Biography

A Very Short Introduction to Özgür Baba and His Music Özgür Baba is a Turkish folk singer and musician who plays the cura baglama and sings folk songs adapted from the verses of the great mystic poets of his land. Özgür Baba is seen singing while playing his cura, the smallest of the baglama family of string instruments classified as a variation of the lute—also one of the oldest Turkish traditional string instruments that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. Özgür Baba sits with his cura baglama, entranced by his song performed in a pastoral setting that would have resembled one of the villages that Emre himself emerged from. His song connects centuries of Sufi and mystic tradition harmonizing the spirit of the poetic verse with the bliss of the musical note. In such a musical recitation accompanied by strings, time does not connect being, being connects time, between one’s song resurfacing in the verses of an other, with one being flowing into another through shared music and verse—in a space where memory and experience cannot be easily distinguished, fusing into oneness between lyric and note