Tristan Driessens is a Belgian born oud player, composer and musicologist. As the son of a traveling family, he spent much of his childhood in Spain and Portugal. There he became acquainted with Sephardic and Arabo-Andalusian music and for the first time came into contact with the Arabic oud.

Between 2009 and 2015 he stayed in Istanbul where he was trained by grandmaster Necati Çelik. Back in Belgium, he obtained master’s degrees in Turkish ‘ûd at the Leuven Lemmens Institute and musicology at the Université Libre de Belgique, both with highest distinction.

In 2011, he founded the Turkish-Belgian Lâmekân Ensemble, which has become a fixture in the field of classical Ottoman music.

From 2016 to 2020, he directed the eclectic Refugees for Refugees. Under his leadership, the group gave more than a hundred concerts throughout Europe and won critical acclaim, including the first place in the annual list of the Transglobal World Music Charts in 2016 and the Klara for best Belgian world music album in 2019.

In 2016, together with fellow musician Emre Gültekin, he founded Seyir Muzik, an association for music production and transmission.

www.tristandriessens.com