Awdil Shakar
It is almost impossible for a musician born in the cosmopolitan geography of Mesopotamia, which is regarded as starter point of the history of civilizations, to be filled with a standardised musical form. Shakar’s musical adventure started as a multi-instrumentalist musician within this cultural vision. According to Shakar, Mesopotamia is a place with endless depth, science and aesthetics, created by Kurdish Armenian Byzantine Syriac Persian and Arab musicians with thousands of years of intellectual touch. Mesopotamia has survived from the ancient world to the present without losing its spirit. He calls his music “Avant-garde Microtonal Bass Art” with the elements of the modal-microtonal music system of Mesopotamia “MAQAM” and the classical music harmony, which is a genius design of west, and the universal music of the modern world, Jazz, built on these values.
Awdil mentions about the ancient city Amida (Diyarbakır) which has a 9000-year-old city tradition where he was born;
“When I look back at the narrow streets of the city where I spent my childhood, it makes me feel tremendous to be able to see the war scars of Byzantine and Persian soldiers 1800 years before me, and to touch the world’s first sundial made by the inventor İsmail Al-Jazari, who lived in the same city. Two of the four holy rivers mentioned in the Torah gave life to this city. To walk on those magnificent walls surrounding the city, which Emperor Constantine helped to repair and to keep it intact until today, and to reach the lands where the first wheat of the world was planted in Çayönü 12,000 years ago and watching the blue sky… It removes the notion we call “time” and takes me on a spiritual journey at that moment. What I brought with me on my way back from this journey inspires my music and I owe every expression that adds value to my art to that land.”
The legendary musician Jaco Pastorius, the miraculous inventor of the fretless bass guitar, is the person who caused the end of the long shifts that Awdil Shakar spent with various musical instruments in his early musical years, which formed the basis of his multi-instrumentalist identity.