Not long ago, Kurds and other ethnic minorities were forbidden to sing in their own language or promote their culture in Turkey. The discrimination and persecution to which they were subjected, whose only aim was to do away with any difference in a multiethnic society, are now thankfully part of the past. Aynur makes the most of this new freedom by recovering some of those repressed traditions, becoming a contemporary troubadour of her people’s traditional music.

Aynur Doğan was born in 1975 en Cemisgezek, in the Southeast of the Anatolian peninsula, moving to Istanbul with her family in 1992. Music has played an important role in her life since she was a child, and in the baglama (the Turkish lute) she has found the perfect instrument to bring back the traditional music she grew up with – songs that told of love stories cut short by war or migrations, women married against their will, broken families… Aynur harnesses her multiple registers to sing ancestral melodies with Arabic, Mesopotamian, Jewish and even Latin American influences, in which the sounds of flutes, violins and baglamas harmonically blend with electric guitars and synthesizers in a perfect display of complicity between tradition and modernity. With her four records (Keçe Kurdan (04), Bahar (05), Miraz (05) and Nûpel (06)), Aynur’s music provides a portrait of Kurdistan, crude and arid like the mountains, full of life and jubilation like the traditional Kurdish dances. On the one hand, the lament and suffering of a maltreated and persecuted people; on the other, a poem dedicated to hope.

www.aynurdogan.net