Hailing from Elazig, a town in East Anatolia, but born in Ankara in 1954, Erkan Ogur started on violin as a child and learned cumbus, a small fretless lute, from local musicians playing traditional dances at weddings. Hearing Jimi Hendrix on the radio was a major shock, and in high school he began studying guitar. While in Munich on a scholarship to graduate in physics, he decided to dedicate fully to music and threw himself full-time into a classical repertoire. He developed a bad inflammation of the wrist, and this -- with the idea of playing on guitar in the microtonal style of Turkish maqams -- was a key motivation to develop his fretless guitar. After meeting Robert "One Man Band" Johnson in Istanbul, he went to the U.S. for two years, playing blues on the road; he returned in Turkey in the '80s, finished his Conservatory studies, and his guitar and saz fills were soon very much in demand by producers of pop music and can be heard on Sezen Aksu's CDs.
Buy CD
© 2009
