Mikail Yakut

Mikail Yakut was born in Turkey in 1987. At the age of 13 he began to play the accordion. Soon after he gave his first concerts. In the following years he played in Istanbul in various folk music groups such as Kafda??, Khalkedon, Babil, Sonbahar Kumpanya and Blacksea – Balkans Line and has already performed inside and outside Turkey. He also participated in album recordings by Ay?enur Kolivar, Sumru A??ryürüyen, Hakan Y?lmaz, Teneke Trampet and Mor ve Ötesi during these years. In the summer of 2010, he not only participated as an artist in the Ismet Siral Creative Music Studio (ISCMS), but was also significantly involved in the organization of the festival. There he got the opportunity to meet and work together great musicians such as Karl Berger, John Zorn and Adam Rudolph, an experience that had a great influence on Mikail's artistic development.

From 2007 to 2012 he studied sociology at Bo?aziçi University in Istanbul. After graduation, he moved to Berlin to devote himself entirely to music. He studied music education at the Brandenburg University of Technology cottbus in the artistic major accordion. Mikail Yakut is a graduate of Eduard Wall's accordion class and Jana Liebschwager's jazz piano class. In Berlin he began to expand his musical spectrum and participated in various projects in the fields of contemporary music, improvisation, theater music and electronic music. This included the founding of Thrace is the Place, a Balkan band, and Meteikos, a Rembetiko band, with whom he could be heard and seen on many Berlin stages.

Currently, Mikail Yakut is a permanent member of the Heval Trio and the A.G.A Trio, which released its debut album "Meeting" (Naxos World Music) in September 2020. Together with Korhan Erel, he can be seen as Mut (an electroacoustic techno duo). The premiere of the musical children's theatre "Der gestiefelte Kater", which he developed together with Birgit Hering on the basis of the compositions of Carlo Domeniconi, took place in December 2019. In addition, he accompanies the renowned writer Dogan Akhanli with his accordion at readings.

Mikail Yakut focuses on traditional music from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. It is this music that most intensely shapes Mikail's virtuoso playing. At the same time, he is strongly influenced by classical music, contemporary music and jazz. Mikail Yakut succeeds in mixing the most diverse musical genres with each other in his musical playing and creating space for improvisation on this basis. In this way, he not only crosses genre boundaries, but also cultural boundaries. Mikail Yakut has played international concerts in countries such as Syria, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland and France.