İbrahim Tatlıses

About İbrahim Tatlıses

İbrahim Tatlıses is one of the best-selling singers in Turkish popular music, with Kurdish roots and a small set of Kurdish-language songs that are widely played at Kurdish weddings. He was born İbrahim Tatlı in 1952 in Urfa (Şanlıurfa) to an Arab father and a Kurdish mother, and he grew up speaking Kurdish and Arabic at home. He has described his own identity in different ways over the years; on several occasions he has summed it up as 'my father is Arab, my mother is Kurdish, and I am Turkish'.

Known as 'İbo' and 'the Emperor', he made his first recording in 1970 and went on to become the leading voice of arabesk, with more than forty albums and hits such as Aramam, Mavişim and Mutlu Ol Yeter. His singing grew out of Urfa's free-rhythm uzun hava, a close relative of the unmetered singing of Kurdish singers in the same region. Most of his catalogue is in Turkish.

Kurdish has still run through his career. In 1986 he was prosecuted in Turkey for singing Kurdish songs at a concert in Sweden. In 2009 his album Yağmurla Gelen Kadın included the Kurmanji dance song Şemmame, widely seen as the moment he broke the barrier of recording in Kurdish. He has also recorded the Kurmanji love song Rinda Min; in 2016 an Istanbul court, in a case brought by the Kurdish composer Beytocan, who said the song was his own Agir Ketiye Dilê Min, ordered Tatlıses to pay compensation. He survived a shooting in Istanbul in 2011 and is living.

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