Tufan Derince is a Kurdish folk musician from Diyarbakir, Turkey. He is currently based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Tufan Derince was born in 1987 and began playing music at weddings at the age of 12. He attended the Gaziantep University Conservatory Department. After his studies, Derince set up a music centre in Mersin, where he taught other musicians and began to produce music for himself and other artists.
Derince plays the electric baglama. In various ensemble formats he plays traditional wedding and folk music. The group’s music has been described as “a celebration and expression of cultural pride in Kurdish identity”.
In January 2020, he performed as part of the annual GlobalFEST celebration of world music in New York. Jon Pareles, the music critic for The New York Times, described the performance as a “whirlwind”. NPR described the group’s sound as “wild distorted Kurdish wedding music”.
Tufan Derince continues to perform at weddings throughout Europe as well as in Turkey and has also performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk meets globalFEST series in 2022, at DubaiEXPO2020, and at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March, 2022.
The New York Times :
The Tufan Derince Trio
The Tufan Derince Trio was decidedly undemonstrative onstage, but its set of Kurdish wedding music was a whirlwind. Derince, who is from Turkey, plays the electric baglama, a long-necked three-stringed lute, backed by beats from a keyboard and accompanying two singers; the second replaced the first. Between and around the vocal lines, the baglama was beautifully relentless, precisely repeating a quick little motif a few times before moving on to another and another, perhaps hundreds of them in the course of the set. Derince also toyed with tone: buzzy, piercing, nasal, twangy, keening. What started as a marvel of breakneck perpetual motion kept accelerating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/arts/music/globalfest.html
