The Articulate Asik
- Geoffrey Clarfield
- Aug 26
- 10 min read
The Asiks (minstrels) are one of the most distinguished and brilliant communities of performers encountered within the realm of Turkish culture. Generally coming up singing lyrics and poetry to the accompaniment of the saz, the asiks are artists that give voice to all of the social events of the societies in which they exist, and write footnotes to history.
Melih Duygulu
Not all gifted lute players and singers are articulate. And so these talented and often dedicated artists are necessarily served by thousands of writers, who patiently listen to their performances and interview them in the hope that they can evoke something about the uniqueness of their God given talent and hard work and then in turn give us, the audience, some understanding of where all this mysterious beauty comes from.
This is not the case with Gur Volner, a young, articulate, and self-aware Israeli student (and to some degree) master of the Anatolian Turkish lute and its oral tradition (the Turks call it baglama or saz). Gur could draft a book about his apprenticeship and growing mastery of this rich and complex Turkish folk/minstrel music tradition. One day I hope he does, as he makes his living as a writer and editor for a well-known Israeli newspaper and publishing house.
Gur is an under forty, Israeli musician. He is fluent in Hebrew, English and Turkish. He plays saz like a Turk and sings like one. This is not surprising as he has spent many months, which add up to years, on several occasions living and studying this music in the Republic of Turkey.
He has been at it for a long time and despite a successful “day” job he lives and breathe saz and Turkish folk music and like the Asiks of old Turkey, he travels the land of Israel and brings his authentic rendering of this complex musical tradition to the ears of enchanted Israeli audiences. He will most likely become famous, or at least well known, in Israel one day. I am sure of it.
Gur is soft spoken, matter of fact and always thoughtful. He has a strong inner voice. We met in Ein Kerem through common musical friends last Fall. I did not hear him in concert but even better, in the privacy of our friend’s home.
I wanted to understand how he got to where he is now and so we embarked on several exceptionally long conversations. In this article I will highlight what I think are just some of the interesting steps that made him the musician that he is, and as he is young, there are no doubt decades of musical exploration ahead of him.
Gur Volner was born in Tel Aviv in 1988. His mother’s family came to the Land of Israel when it was still under Ottoman rule and his father escaped Hungary during the failed uprising of 1956. His family were and are largely secular Israelis. Gur showed musical aptitude early in life and was lucky to go to a high school that specialized in music and fine arts.
He told me that in some way he felt fortunate that he was not musically “assaulted” by the wave of Israeli singer songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s who themselves were reacting to the socialist, collectivist musical styles that were imposed on baby boomer Israelis by a generation born in the 1920s. “It all passed me by,” he said to me in a matter-of-fact way. And so, he and his classmates could pick and choose the music they liked.
This included American Jazz, blues and classic rock and roll, and included bands like the Beatles and the Doors And yet instead of doing crass imitations of these English speaking bands, Gur and his friends formed an eclectic Yiddish speaking rock band which drew on multiple styles of music, and to my surprise had an audience in the music clubs on Allenby street in very hip Tel Aviv.
During this period Gur learnt to play guitar and develop expertise in keyboards and in the growing world of software driven electronic music. He tells me, “I did not understand it at the time but as much as I was interested in technique and repertoires, I was unconsciously exploring different kinds of timbres. I was searching for the sound that spoke to me, and it took some time to discover.”
After national service, like so many Israelis of his generation, Gur ended up on the coast of the Indian Ocean in the ancient formerly Portuguese enclave of Goa. While in India he was exposed to the full range of Indian classical, folk, and popular music. It captured his imagination. He went to India four times and began the study of the classical sitar, made famous in the West by Ravi Shankar and his most famous student, George Harrison of the Beatles.
He also studied classical guitar and Flamenco, at some deep level recognizing that so much of Flamenco’s timbres, scales and singing style has a medieval origin in North India from where the Gypsies of Andalusia had originated.
During this period he finished his degree in Journalism and Editing at Sapir College and managed to create a sustainable but transhumant lifestyle, months working in Tel Aviv and then off to India to explore his musical interests.
In Israel he participated in the rich, aesthetically adventurous Tel Aviv music scene which now has an internationally respected Jazz reputation. At the same time Gur made time for sitar studies in Dharamsala (home of the Dalai Lama) and in the sacred city of Benares or what is now called Varanasi.
As he developed as a musician, Gur became aware of what is now called “ethnic” music in Israel. Musicologists will tell you that this style of music is the partial return of the Arabic, Turkish, Persian music of the Jews from Islamic states (as well as the Klezmer styles that were developed by the Ashkenazic musicians of Eastern Europe) who having been expelled from countries like Egypt and Syria brought the tradition of “Makam” to Israel.
Makam simply put, is the near eastern version of Ragas and Talas, which are modes and rhythms of what is often called Turkish and Arabic classical music. Like so many other Israelis his age Gur took up the oud, found a teacher but unlike guitar or even the sitar, he did not please the oud, and the oud did not please him.
Gur eventually traded his oud for a long necked Turkish saz, largely because of the timbre of the Saz. For Gur this was one of those magical turning points. He fell in love with the sound of Saz but knew very little about it. From that moment on he knew that the saz was his path, and like a Dervish he had finally found the way.
This new discovery or fascination triggered a period of auto didaction. Gur listened to radio stations from Turkey, found records and recordings on the Internet that fed his love of the saz and the songs that it accompanies. The first piece that he mastered on his own was the traditional Anatolian melody Oyun Havasi.
By that time, a generation of Israeli musicians with deep roots in Arab, Turkish and Persian Makam (Dastgah in Persian) had coagulated in the Jerusalem suburb of Musrara and there had constituted a conservatory for the study of the classical modal music of the middle east. Until that time Israel was chock a block with singers and players in the Makam tradition, but they had no institutional center.
And so Gur took courses in Arabic classical music. However there was only one saz player and teacher there, Perez Eliyahu who played the saz in the Azeri style of Tabriz in Iran. Gur was still searching for an indigenous saz master.
And then a Turkish musician came to Israel, and this triggered another major shift in Gur’s journey. His name is Okan Murat Ozturk, a gifted Turkish saz player and singer and master of his repertoire. In the Indian tradition Gur had found his Guru or in Turkish, his Hoja or teacher.
Gur was enchanted but at the same time quite intimidated by this potential Ravi Shankar like Turkish master. He was told that Ozturk was not looking for students and you must ask him to learn with him. If he feels you are worthy, he will consider taking you on. If not, he will not teach you. Gur got up his courage and asked if he could come to Turkey to study with the master and the answer was, “Yes.” Gur was elated, humbled and a bit intimidated, asking himself, “What if I am not up to this?” His own answer was, “This is what I have been looking for so long. Now that I have found it, I must rise to the occasion.”
Gur told me, “When I went to Ankara to study the saz with Ozturk, I felt like I was in the suburb of Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv. Ankara is the capital of Turkey. It is high up and a bit of a concrete jungle, unlike the Byzantine feel that still pervades Istanbul. And so I moved to Ankara to become Ozturk’s student.
He is the vice rector and an ethnomusicologist at Ankara university. Once I got settled, he came to my apartment, brought me delicious Turkish food, and gifted me with two Sazes. I spent two and a half months straight studying and learning with Ozturk on that trip.”
And so it took Gur until 2018 to feel that he had an authentic guide to the rich and living tradition of Turkish folk music and the tradition of the Asik minstrel. In Turkey, Gur tells me he got the full picture and exposure to this music as Turkey only really industrialized after WWII and despite massive rural to urban migration, its folk traditions are alive and thriving in a similar way to the folk traditions of Appalachia which survived into the 1960s and then were adopted by Americans from all walks of life. The saz tradition and that of the Asiks is similarly constituted in today’s Turkey.
Ozturk taught Gur the various baglama tunings and the regional styles of Turkish folk music. He came to understand that styles varied musically with the place they had wandered, Through being a student of Ozturk Gur met many Turks from different walks of life and for some time he had a Turkish girlfriend,
“No,” he told me “She had no problem with me being Jewish or Israeli. On the contrary, it may have even given me a romantic advantage in so far that most of my generation of Turkish women have university degrees, are open to the West, believe in personal freedom and saw or see me as an emissary from the “free world” outside of Turkey’s various forms of authoritarian politics, whether religious or secular. And as I became fluent in Turkish, I began to fit in socially.”
“And then I discovered the saz shop owned by Murtaza Cağır who was also a luthier and gifted saz player. Like guitar players in America, saz players spend time together in music shops, playing, talking, and jamming and there is a pecking order of who is good, great, and wonderful. And you need to know your place.
I did not do too badly as I was humble and keen to learn. That is where I met Murtaza who also tutored me and helped me master the nuances of any great musical tradition which like opera in Italy is best learnt in its home.”
During a study period in 2021 at that shop Gur met a man who looked like something out of central casting. He was elderly with white hair and carried himself with cinematic dignity. He was an industrialist but also a saz player and singer and patron of musicians. He took a liking to this gregarious and cross culturally sensitive Israeli, and they would sit in his warehouse and play saz.
He was also a collector of saz instruments and a particular fan of the saz repertoire of the Alevi sect, a Shia form of Islam that treats the saz like a sacred instrument in its rituals and whose followers sing songs of defiance composed to give hope to opponents of Sunni Ottoman Sultans from their Turkish and Kurdish holdouts in Anatolia. It is a repertoire that has also captured the imaginations of young Turks who have adopted this music as a form of rebellion against corrupt politicians, a bit like the protest music of the USA during the 1960s.
Gur tells me, “I felt like his musical grandchild. I knew that although I was not Turkish, he felt that musically I was, and that he felt comfortable passing this tradition on to me. It was a privilege.”
Gur still keeps coming and going to Turkey for musical reasons but at a certain point he felt that as an Israeli who had done a deep dive into Turkish folk music (and who was learning how to sing the songs that go with the Saz) he felt comfortable enough to take on students in Israel.
“I teach them the Saz the way it was taught to me in Turkey, and I crossed that threshold where I do it authentically. The ethnic music scene of Israel has some cultural differences from mainstream rock and roll and popular styles. There is a lot of boasting. People say, “I am the best” or their admirers do it for them. That is so not my scene, and it is certainly not the tradition of the Asik which is one of inspired humility. An Asik channels poetry and song and that is what I am trying to do. I am also translating songs of the Asik into Hebrew, which is quite challenging, but I am getting there.” And in addition to teaching students Gur performs at various venues in Israel. You can follow him on his Facebook page.
At the end of the day, no matter how much a purist Gur is, he is aware that Turkish music and the saz are just one of the many and diverse musical rivers that flow in the land of Israel. He told me, “I think that mainstream Israeli popular music has much to gain from incorporating authentic aspects of the Asik tradition. I am in touch with some very big names in this field who are working on a project with me.”
Many, many years ago, President of Israel, Yitzchak Ben Zvi established the Ben Zvi institute for the study of Oriental Jewry. It is an ongoing academic enterprise of research and public education. What he missed was that the living tradition of the music of those cultures would one day sweep over the youth of Israel and, they would then go out and discover the musical traditions of their fellow coreligionists. Who knows whether any of Gur’s Hungarian ancestors wandered into Anatolia and listed to the Asiks of Anatolia? It could have happened.
In the meantime, Israelis audiences will be hearing more about this upcoming Israeli saz player and singer. I am confident that Gur will also give particularly good interviews as he is Israel’s most articulate Asik.
