Grup Yorum

Grup Yorum has seen over 60 musicians come and go in the 21 years since it was founded. This reflects the unrelenting pressure it has had to live with to express itself musically in modern-day Turkey. When the band first took shape, the nation was still in the iron grip of a military dictatorship and the repression that accompanied it. The university students who formed Yorum had been inspired by groups and artists like Inti Illimani, Victor Jara, Ruhi Su and Theodorakis. They were activists who hoped their engaged music would inspire Turks to fight for their rights. As such, the band accompanied hundreds of pickets, factory occupations, street demonstrations and mass protests. They would sing in a variety of languages spoken in Turkey, including banned ones like Kurdish and Circassian. Several of the artists were arrested as a result, and some spent years behind bars.

The music Grup Yorum play has been described as folk-rock, and features local instruments such as the mey (a diatonic-stringed instrument), the shepherd’s pipe called the kaval and the baglama string instrument. The lyrics deal with the political realities in the country, massacres within prison walls, and a longing for an end to the political and military repression. Several of the albums have been banned and even shot up (the example of the 1991 record “Cesaret” (“Courage”) was brought up at a 2006 conference in Istanbul on musician rights. The band member Cihan Keskek brandished a cassette with a bullet hole in it to underline the extent to which the Turkish police had gone to in order to destroy the group’s music).

“We are angry, there are times we are sorry,” explained another group member Ali Araci at the same conference. “But because we always keep our belief that things will change this keeps us holding on.” In 2001 the record “Feda” was confiscated by the control commission. No explanation was given, and the ban was only lifted in 2006. On Yorum’s website, the members query the ban: ““Meryem” is an Arabic-language love song, “This Homeland is Ours” is a poem by Nazim Hikmet which we set to music, “Does Anyone Hear My Voice?” was composed after the August 17 and November 12 earthquakes, there is a poem by Dadaloglu which we have set to music, called “Kozanoglu”, and is that a reason for the control commission to ban all of them? Who is threatening national security?”.

Grup Yorum have vowed to continue to perform and compose about the realities around them. One of its members remains in prison and another has been forced into exile. The ten-person band continues to find it hard to perform live concerts in Turkey, although the government no longer provides a legislative arm to muzzle the group. “We have a political attitude, we have an ideology,” explains Cihan Keskek. “We stand for solidarity ... They are trying to detach us from our audience, from the people of Turkey, our people. They are trying to isolate us. And this is the reason for the things that happen to us.” For more information, you can see the interview of three Yorum musicians on www.freemuse.org.

February 2007

Daniel Brown

Artist website