Ebru Gündeş

Early life

Ebru Gündeş was born in İstanbul. She attended primary school in Ankara, but she was forced to discontinue her education due to financial difficulty.

The quality of her voice was discovered at an early age when one of her relatives took her to Neşe Demirkat, a partner in Raks Neşe Müzik, which is a record label in Turkey. Demirkat was impressed with her voice and introduced her to music producers Koral Sarıtaş and Selçuk Tekay.

Career

Ebru Gündeş sings the kind of desperately tragic Arabesque (Arabesk) love songs that are the core of Turkish pop music. Aside from Turkey, she is particularly popular in Iran, because of the substantial Turkic minority in the country. Consequently, she is considered to be one of Iran's favourite singers. She is also very popular in Azerbaijan republic

Her debut album, Tanrı Misafiri, was released in 1992. It proved to be a massive success, selling 1,250,000 copies nationwide. At this stage, she was regarded as a very sweet and innocent-looking girl, slim, dressed in white and with an attractive habit of raising one eyebrow. She was on billboards all over Istanbul. Her subsequent albums have been hugely successful.

She has had serious health problems. She suffered from a cerebral haemorrhage in December 1999, while recording Dön Ne Olur. After two operations, Ebru eventually returned to full health. Dön Ne Olur was one of the best-selling albums of all time in Turkey. In November 2001, she released the album Ahdım Olsun. This album embodied the pain of the experiences she endured from December 1999 to November 2001.

Television career

Ebru Gündeş has made hundreds of television appearances in Turkey as a singer and recently as an actress in the comedy series İmkansız Aşk (Impossible Love). She was also the host of Mega Show, which was one of the most popular television shows in Turkey. Every week Ebru was joined by a variety of other Turkish singers, most notably her long-time friends Serdar Ortaç and İbrahim Tatlıses. The show featured Ebru singing her own songs, singing classic songs and singing duets with other singers. She then appeared in the hugely popular singing contest Popstar Alaturka as a guest judge alongside some of Turkey's most popular singers, namely Bülent Ersoy, Orhan Gencebay and Armagan Çaglayan. Just before leaving Popstar Alaturka because of problems with the show's host, she released her new album Evet (Yes).

Ebru Gündeş then released another album, "BEYAZ" ("White"). The album, like most albums released that year, has been unsuccessful, selling just over 100,000 throughout the year. In 2012, she released her latest album '13.5', which consisted only of covers of old popular songs. The album has reached average sales in the country. However, the general perception of music critics has been one of disappointment, as the album consisted solely of covers and was therefore considered to be 'repetition'. Currently, she is a judge on O Ses Türkiye (Turkish version of The Voice), which is Turkey's most-watched television show with Hadise, Murat Boz and Gökhan and Hakan Özoğuz.

Personal life

In 2010, she married Iranian Azerbaijani businessman Reza Zarrab. The couple has one child. Reza Zarrab was arrested on 17 December 2013 by Istanbul police in light of a corruption scandal, which involving the AKP government being accused of giving bribes totaling 63 million dollars to government ministers or their proxies.

Discography