Mercan Dede
Mercan Dede is the brainchild of ARKIN ILICALI. After an academic career at the Istanbul University he immigrated to Canada receiving his master’s at Montreal’s Concordia University. His first album, “Sufi Dreams,” came out in 1998. By his third album “Seyahatname,” when he played the prestigious Montreal Jazz Festival, his stage performance started to feature choreography by Beyhan Murphy as whirling dervish. Mercan Dede and his band Secret Tribe then embarked on a world tour including stops at Womex and Transmusicale in Rennes. Following the success of the tour, he was nominated twice in the BBC Radio 3 Awards in the “Middle-Eastern/North Africa” and “Club Global” categories. Mercan Dede’s subsequent albums “Water” and “Breath,” both rose to the number one on the BBC Music Charts. In 2003, collaborated with one of modern dance’s most iconic figures, Pina Bausch. Mercan Dede also composed the opening music to Louis Cavalier’s “So Blue” which premiered in Frankfurt, not to mention the many film scores he composed including Kingdom of Heaven, Head On, Prince of Persia and Crossing the Bridge. Unesco announced 2007 as “World Mevlana Year” during which Mercan Dede released “800,” a album in homage to Rumi's 800th birthday. After a six year hiatus his new album “Earth” was released to critical acclaim featuring guest vocals by Azam Ali, Sabahat Akkiraz, and a sample of Gandhi’s first and only speech recorded in 1923.
www.mercandede.com
The Secret Trio
The Secret Trio is made up of three astounding musicians - Ara Dinkjian on oud, Tamer Pinarbasi on kanun and Ismail Lumanovski on clarinet - who came together to create a new type of chamber music, combining the elements of sound, texture and rhythm with new and interesting approaches to their instruments. Not bound to a single tradition, they perform a collection of original pieces and traditional melodies that fuses the microtonal modes and improvisation of the Middle East, dance beats of the Balkans, and elements of jazz, Rock, classical and world music. The delicate harmonies, rapid-fire synchrony and intricate counterpoint developed by a trio of musicians with separate roots in Turkish, Armenian and Macedonian Roma music is extraordinary. By inventing new ways to play percussively on fundamentally melodic instruments, the ensemble, full of rhythm and drive, harmony and counterpoint, never sounds like only three instruments. In that the energy of live music is essential to the ensemble's ideology, this recording was made without the use of any overdubs in order to capture the excitement of their live concerts.