Arto Tunçboyacıyan

Arto Tunçboyacıyan — Biography

Arto Tunçboyacıyan is a musician who brings percussion, voice and the folk music of Anatolia and Armenia together with jazz and avant-garde experiment. Born in Istanbul to an Armenian family, he lives in the United States today and leads the Yerevan-based Armenian Navy Band.

At eleven he began playing and recording traditional Anatolian music with other musicians, among them his elder brother Onno Tunç, and before settling in New York in 1981 he appeared on more than two hundred records in Europe. In America he worked with jazz figures such as Chet Baker, Marc Johnson, Al Di Meola and Joe Zawinul and performed with Paul Winter and the Earth Band. Duo projects with Ara Dinkjian and the quartet Night Ark, which released five albums in the 1980s, date from this period; he answered the loss of his brother in a 1996 plane crash with the album Onno, made with Dinkjian. In 1998 he founded the Armenian Navy Band in Yerevan, and in 2003 made the album Serart with Serj Tankian.

He has also worked with Sezen Aksu and the Greek singer Eleftheria Arvanitaki. Tracks from his album Aile Muhabbeti appear in the films Hemşo and Mon père est ingénieur; he composed the score for Le Voyage en Arménie and wrote music for the Turkish films Avcı and Gavur Mahallesi. In 2011, as a member of the Paul Winter Consort, he won a Grammy for Miho: Journey to the Mountain, and in 2017 he was named an Honored Cultural Worker of Armenia.