Cüneyt Sepetçi: From Weddings to World Music
On a Sunday in November, I caught up with Cüneyt Sepetçi, after a gig at Berlin’s Urban Spree. Sitting backstage, dressed up in a dark blue suit, striped tie, sparkling patent leather shoes, Sepetci fingering his neatly clipped mustache and sipped a coke, telling me about his fast-paced life as an in-demand wedding musician turned minor world music sensation.
Musician Cüneyt Sepetçi
Sepetçi is the latest Roma music sensation from Istanbul, just now trying to break into the World Music industry. 6 years ago he was discovered by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Comforting the New Mexico folk band Hawk and a hacksaw and signed to their label LM Duplication. Recently it has been released by world music promoter Planet Rock in Berlin. “I got it from my family,” says Sepetçi about his affinity to the clarinet.
Like many Roma musicians, it came from my father, who got it from his father, who got it from his father. The whole Sepetçi family plays the clarinet, seven brothers and nephews. So, you could say, it’s a family tradition.
Sepetçi’s grandfather came to Thessaloniki from Istanbul in 1922 and settled in the Mimar Sinan neighborhood of Büyükçekmece, a European district of Istanbul. Dolphins, a notorious Istanbul slum district famous as the breeding ground of Turkish Roma musicians.
Now old buildings in Dolapadere are destroyed and new, upscale condos built in their place. The old inhabitants -Roma and Kurds mainly – being forced to relocate to soulless housings in the outskirts of Istanbul. A lot of urban renewal takes place in Istanbul on the pretext that many of the old buildings are not earthquake-proof and therefore have been replaced. The move to revolt old neighborhoods came into effect after the last big earthquake in 1999. But safety is the real motivation for urban renewal projects.
A Place once called Home
Many of these old, decrepit neighborhoods, like Dolancere House Roma communities, and some of them are trying to break the unity of these communities, this being the real reason for the slum clearance, like in the Sulukule in Fatih, right under the old city walls, which took place in 2012. The buildings consisted of so-called “gecekondus”, literally, “houses built over-night”, and inhabited by Roma for as long as anyone can remember. Sepetçi is, however, cool with the changes affecting Dolapdere.
“Dolapdere always wants to be known as the place to go if you want to hire musicians,” says Sepetçi. “The new buildings are a good thing because of it’s an improvement of the area.
No matter what happens, if you play an instrument you want to earn money in Dolapdere.
To this day Sepetçi makes its most of its dough and sendenes – circumcision parties – chiefly to villages in Thrace, the western, European section of Turkey, known to be the hedonists of its inhabitants as well as it’s distinctive Roma music. Sepetçi wants to play every night non-stop. Not just Roma weddings, all sorts. “To us it really makes no difference,” says Sepetçi. “As long as it is a wedding we go there and do our job.”
Scene at a typical Rome wedding
On Roma Weddings
Asked what separate Roma weddings from gadjo weddings, Sepetçi says it’s the uneven 9/8 time signatures at the Roma weddings. Roman Havası, which would be a Roma atmosphere, explains Sepetçi. “This is prevalent in all of Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, everywhere there are Muslim Roma. At my European concerts not many people dance to these songs. “
Sepetçi has been around the years, as bands of kanun, cumbüş, darbuka, violin ceded place to more compact, stripped-down outfits of clarinet, darbuka and the ever present synthesizer, which some see as the bane of Turkish Roma music.
“Before the synthesizer there is six, seven musicians at a wedding. But now with synthesizers there are two or three people and because of the capacity of the synthesizers they make it look like seven seven, eight people on stage. “So what makes a successful wedding musician?
“It’s really important, besides the music, just being a good person,” says Sepetçi “Being there and being a gentleman, being nice to everyone.
You can be a very good instrumentalist, but if you do not have people skills you just stay at home. “
Text: Robert Rigney
Photos: Christoph Lindner (Planet Rock)
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