All images © 2019-2022 Marc Delforge
…. to (some of) those I have admired.
Below you will also find my tribute to some great didgeridoo players.
And further down my tribute to a Sufi Saint through the photographs of some of his Turkish disciples at a festival in his honour.
By the year 2000 the didgeridoo had become very popular. He had a place in rock bands like Midnight Oil and some Australians who had mastered this incredible instrument were accompanying all kinds of world music everywhere in the world. I remember hearing with delight Alan Dargin, Philipp Peris and Gary Thomas already in 1997, playing together or accompanying a flamenco band at the Sfinks, a Belgian world music festival. For me it was a revelation.
In the following years workshops were organized on the fringe of this festival, with teachers like Alan Dargin, Mark Atkins, Gary Thomas, Michael Jackson and, last but not least, Charlie McMahon. I participated a few times. Here are some pictures from that time (2002 and 2003). See it as a tribute to these extraordinary blowers, so gifted in teaching breath (something I was doing also but a in radical different context as a hatha yoga teacher) and its musical use.
Kindly note that among them, Alan Dargin has left us. He was a great chap.
In August 2002 after attending the wedding of a friend in Taurus (see https://marcdelforge.org/portfolio/weddings/ ) and visiting another old friend in Konya, and before joining my wife in Kos (Greece) on our way to Patmos and Lipsi ( to attend a religious festival: see https://marcdelforge.org/portfolio/greece/), I decided to revisit Cappadocia and to attend a nearby festival dedicated to the Sufi Saint Hadji Bektaş Veli whose tomb (türbesi) is located in Hacıbektaş.
Hadji Bektaş Veli (1209-1271) was a mystic but above all a paragon of tolerance and benevolence. He put people first (“ The greatest book to read is man himself.”), something I liked, as I used to travel the world mainly to meet them (and photograph them… slowly). And in Hacıbektaş I did indeed meet only kindness. I pay tribute here to some of these open-minded and spiritually inhabited people.
MARC DELFORGE 