Salih Korkut Peker is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and instructor of microtonal and Turkish makam music, and one of the most distinctive voices on the Turkish music scene. Born in Ayvalik and raised in Ankara, he decided to become a musician at the age of fourteen, beginning on clarinet before turning to string instruments. Having grown up by the sea, he often describes his musical identity as shaped by his “distance from, and closeness to, the sea.”
His professional career began in 1998, performing as a guitarist, fretless guitarist, and bassist across genres from indie rock to folk, and contributing as a composer, lyricist, and arranger on albums and singles. He has given hundreds of concerts around the world with the Istanbul Arabesque Project, and since 2011 has built a solid reputation as a studio musician, playing strings on the soundtracks of more than fifty television series and films. His abiding passion is the cumbus — a relationship that began when he saw the instrument on a television program as a child and grew so deep that he carries a cumbus tattoo. Yet he never confines himself to a single instrument: today he plays cumbus, caglama (a guitar-strung saz), divane (a cross between the saz and the lavta), and fretless guitar, bringing his own flavor to Anatolian music.
His musical language is a true blend, weaving Eastern and Western melodies together to bring grunge, rock, blues, arabesque, rebetiko, and Anatolian music into one voice. This approach — adding his own temperament to folk traditions — makes him not merely a player but a kind of musical storyteller. He has taken part in projects such as Duble Salih, Yasak Helva, and Calgiya Izmir, and leads a one-man project named “Kirsehir-Izmir-Seattle,” a title that sums up his work. His debut solo album Denize Dik, released in September 2020 on LU Records, brought Anatolian melodies together with blues and grunge; he played nearly everything on it himself — vocals, cumbus, caglama, divane, guitars, even foot percussion. He studied music intensively under masters Erkan Ogur and Emin Igus at the Nazim Hikmet Academy, and defines his approach to music as “a form of freedom and expression.”
At the Tapadum Music Academy, Salih Korkut Peker teaches microtonal and Turkish makam music online, for every level from beginner to advanced. His lessons span basic makam theory; fretless guitar and cumbus technique; the art of caglama and its hybrid playing techniques; Turkish and Middle Eastern techniques for fretted guitar — simulating microtones and authentic Eastern ornaments; and the ornamentation and phrasing, the tavir or attitude, that bring the music to life. For fretless enthusiasts and guitarists alike, he offers a roadmap to the “sounds between the notes.”