MERAL POLAT TRIO
KURDISH FOLK MUSIC, RAW GROOVE AND MINIMALIST BLUES ARRANGEMENTS
Singer and actress Meral Polat was born in the Netherlands, where her parents immigrated from Turkey to work. Her father was formally a gastarbaiter, but a poet at heart. Meral set his lyrics to music on her very special debut album. The singer’s ancestors come from the Kurdish Alevi community, which, unlike the Islamic mainstream, allows for critical thinking and places value on individuality and education. Meral Polat draws not only on Kurdish melodies, but also on Greek, Turkish and Persian ones, and the accompaniment consists of equally unique players. Chris Doyle, a Berklee graduate and member of the Grammy-nominated Afrobeat band Antibalas, plays keyboards. Drummer Frank Rosaly hails from Puerto Rico and draws from Caribbean rhythms, classical music and jazz. While the accompaniment creates a sharply rhythmic but instrumentally minimal groove, Meral Polat’s vocals are packed with dramatic twists, microtonal shifts and melodic embellishments typical of Middle Eastern music.
The birth of modern Turkey a century ago was accompanied by a series of massacres and ethnic cleansings: the Armenian genocide in 1915, the expulsion of the Greek population from Asia Minor in 1922, and the bloody suppression of the Kurdish Alevi uprising in 1938. It occurred in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey, and it is from there that the singer’s ancestors originated. Thousands of Kurds were slaughtered or forced to flee. In this historical context, Meral Polat asks and answers questions in her songs: “What does it do to a person when they are forbidden to speak his language and profess his faith? Our fate is similar to that of the Jews, we had to accept the fact that they stole the ground from under our feet.” This historical experience makes the Kurdish Alevis today an exceptional group of people. They keep their distance from religious dogmas, they are left-wing and rebellious. And in no population group in Turkey are women as emancipated as among the Kurdish Alevis.