Tribal Bellydance: it's origins, it's evolution and it's future...?
Turkish tribal dances: aksak semai, devri hindi
Tribal dance in Turkey has different styles depending on the region or origin. Very popular is the 9/8 rhythm and this beat is adopted to a bellydance routine by Turkish bellydancers.
Also 7/8 and 10/8 beats are used and give a particular swing to the music and the dance. For Western ears a bit odd but really unresistable. The free mps music featured here fives an example of Turkish gypsy music. Pay particular attention to the fabulous gypsy clarinet player. His clarinet sometimes sound as a violin, sometimes as a sax, sometimes as a duduk and sometimes as a kamandze. This is one of the worlds biggest virtuoses on clarinet!
Some of the Turkish dances have their roots in Central-Asia, mainly Turkestan. There are also simularities between Turkish dances and dance of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and the Uygur region of China.
Turkish tribal dances are done in troupe and can genuine be called tribal dance as it is done by a distinct tribe. In fact Turkish tribal dances have nothing in common with the so called oriyantal dans or oriyantal dansi which is mainly executed in the big cities and the touristic places on the mediterreanian coast of Turkey. Turkish folklore dances include Halay, Zeybek, Horon (same as the Bulgarian hora) and Karsilama.
Most of the orchestras that accompany the Turkish tribal dances use davul (big bass drum) and zurna as main instruments.
The pear shaped Kazakh dombra looks a lot like the Turkish saz. So we can speak of common roots in all cultures of Central-Asia.
- Turkish gypsy music track 1
- Turkish gypsy music track 10
- Turkish gypsy music track 2
- Turkish gypsy music track 5
- Turkish gypsy music track 6
- Turkish gypsy music track 9
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