The Istanbul Oriental Ensemble is a Turkish band playing traditional Turkish music in an oriental gypsy style. The band's leader is Burhan Öçal. Though he is a multi-instrumentalist, in this band he generally plays the darbuka drum, which provides a rhythmic backdrop for improvisations by violin, clarinet, oud, and kanun. Öçal started the band (only one of his projects) in the mid-1990s to revive the old Turkish tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gypsy music. In Istanbul and Thracia, the European part of Turkey, gypsy music has played an important role in the Turkish music scene dating back to the tenth century. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Istanbul+Oriental+Ensemble">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.