How I bought My SAZ July 13, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music , trackbackI was in Turkey on holiday, and I took an old guitar along. I carried it around with me because there wasn’t much to do all day in the heat except sit around sunbathing and swimming off the Gulet boats that toured around the islands. Anyway, Turkish people are very friendly and would see the guitar and ask me to play, or invite me in to have a drink. A few older guys told me they played the SAZ, but never seemed to have one somehow. Then one evening, I spotted a retaurant which had two musical intruments hanging up on the wall. It turned out that one was a saz and the other an OUD. I asked if anybody played them and was told to come back the next night at 10.pm
So I did, ate my dinner there and waited. Eventually an old man took the saz down from the wall and started playing. Another man sang. So I sent them over a drink which made them very happy. They came over and I watched carefully as a couple more tunes were played. Well they must have noticed that I was following the left hand and offered to pass the instrument over to me. Kind of insisted really. I had drunk enough wine to think there was nothing unusual about attempting to play an instrument I’d never touched before in public!! But the thing is, the saz is really quite simple, and I’d been listening to a lot of eastern style music so I just held down a random note on the highest string and strummed the chord. That soundeed ok so I started to experiment with a tune, just keeping to the one string, and strumming the rest occasionally as a drone. They were absolutely astonished and so was I. I was enjoying myself and the rhythm got faster and faster.
What a fabulous instrument, I just had to have one.
Because I was in a tourist resort it was really hard to find a Saz shop. I asked around and everyone told me to go to this bigger town an hour’s bus ride inland. I tried that but the taxi drivers who claimed they could take me to a saz shop just dumped me off at their cousin’s restaurant all the time.
Back at the beach, I asked the man in the water shop and he offered to take me somewhere on his moped. We went into a bakery, but then the baker showed us upstairs. There were about a dozen instruments for sale, of which about 6 were the type of Saz I wanted. I tried a few and then settled on one and agreed a price. As it’s quite a fragile instrument I nursed it carefully on my lap all the way home on the bus and plane.
Here’s a photo showing the body of my 7 string saz:
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