Democracy. We had already taken it for granted. We had believed that it would live forever. Now we have to fight for it again. We must fight for it not to die. That it is not murdered by all those who want to force us into a new age of fear, into a new age of hatred, into a new era of dictatorial rule. We must fight for democracy: “„Jedem ist doch klar, vom Himmel fiel sie nicht, die Demokratie” (It’s clear to everyone, democracy didn’t fall from the sky), sings Ozan Ata Canani in the title track of this album: “Auch zum Nulltarif gibt es sie nicht, die Demokratie” (Democracy doesn’t come for free either).

Fifty years have passed since Ata wrote his first songs, in the mid-seventies, when he was just 13 years old and had moved from his Anatolian birthplace to Germany, where his father worked as a “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) in the heavy industry. To make the move easier for his son, his father bought him a bağlama, a long-necked lute whose history can be traced back hundreds of years, to the Ottoman court and to the songs of Turkish bards; in the Turkish rock music of the sixties and seventies, it celebrated a renaissance in an electrically amplified form. The young Ata taught himself the instrument, performed at Turkish wedding parties and began to write lyrics in German. His first song was called “Deutsche Freunde” (German Friends) and was about the fate of people who were living in Germany “as unskilled laborers, as dirt and garbage workers”; and it was about the fate of their children: “divided into two worlds”.

Ata’s musical career ended in the mid-1980s, and it took almost three decades for him to be rediscovered. He re-recorded “Deutsche Freunde” for a compilation entitled “Songs of Gastarbeiter” in 2013, after which he began to play concerts and compose regularly again. In 2021, with 58 years old, his late debut “Warte mein Land, warte” was finally released on the Fun In The Church label.

The album “Die Demokratie” is the second coup from this astonishing youthful, highly contemporary work. Ata still uses the bağlama as his guiding instrument. He is accompanied by the Cologne band Locas In Love and the London percussionist Renu; Komba Coşkunel, a Turkish-Bulgarian virtuoso on the Arabic goblet drum darbuka, and the German-Turkish singer Sinem can be heard in the choir; Jerome Bugnon, the trombonist from the Berlin dancehall band Seeed, contributed the brass arrangements.

This is how “Western” and “Turkish” styles meet, and the present and the past come together. In the first single “Freund / Dost” (Friend), Ata sings about being a stranger in a hostile society and longing for home. It originated in 1979, and the recording also features the voice of the then 18-year-old: Istanbul-based DJ Bey ripped it from the YouTube recording of a television program and used it as the basis for his arrangement.

Watch the video here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ivQkD6BZkNE