Turkish singing and Turkish songs

I am about to head over to Feriduns house for my 5th Turkish singing lesson. To be fair it's actually more of a song lesson than a singing lesson. Feridun is teaching me Turkish songs, and how to sing them. Along the way I'm learning a lot about the instruments, time signitures, the important Turkish musicians, and the fashions and traditions in Turkish music.
I mentioned in the previous post that Feridun talked about Arabesque ornamentation and I was concerned about how to sustain notes without sounding too western. Well its seems that there is another element to choosing how to sing in Turkish, the Traditional. Because we are working towards a recital and Feridun wants us to share input into the way we arrange and prepare the songs we have had to experiment with instruments, keys, and tempo's, and time signitures. Feridun has asked me if I wanted to do traditional or fusion and has indicated that we should leave the Arabesque alone. At first he said we should use guitar to accompany the songs which was OK but after a while I felt like we were just copying Ekin Koray and Baris Manco. After seeing a film clip with a saz with a capo attached I asked Feridun if he could use a capo to change the tuning of his saz to suite a song we were practicing in F. He did this and it made a great difference. The saz then produced sympathetic tones that gave me a greater sense of the traditional roots of the songs. It seems that Feriduns ideas about fusion were different to mine. I'm very familiar with guitar and he's very familiar with the saz.
We now have four songs to prepare two by Erkin Koray and two by Baris Manco. I have become more proficient at Turkish pronounciation and have been able to sing with more power in my voice. Last week Feridun suggested I sing with more "feeling" and suggested I listen to some traditonal tunes to get ideas for how to develop more emotion in my voice. I asked him if that meant I would sound more Arabesque and he pointed out that traditional emotional delivery is at the other end of the scale to Arabesque. This was an aha! moment for me.
So my challenge now is to listen and feel and continue to develop my skills at singing inTurkish. Soon we'll be ready to record some of our practices and some time in the near future Feridun may bring along his mate Steve the oud player.