Istanbul Oriental Ensemble

The Istanbul Oriental Ensemble is a Turkish band playing traditional Turkish music in an oriental gypsy style. The band's leader is Burhan Öçal. Though he is a multi-instrumentalist, in this band he generally plays the darbuka drum, which provides a rhythmic backdrop for improvisations by violin, clarinet, oud, and kanun. Öçal started the band (only one of his projects) in the mid-1990s to revive the old Turkish tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gypsy music. In Istanbul and Thracia, the European part of Turkey, gypsy music has played an important role in the Turkish music scene dating back to the tenth century. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.