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Turkish Roman musical lineage

Background for the repertoire this project started from.

The tradition

Established Roman (Romani) musicians occupy a central and long-standing role in Turkish instrumental music, particularly in wedding and celebration contexts, and particularly on clarinet. The clarinet — specifically the G clarinet, pitched lower than the Western B♭ instrument — is the emblematic voice of the tradition.

Regional centres include Thrace (Edirne, Keşan), the Aegean (İzmir, Bergama), and Istanbul.

Key figures

Chase people, not genre labels. Genre names in this field are unstable and frequently invented; discographies are not.

Şükrü Tunar

Established Legendary Roman clarinettist and composer, active mid-20th century. The foundational vocabulary that later players inherited. Credited as composer on the title track of Laço Tayfa's Hicaz Dolap.

Mustafa Kandıralı

Established The other towering clarinet master of the classic era. Caz Roman is the standard recommendation.

Barbaros Erköse / Erköse Kardeşler

Established Roman clarinet meeting jazz. A direct forerunner of the fusion approach that Laço Tayfa later took.

Selim Sesler

Established Thracian rather than Aegean. Widely regarded as the real thing. The Road to Keşan is the entry point.

Hüsnü Şenlendirici

Established Born Bergama, 1976, into a musical family — his grandfather Hüsnü played clarinet and trumpet, another grandfather, Otmar Köfteci, played clarinet, and his father Ergün played trumpet. Has played with percussionist Okay Temiz. Leader of Laço Tayfa.

Ergün Şenlendirici

Established Hüsnü's father, trumpet. Connected to the Okay Temiz circle. This lineage — rather than any Egyptian influence — is the source of the funk-fusion instinct in Laço Tayfa's sound.

Laço Tayfa

Established Hüsnü Şenlendirici's group. Hicaz Dolap (2002) and Bergama Gaydası (2000) are the two records that matter for this project.

Attested The band name is part Turkish, part Romani, meaning roughly "good crew."

Bergama Gaydası is the more traditional record — straighter readings of standards including İzmir'in Kavakları, Çiftetelli, Malatya, Harmandalı, Fidayda and Onbeşli. Useful as a reference for the unornamented shape of tunes that Hicaz Dolap elaborates.

What "traditional" means on these records

Practice Several tracks on Hicaz Dolap are credited "Traditional" — Şurmat, Erkilet Güzeli, Estergon Kalesi, Uşşak, Gel Yad'a Salma Dilber.

On a record from this scene, "traditional" typically means a wedding-band tune everyone in the region already knew and nobody ever formally titled or attributed. It does not mean the tune has no source; it means the source is oral and diffuse.

This has a direct implication for research: the absence of a documented composer is not evidence that a tune is ancient or anonymous in origin. It's evidence that the transmission was oral.

Türkü repertoire on the same record

Useful for anyone learning Turkish alongside the instrument, since these have lyrics:

Where to study from

Practice Search in Turkish, not English. English queries return performances; Turkish queries return lessons.

Useful query terms: klarnet dersi, ud dersi, cümbüş dersi, roman havası klarnet, hicaz taksim dersi, nota.

For oud specifically, English-language channels aimed at players coming from Western instruments are genuinely good and transfer directly to cümbüş. For cümbüş specifically, there is essentially nothing — see 01-instruments/cumbus.md.

Turkish folk repertoire is documented in the TRT archive, and Turkish nota sites carry oyun havası transcriptions. For actual notes on a page, that is where they live.

Sources

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