The Kurdish singer Aynur opened her current European tour in Bristol, presenting music that's rooted in ancient tradition but explores contempoary sonorities and styles while keeping the music of her people vibrant and alive.
On arriving at the venue, it felt as if the place had been magically transplanted to the Middle East. The audience was predominantly Kurdish, and many of the excited crowd, posing for selfies and photographs in the entrance area, were wearing festive traditional gear – brightly coloured and sequined dresses, extravagant headscarves and some turbans for the women, the men in smart waist-coasts and cummerbunds, with traditional baggy trousers. There was even a man wearing a kepenek, a traditional shepherd’s coat made of felt, in this case with two cheeky points rising above his shoulders. A reminder that the Kurds have always herded, and lived at times nomadic lives. This was not the usual and often drab casual wear that characterises today’s concert halls, but dressing-up for a celebration.
This was a gig unlike many others – it reminded me of Palestinian singer Nai Barghouti – another great voice, also exiled from her homeland - whose audiences come to events that are as much celebratory of identity as they are purely musical performances. This was a community event that built sensitively towards a rousing finale, as Aynur and her band worked gradually through a rainbow of emotional colours, from introspective to festive, winning her listeners over, stage-by-stage, as if she were slowly but surely leading them back to their roots in Kurdistan.
Kurdistan is a nation without a country, yearning for recognition and a place in the world. The notion of being persecuted and displaced is fundamental to a culture that has survived for centuries, spread over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Never forget that the victims of Saddam Hussein’s vicious attack on Halabja with chemical weapons in 1988 was perpetrated on Kurds, and this is only one of the croses they've had had to bear, as if they were destined to be rejected.
Aynur, born in Eastern Anatolia, left her small home town of Çemisşgešek to study the saz and singing in Istanbul. She has worked with Kurdish as well as Turkish musicians, many of them opponents of the regime, and she now lives in Berlin, a cultural melting-pot, in which she has connected with a range of outstanding musicians who bring to her work a spirit of cross-cultural adventure that is characteristic of much world music today. She has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma in the context of his Silk Road project, the Iranian Kurdish master of the kamancheh Kayhan Kalhor and many others. Her touring band includes two musicians rooted in contemporary jazz, the French percussionist Patrick Goraguer and Canadian bass player Chris Collins, both of whom adapt remarkably well to Kurdish rhythmic complexities, while taking the music into a realm of its own – fusion but with subtlety and style. It is clear that, when they do their thing, Aynur savours their gift for invention. The star in the band is without question clarinettist Caner Malkoc, who ranges from brief interventions that underline the singer’s vocal flourishes, to heart-wrenching solos (as in the song “Hedur”, in which he explores the microtonal universe of the music, aided by an extraordinary control of vibrato, low-register soulfulness and high-pitched (bit never shrill) explosions of emotion.
There are moments when Aynur’s wish to win her audience over comes close to Eurovision Song Contest crowd-pleasing uniformity. The temptation must be great, as a forest of phones rises from the suddenly less discriminating listeners thrilled to be in the presence of a star. Impossible not to think of Bob Dylan and others who sensibly ban mobiles from their concerts. Fortunately, Aynur knows she must balance her set, and there are plenty of moments, when she doesn’t play to the gallery: “Daye Daye” and “Dilo Ez Bimri”, at the start of the second half, in which she accompanies herself on a double-necked tembur, featuring her own vocal range from honeyed melisma to keening lament, her passion never dwarfed by virtuosity. The lyrics of the songs are mostly what you'd expect from a Middle Eastern folk tradition: references to turtle doves and nightingales, dark eyes, insufficient dowries, as in “Edlaye”, a song to Edla, daughter of a Turkish lord, where “her shawl got untied, her golden neckline appeared, as soon as I laid eyes on her my dead father rose from his grave”.
Anyur can do love and introspection beautifully, but she is as much at home driving her band and the audience to heights of excitement. She prowls to and fro across the stage, like a lioness. Her voice takes on a different tone, as she coaxes those around her to feel the music inside them, to open their hearts.
The women in the audience who've dressed up will no doubt identify, when they sing and dance to the song “Govinde”, with the romance of the girl “who has a scarf and belt, her two braids look like black snakes, the youths fighting for her attention”. This is a time for dance, an occasion in the Kurdish villages and camps of old, when the rows of women offered themselves in display to the young men, waving scarves and kerchiefs – an opportunity
to flirt and size up the opposite sex. Something of the collective memory of these rituals echoed through the hall in Bristol. The thrill of it was palpable and contagious. The last song of the show – before a wild encore – was “Keça Kurdan”, a rousing song in praise of women warriors, “Kurdish Girls” who are “rebelling against the barbarians”. By this point, the whole hall was dancing, someone was waving a large Kurdish flag in front of the stage, as a row of ecstatic women reeled past. The man in the felt shepherd’s mantle was there too, bobbing up and down.. The spirit that has kept the Kurds from being absorbed into the cultures that tried to subjugate or eliminate them was very much alive in Bristol and it was a privilege and joy to feel its power so vividly.
- Aynur Doğan's UK tour continues:
- Queens Hall, Edinburgh, 30 March 2026
- National Concert Hall, Dublin, 31 March 2026
- Barbican, London 2 April 2026
- More new music reviews on theartsdesk
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