Ageless Garden

Mehmet Polat is from Urfa in Turkey, overlooking the Euphrates, so looking towards Syria and Iraq rather than Istanbul. He is influenced by the musical legacy of Sharif Muhieddin Haider, a Hashemite prince from Mecca who studied in Istanbul and founded the Iraqi school of musicians, from which the Iraqi oud masters Munir Bashir and Salman Shukkur originated.

Polat adds elements from the Turkish Alevi style, with its signature wild chords, and also incorporates elements of music from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Mali, through collaborating with instrumentalists whom he partly met in his current home in the Netherlands. Polat plays an oud with two extra low strings. He exploits these to the extreme in the melody line of the track ‘Aylan’, named after the Syrian-Kurdish boy, a refugee who drowned while crossing the Aegean Sea. Elsewhere, those extra strings add a solid, low chordal layer, as in the opening piece ‘Hasret’, which is dedicated to Hasret Gültekin, a young musician who died in an arson attack on an Alevi gathering in 1993.

Polat avoids trying to emulate the Spanish guitar, like many oud players do; instead, on ‘An Anatolian Bulerias’, he captures an essence of Spanish music but sticks to his own style.