2019 Obit: Silo Qiz, Kurdish bard/violinist, 104

Subject: RE: 2019 Obit: Silo Qiz, Kurdish bard/violinist, 104
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Dec 19 - 03:06 PM

This is the event many of his songs are about. He was one of the last eyewitnesses to it. (If you've flown into Istanbul lately, you might have landed at an airport named after the military officer responsible for the slaughter).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersim_rebellion

Subject: Obit: Silo Qiz, Kurdish bard/violinist, 104
From: Jack Campin
Date: 14 Dec 19 - 06:58 PM

The Kurdish dengbej (bard) Silo Qiz has just died at the age of 104. Here is a short video about him, showing him singing and playing and the village he lived in. It's in a mixture of Kurdish and extremely dialectal Turkish, subtitled into standard Turkish. He's mostly talking about how lively the village used to be, with pilgrims from all over and musicians playing for weddings. This would have been before 1938 when the Turkish state massacred the leadership of the local Kurdish Alevi (Sufi/Shiite) community.

https://youtu.be/mWxdKTPFXO8

I've never seen anybody play the fiddle quite like that. He could almost have been Jim Eldon's dad. He says he learned it from his father, who died when he was young.

There's quite a lot of him on YouTube, but recording quality is mostly pretty bad. I'm not sure anyone ever got him into a studio.