Çiğdem Aslan, The Vortex - music review

Slight of form but full of content, Çiğdem Aslan is a lioness of Greek and Turkish song. She sashayed onto stage last night with a red flower in her hair and an eightpiece band of fine musicians. She transformed The Vortex into a rebetiko club, with the audience sipping raki and hanging on every note. Maybe it helped that the venue is handy for London’s Greek and Turkish communities — and certainly many were singing along — but this was the third sell-out night and the music is clearly reaching out to a wider audience. Someone had come over from Amsterdam, having heard her on Radio 3.

Aslan is singing the shared Greek and Turkish repertoire born of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Generally known as rebetiko, this was the music of an underclass, but Aslan chooses the beautiful love (or lost-love) songs over those about crime and hashish. They have a more lasting value. Many are playful and coquettish, but the most beautiful are the slow ones with curling melodies like To Dervisaki (Little Dervish). She even included one, more folk-like, song in her native Kurdish language.

But this is ensemble music and around Aslan’s charismatic performance are some spectacular musicians — notably Pavlos Carvalho on bouzouki, Pavlos Melas on guitar and vocals, and Nikos Baimpas on kanun, the plucked zither that adds a filigree brilliance to this music like a curtain of shimmering beads. He played some spectacular solos. Aslan’s final song, Cile Bulbulum, about enduring the tribulations of life, shows she is both a lioness and nightingale.