Orhan Gencebay is one of the giants of the Turkish entertainment industry. In his monumental career Orhan Gencebay has been the lead actor in almost 40 movies, composed an estimated thousand songs and sold over 65 million records — watch this video and you’ll sure get why. Musically, Gencebay pioneered a multifaceted mix of international sounds from Turkey. Wikipedia describes the genre like this: “During the 1970s [Gencebay] released many singles in a new genre that is a fusion of traditional Turkish Folk music, Turkish classical music, Western classical music, jazz, rock, country, progressive, psychedelic, Indian, Arabic, Spanish, and Greek music styles.” Rather than call this new genre “Turko-folko-clasico-jazzy-
rocky-country-prog-psych-Indi-Arab-Spania-Greek” music, musicologists termed it “Arabesque.” Gencebay didn’t like this categorization because it initially implied that he stole his songs from Arabic music he heard on the radio, but the term “Arabesque” has since grown to become synonymous with Turkish music about heartache, longing and even deep suffering. In that way, Arabesque is the Turkish equivalent of the blues.
We are revising the AllAroundThisWorld.com site — the information you’re seeking may still be here, but a lot of links are broken and details may be out of date. We are currently using a new (better!) site — ExploreEverywhere.com — to tell you all about our class offerings, our “pen pal” program and how to become one of our teachers, and will eventually be moving all the goodies from here over to there. So, GO TO THE NEW SITE!
