Ahmet Aslan

Hozat, Istanbul, Düsseldorf

Ahmet Aslan was born in 1971 in Hozat, a district of Tunceli province in the eastern Anatolian region its own people call Dersim. He is of Zaza descent, and the Zazaki language of that region has stayed at the centre of what he sings, alongside Turkish and Kurmanji.

He took the formal route into music rather than the family-apprenticeship one. Between 1993 and 1996 he studied at Istanbul Technical University's conservatory, the institution that has trained a large share of Turkey's professional folk and art musicians. In 1996 he left for Germany, and he has lived there ever since.

Germany turned him into a guitarist as well as a saz player. He studied guitar at the conservatory in Düsseldorf, then went back into education a decade later, enrolling on the world music programme at Codarts in Rotterdam at the end of the 2000s and completing it in 2013. That second degree matters more than it sounds, because the instrument he is now known for came out of it.

An instrument built to settle an argument

The problem Aslan had was structural. The bağlama and the classical guitar do not agree about frets, about tuning, or about how a melody should be ornamented, and a musician who has trained seriously on both ends up switching instruments mid-set rather than playing one idea through. His answer was to build a third thing. He called it the Di-Tar, and it fuses the body and string arrangement of the classical guitar with the neck logic of the bağlama; British promoters describing it have added flamenco guitar to the list of ingredients.

He did not do it alone or in secret. The instrument was developed during the Rotterdam years, with the physical build handled in collaboration with the instrument maker Süleyman Aslan, and with design opinions sought from the musicologist Martin Greve and from the guitarists Paco Peña and Carlo Domeniconi. Domeniconi in particular had spent years writing guitar music out of Anatolian material, so the consultation was pointed rather than ceremonial. The Di-Tar is now the instrument he is billed with, to the extent that Turkish promoters have simply used the word as shorthand for the show.

Records made at their own pace

His albums come slowly and in two languages at once. Va u Waxt, Zazaki for wind and time, appeared in 2004. Veyvé Mılaketu followed in 2007, circulating in Turkey under the title Meleklerin Dansı, the dance of the angels; a Turkish-titled Rüzgar ve Zaman surfaced on streaming services in 2010. Then came an eight-year silence, broken in 2015 by Na-Mükemmel, whose title translates as un-perfect. Duo arrived in 2017, and Dornağê Budelay, issued in Turkish as Budala Aurası, in 2019. Most of this catalogue sits with Kalan Müzik, the Istanbul label that has done more than any other to document Anatolia's minority repertoires.

Asked in March 2016 why the gap had been so long, he was blunt about refusing a release schedule: music, he said, is not a piece of technology that comes with a two-year warranty. In the same interview he rejected the role people keep trying to hand him. He is not, he said, making an effort to preserve tradition; tradition does not need protecting, and a musician who steps outside it gets pulled back in by it anyway. His image for the risk was leaving harbour — go too far out and you drown.

He was equally resistant to being filed by ethnicity. He has described what he plays as Anatolian music rather than Kurdish music, on the grounds that a large part of the repertoire crosses those boundaries before anyone gets to argue about it. He also paints, though that side of the work stays largely private.

Singles, soundtracks and a wider audience

The broad Turkish audience found him through television. His voice carried the crime series Eşkıya Dünyaya Hükümdar Olmaz, and that exposure moved him out of the world-music circuit and into halls that sell out to people who could not name a single Zazaki lament. He has also worked well outside that frame, with festival appearances including Rudolstadt and collaborative work with the Berlin Philharmonic among the credits listed in his Turkish-language biography.

Since 2024 he has stopped waiting for albums. The output has come as a run of singles: a paired arrangement of Satie's Gnossienne No. 1 with the Zazaki lament Daye Daye alongside Albéniz's Asturias in 2024, Efendiler Bagi the same year, then Yar Olmazmış and Serdo across 2025. The most recent is De Be Wayiro, released on 12 April 2026 as a self-issued single, a six-minute traditional folk setting rather than a radio edit. It is a title with history for him — the song has circulated for years in a version recorded with his relative and fellow Dersim musician Mikail Aslan.

Where things stand in autumn 2026

The touring picture right now is lopsided. The European side has gone quiet: the international listings run out after a show at Kampnagel in Hamburg on 8 October 2025, preceded by Innsbruck's Treibhaus on 28 September 2025 and, the year before, Berlin and Hannover in October 2024 either side of a Swiss pair — the Alhambra in Geneva on 8 October and the small hall at the Tonhalle in Zurich on 10 October, at CHF 45 to 75. His most recent British appearance was at the Stoller Hall in Manchester on 22 May 2026, priced between £32.50 and £52.50.

Turkey is where the diary is full. A run of solo dates is on sale now under the plain billing Ahmet Aslan – Solo Konser, almost all of them 8.30pm starts in municipal culture centres rather than clubs: Beylikdüzü Atatürk Kültür ve Sanat Merkezi in Istanbul on 9 October, Sahne Dragos in Maltepe on 16 October, the Çankaya Atatürk Sanat Merkezi in Ankara on 17 October, the Bostanlı Suat Taşer open-air theatre in İzmir on 22 October, the Osman Hamdi Bey Kültür Merkezi in Gebze on 12 November, the Atatürk University auditorium in Erzurum on 28 November, and the Tayyare Kültür Merkezi in Bursa on 30 December.

Prices place him firmly in the concert-hall bracket at home. Tickets for the Istanbul and Bursa shows start at 1,100 lira and for Gebze at 1,045, which is well above a club gig and roughly what a state ensemble charges.

The reputation, and its limits

What has not happened is a critical apparatus to match the audience. More than six thousand people track his movements on Songkick, yet setlist.fm holds no logged setlists for him at all and no recorded attendances — the sign of a following that turns up and listens rather than one that documents. Promoters fall back on describing the voice, which is usually characterised as warm and heavy at rest and capable of opening out sharply, and on explaining the Di-Tar, because no one has a shorthand for it.

That gap is consistent with the way he has built the career. He has kept the release rate low, refused the preservationist label that would have made him easier to programme, and spent three decades of exile turning a regional repertoire into something he can play on an instrument that did not exist before he made it. Thirty years after leaving Turkey, the halls he is selling out are the ones back home.