From çingene Accompanist to Instrumental Soloist

Abstract

Alongside state discourses of canonical Turkish music, local commercial recording companies relied on the innovative skills of Romani instrumentalists who could generate a variety of urban dance tunes for the burgeoning record market. By conferring the prestige of nightclub music on these instrumental compositions, these new Romani instrumental stars opened up a musical space for hearing negative “çingene” identity as prestigious “Roman.” Biographies of artists Haydar Tatlıyay, Şükrü Tunar, Kadri Şençalar, and Mustafa Kandıralı focus on their mediation of community-based music-making with nightclub and state radio styles. This chapter presents musical analysis of the link between keriz and the structuring of oyun havası in the first mass-produced recorded presentation of the social term, “Roman” by Yılmaz Şanlıel and Nazif Girgin. By introducing the group name “Roman” and “Romen” as a musical label for keriz-based instrumental dance music, these artists founded a genre and stylistic space for incremental revisions of social self-representation.