Ahmet Aslan

Ahmet Aslan — Biography

Ahmet Aslan is a musician who was born in Hozat (Tunceli) and lives in Germany, performing folk songs and songs in Turkish, Zazaki and Kurdish. He plays the tambur, guitar, bağlama and oud, and developed his own instrument, the Di-Tar, by combining classical guitar and bağlama; his style blends contemporary Western music with the sounds of Mesopotamian instruments. In Turkey he reached a wide audience with the song "Minnet Eylemem", used in the series Eşkıya Dünyaya Hükümdar Olmaz.

He studied at the Istanbul Technical University Conservatory between 1993 and 1996 and settled in Germany in 1996, where he took guitar lessons at various music schools and attended the Düsseldorf conservatory for a time. He studied world music at the Rotterdam World Music Academy in the Netherlands, graduating in 2013, and created the Di-Tar during those academy years, taking the views of Martin Greve, Paco Peña, Carlo Domeniconi and Antonis Anissegos and refining it at the workshop of instrument maker Süleyman Aslan.

His albums include Va u Waxt (2004), Veyvé Mılaketu (2007), Na-Mükemmel (2015), Su ve Ateş (2017) and Dornağê Budelay (2019); the series' music was also released as an album. He has given solo concerts with names such as Erdal Erzincan and Grup Abdal, and performed at the Rudolstadt music festival. On screen he played the character Dervi in the 2017 film Zer.