Bayatılar

Grinsteins Mischpoche play Bayatılar

I like interesting attribution trails. Yesterday in the pub I heard Stereo Love, a boppy yet wistful electropop piece featuring a catchy accordion riff as its central motif.  A look at Wikipedia finds it to be Romanian, written by Edward Maya and featuring the vocalist Vika Jigulina; after its release in 2009 it became a long-running Euro-hit.

The central riff, however - as noted at Whosampled.com - comes from Bayatılar, a composition by the Azerbaijani composer Eldar Mansurov, which from its 1989 release by Brilliant Dadashova had percolated across to the pop circuit of some 60 countries. Eldar Mansurov's YouTube Channel has a number of clips of the varied interpretations of this extremely infectious tune: I especially like the laidback klezmer brass version by Grinsteins Mischpoche, and Bayaty by the Italian folk fusion group Cantodiscanto.

As with the Men at Work's "Kookaburra" quotation (see Kookaburra fossil exposed) this led to copyright issues; but this one seems to have been sorted amicably, with Maya and Mansurov signing an agreement to co-authorship of Stereo Love. 

Geeky background: "Bayatılar" is the plural form of "Bayatı", a traditional Azerbaijani lyrical folk poetry form based on quatrains. The dotless i - ı - is the character in the modern Latin-based Azerbaijani alphabet representing the close back unrounded vowel.

- Ray