What I needed to hear:

The sublime Çetin Akdeniz on baglama, that’s what.

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Ah, this song reminds me of driving through Turkey! We went into a music shop, pointed at a baglama hanging from the ceiling and said, “That! We want to hear that!” They let us have a listen to a few discs, but Çetin won, no contest. His ornamentation was lightning fast and he didn’t have a lot of pop or new-agey back-up going on.

The people in the music store all looked at us like we were crazy, and we probably were, a little. Vancouverites o...