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Articles and Interviews
Tango outside of Argentina 2
Turkish Tango : Seyyan Hanin and Ibrahim Özgür
( transl. E. Marseglia)
Tango was well known in the Turkish Rupublic from the 1920s onward. The first Turkish tangos were the instrumental work called “Tango Turk” composed by Muhlis Sbahattin and recorded in 1928, and the song "Mazi” (The Past) composed by Necip Celal Andel in 1928. This song is held to be the very first Turkish tango, but it was not known until 1932 when it was recorded by the singer Seyyan Hanim.
Hanim and her colleague Ibrahim Özgür were the first to become famous as tango singers in Turkey.
For many Turkish musicians the tango was their first contact with Western music, but it was the Armenian and Jewish musicians who first created a Turkish tango.
As in many European cities tango became the most popular music in the night clubs and dance halls of Istanbul at the end of the 20s and into the 30s, attracting followers from all over the word who were drawn to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city.
Seyyan Hanim (1913-1989)
In the Ottoman Empire it was unheard of that a Muslim woman would appear in public. Actresses and singers were always Jewish, Armenian, Greek or Occidental, never Muslim. This was all changed however when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced his revolutionary separation of state and religion.
After that, the very first Turkish woman to appear on stage was the tango singer Seyyan Hanim. She was well protected by Atatürk as he considered her career brought a definitive end to political repression. She became a very important figure for female emancipation in Turkey, but when she
married an army officer she then spent the next twenty years of her life in an isolated garrison in Western Anatolia. Only once a year was she able to make the long voyage back to her home in Istanbul with her husband, where she once again performed on the stage and recorded new songs.
Ibrahim Özgür (1905-1959), the King of Turkish Tango
The first male tango singer to become well known was Ibrahim Özgür who was born in Instanbul in 1905.
His father Mustafa played the trumpet in the State Orchestra, and at 16 years old Ibrahim entered the military Academy of Ankara to study clarinet and saxophone. After finishing his studies he played jazz in the night clubs of Istanbul and later founded his own orchestra, becoming famous for his musical arrangements. In 1931 and for the following seven years he toured in the Far East, beginning in Beirut, then in India, Java, Sumatra, Singapore e Ceylon. Returning to Istanbul via England he opened up a night club called “Ates Böcekleri” (The Glow-Worm) and became a convert to tango music.
His first recordings were made in 1938. With a “velvet” voice well suited to the nostalgic and the romantic he wrote and performed many tango songs of that genre, including the famous “Mavi Kelebek” (Blue Butterfly), which was the most popular of all and which made him a “star” in the eyes of his female public.
According to him unrequited love, longing and the pain of separation were the emotional pillars for a real tango, and for writing such romantic songs he drew upon his own experience of unhappy love for an Indian princess, to whom he passionately longed to return.
In the latter part of his life he lived in a country home outside Istanbul, with his horses, his dogs, his birds, and even a bear, and it was here that he died of a heart attack on the evening of February 11, 1959. But his “velvet” voice lived on after him.
After his death he was pretty much forgotten until his nephew Ahmet Ediz, who is a member of the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich, asked Radio Istanbul for Özgür’s recordings. He then reproduced about 30 of these in a commemorative CD as a gift for friends and relatives. One of these CDs
ended up in the hands of a tango afficionado who was the owner of a record company in Berlin. This man was so impressed by this music that he made his own CD so that Özgür¹s songs could be made accessible to a wider public.
We would like to thank Uli Schumann (Links) for his kind permission for the use of this material
