Meykhana
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Meykhana (Azerbaijani: meyxana) is a kind of traditional Azeri distinctive folk unaccompanied song, usually performed by several people improvising on a particular subject. Meykhana originally meant a kind of drinking house (pub), where alcoholic beverages called mey were served. The contests, carried out in such places, involved two or more poets exchanging verses back and forth in an extemporaneous fashion, sometimes joking and disparaging one another. At the end of the contest, the audience determined which poet had improvised the most elegant and clever verses and declared him the winner.
The most known type of meykhana is verbal exchange (Azerbaijani: deyişmə), where some phrase or sentence forms a rhyme (Azerbaijani: qafiyə) with the following couplets. Meykhana was performed among the youth of Baku settlements in the pre-Revolutionary time. Although during the Soviet period meykhana was banned, the poetry of Aliagha Vahid was often rhymed as contemporary meykhana.
Modern performers of meykhana in Azerbaijan include Aghaselim Childagh, Namig Garachukhurlu and Vugar Abdulov. In late 1990s, some Azeri performers, such as Anar Naghilbaz and the "Deyirman" Group, started mixing meykhana with Western-style rap and reggae, laying the foundation of the modern Azeri hip hop.
