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The profile · researched 30 September 2026
Manuş Baba: two albums, a grandmother's nickname, and a decade of Turkish festival stages
Mustafa Özkan built one of Turkey's most-streamed pop-arabesk catalogues out of an Antalya bar band and a single 2017 album, and in January 2026 he finally recorded with Nazan Öncel, the writer he had named years earlier as the person who shaped him.
Tarsus, Antalya, and a name from the family
Mustafa Özkan was born on 1 December 1986 in Tarsus, in Mersin province, into a family with roots in Diyarbakır. He attended the Tarsus Turgut İçgören primary school before the family settled in Antalya, where he finished at Gazi High School. The stage name came from the household rather than from any studio: his grandmother called him Manuş when he was small, and the first word he spoke as a baby was baba. He has carried both halves ever since, and has explained the second as a mark of how his family treated fathers.
A guitar from his own father during his high-school years started the music. In 2010 he enrolled at the music department of the Fine Arts Faculty at Akdeniz University in Antalya, and trained on voice, guitar and mandolin. Speaking to the student paper Gazete Bilkent in May 2015, before he had released anything commercially, he said his material came out of watching people and places as he moved around the country, and named Yaşar Kemal's İnce Memed and the film-maker Yılmaz Güney among the things that formed him. He described his approach to other writers' songs as something close to jealousy — wanting a song he loved to be his before rebuilding it in his own terms.
Güneşe Yolculuk, then a producer
From 2010 he sang with a group called Güneşe Yolculuk, working around Antalya. That was five years of regional club and bar work with no recorded output behind it, and it is the period that explains why his stagecraft arrived fully formed and his discography did not.
The turn came in 2015, when he met the producer Murat Kınay and the two began working together. Three singles followed in 2016, among them 'Aşkın Kederi' and 'İstanbul'. Kınay Müzik and DMC, the Doğan Music Company, have handled his releases since. The arrangements from the start set oud and darbuka against guitar, which is the main reason his records get filed under arabesk as often as under pop.
Dönersen Islık Çal, and the claim that followed it
The debut album, Dönersen Islık Çal, arrived in July 2017. The first video taken from it was for 'Eteği Belinde'; the title track followed. Talking to Cumhuriyet on 20 August 2017, he described the record as an accumulation rather than a project — nostalgic pop, a rock motif, acoustic material he placed near deep house, and türkü, written across years rather than to a brief. In the same conversation he gave the line the paper used as its headline, that he was trying to pull an order out of the chaos, and he named Nazan Öncel as the figure who had shaped his character. He also explained the white shirt he wears on stage as a matter of respect for the stage and for the people in front of it, and talked about wanting to write screenplays and turn his stories into a book.
The album moved further than a debut on a small label normally does. 'Eteği Belinde' passed 77 million views on YouTube within months. That reach also drew a dispute: in December 2017 the singer Atilla Yılmaz said the song reproduced his 'Senden Gayrı', from his 2005 album Vaktidir, said the copyright owners' body MSG had upheld his claim, and said he had begun legal proceedings. The song remained in circulation and remains a fixture of the live set.
A second album, then singles
İki Gözümün Çiçeği, the second album, came in 2019. Nothing album-length has followed it. What came instead was a run of individual releases: a Milad remix of 'Beni Düşünme' in 2019; 'Dayanamam' in 2020, alongside home-recorded readings of 'Bir Tek Sensin İçimde' and 'Dam Üstüne Çul Serer' issued under the heading Ev Kayıtlarım, and a remix of 'Ah Gelemem Ki'; then 'Ey Benim Divane Gönlüm' in 2022 and a four-year gap after it. He has also appeared as a guest, on 'Kimler Gelmiş' from the 2018 album Durum Şarkıları and on 'İyi Bak Kendine' with Hirai Zerdüş.
The result is a catalogue that is small for an artist at his level of recognition in Turkey — two albums in nine years — and heavily weighted towards a handful of titles. 'Dönersen Islık Çal', 'Eteği Belinde' and 'Bu Havada Gidilmez' are the songs that carry the streaming numbers and the crowd response, and the touring calendar, not the release schedule, is what has kept him working.
2026: recording with the writer he named as his model
On 9 January 2026 he released 'Oldu Bi' Şeyler' with Nazan Öncel — the same Nazan Öncel he had cited in 2017. Öncel wrote both the words and the music, Emre Şen arranged it, and the track runs two minutes and forty-two seconds. Öncel announced it from her own channels and an official video went up on YouTube the same week. It is his first listed release since 2022 and, at the end of September 2026, still his most recent.
Whether it becomes the front end of a third album is not something either party has said publicly. For now it sits on its own, and the live diary is where the activity is.
The circuit
He works Turkey continuously and, on the evidence of the listings, only Turkey — Songkick has him touring in a single country. The pattern is municipal and festival work through the summer, then ticketed halls in the autumn. Recent stops include Sandıklı in Afyonkarahisar on 11 August 2024, the Denizli motor vehicles fair on 6 July 2025, and the 25th Evvel Temmuz Culture and Arts Festival in Hatay on 14 July 2025.
The 2026 summer took in MilyonFest dates at Sinop on 1 August and Arsuz in Hatay on 7 August, and on 4 September he played the 11th International Altın Biber Festival at the Osmangazi Millet Bahçesi in Yenişehir, Bursa, to a crowd the local and national reports put in the thousands; the district mayor Ercan Özel met him beforehand and presented a cake modelled on the festival's trademarked pepper. The autumn run is MilyonFest İzmir at the Tarihi Havagazı Fabrikası in Alsancak on 2 October, Blind İstanbul on 17 October at 21:00, and Milyon Performance Hall in Ankara on 6 November and Eskişehir on 7 November, both at 20:00. Booking and press enquiries go through his own site, which functions as a management contact page and nothing else.
The show, now
A Manuş Baba show in 2026 is a band performance in Turkish, drawn almost entirely from the two albums and the singles around them, with 'Eteği Belinde', 'Dönersen Islık Çal' and 'Bu Havada Gidilmez' doing the heavy work and the audience singing them back in full — that mass sing-along is what every report of the Yenişehir festival night on 4 September 2026 led with. He performs in the white shirt he has worn since the first album and has described as a matter of respect for the stage, fronting a group whose oud and darbuka sit alongside guitar, so the arrangements stay closer to the records than to a stripped-back reading. Free municipal and festival dates run through the summer and pull crowds in the thousands into open ground — Osmangazi Millet Bahçesi in Bursa, MilyonFest sites at Sinop and Arsuz — and typically end late in the evening with no support act named on the bill beyond the festival's own programme. The autumn shows move indoors and are ticketed: Blind İstanbul on 17 October at 21:00, and Milyon Performance Hall in Ankara and Eskişehir on 6 and 7 November, both starting at 20:00, with MilyonFest İzmir at the Tarihi Havagazı Fabrikası on 2 October running as a daytime festival slot from 15:00. Set lengths are not published for any of these dates, and no venue or promoter has announced opening acts for the November hall shows.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · tr.wikipedia.org · cumhuriyet.com.tr · gazetebilkent.com · music.apple.com · music.apple.com · haber.mynet.com · milliyet.com.tr