The Off-Colored Officer - Arif Sağ



As promised earlier, continuing with our current interest in folk music from far-out corners of the Earth, today we feature another big name from Turkey: Arif Sağ. While our first feature, Erkin Koray, headlined the rock & roll movement in Turkey, our bağlama virtuoso here is more of a folk music hero. Again, as it probably is the norm with musicians from country where English is not the national spoken language, our research on Mr. Arif returned lots of websites in Turkish. But well, you know, sometimes persistence does pay...

Arif Sağ (born 1945 in Aşkale, Erzurum, Turkey) is a singer, bağlama virtuoso and leading figure in modern Turkish folk music, as well as a former MP in the Turkish parliament, and an academic. He taught more than 40.000 students in his music school ASM (Arif Sağ Music). He is a big influence in Turkish Folk Music... (Source)

Yeah, that is pretty much it that we could gather about him. I mean, you could give his official website (Resmi Web Sitesi) a shot, and with the help of Google Translate, we could be going somewhere further, but then that would have probably defeated the real intent and purpose of this post - sharing great music with the rest of the world. I'm not sure about other people but I prefer my foreign language songs to remain alien, so that the exotic remains as exotic as when it was first discovered.

Embedded at the end of this post are two of my favorite songs from Arif Sağ, entitled "Su Samsunun Evleri" (Yeah, very funny Google Translate) and "Osman Pehlivan". Plus, if you really have to find detailed information about the man, this here is it.