Nükhet Ruacan

Nükhet Ruacan — Biography

Nükhet Ruacan was a singer and one of the best-known female jazz voices in Turkey from the 1980s on. She is remembered together with Ayten Alpman and Sevinç Tevs among the country's jazz divas. Alongside performing she taught music for years, and when she died in 2007 the press remembered her as a diva of jazz.

Her artistic path began with graphic design. She enrolled in the graphic arts department of the State College of Applied Fine Arts but left her studies unfinished and turned to pop singing. She began singing jazz in Switzerland in 1974 and until 1977 worked with the orchestras of Emin Fındıkoğlu and Tommy Dodd in Switzerland and Norway. Back in Turkey she performed as a jazz vocalist in nightclubs and festivals. In 1979 she moved to New York to study voice at the New York Conservatory of Music, returning in 1982. She recorded an album titled Ruacan.

In the 1980s she appeared often on TRT, accompanied by the TRT orchestra and by her own jazz groups, and gave concerts in China and the United States for the Ministry of Culture. In 1984 she entered the Turkish Eurovision selection with the song "Hayallerin Işığında". She was the sister of the jazz guitarist Neşet Ruacan and also appeared on programs with him. She taught in the music department of Istanbul Bilgi University for about ten years and, after 2005, trained students at the Nazım Hikmet Center of Art. She died in Istanbul of leukemia on May 6, 2007, and was buried in Karacaahmet Cemetery.