On January 11 2025 I attended a Coffee Concert at the Atatürk Cultural Centre in Taksim. These concerts take place on Saturday mornings in the downstairs foyer – where concertgoers go for refreshments. Fortunately, the space on this floor of the AKM is big enough to accommodate a stage and several rows of chairs. I was told that the audience for Coffee Concerts are served free cups of coffee, but not being a coffee-drinker myself, I cannot comment on its quality.
This particular Coffee Concert was a solo recital by the Azeri composer, arranger and pianist, İlyas Mirzayev, born in Baku in 1961.
Despite the fact that Musa Mirzayev, his father, was famous throughout the Soviet Union as a composer, the young Mirzayev had very little interest in music, his main preoccupation being sport. He was in fact a member of the Soviet junior tennis team. It was Vagif Mustafazade, father of the celebrated jazz singer and pianist Aziza Mustafazade, who in 1977 brought about a radical change in Mirzayev Junior’s life path by beginning to train him as a jazz pianist.
This introduction to the world of music eventually led him to follow in his father’s footsteps. After studying for a degree in composition in Baku, he completed a master’s in this subject at the Moscow Conservatoire, after which he gave concerts as a jazz pianist with a number of different groups in Baku. He then became an itinerant musician, performing as part of a five-man group accompanying the pop star Sarhan Sarhan at venues all over the Soviet Union from Moldova to Kamchatka – even in stations along the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, which traverses Siberia.
From 1987 onwards Mirzayev worked closely with the Azerbaijan State Radio and Television Light Music Orchestra composing songs, writing film music and doing musical arrangements. His training at the Moscow Conservatoire stood him in good stead here, and thanks to the hands-on experience gained during this period he soon became a master orchestrator. Meanwhile, he was able to hone his skills as a jazz pianist – especially as he had the good fortune to be working closely with Rafig Babayev, a pianist and producer whom he acknowledges to have been his main teacher in the jazz department.
A major life change occurred in 1991, when he moved to Turkey on a permanent basis. While entertaining customers on the piano at the Istanbul Sheraton Hotel he co-founded the Enbe Orchestra, which became a regular fixture at social events in the city. From 1995 to 2002 he worked at the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall as composer and arranger, at the same time writing songs and making orchestral arrangements for Turkish pop stars such as Fahir Atakoğlu, Nilüfer, Sezen Aksu, Fatih Erkoç, Candan Erçetin, MFÖ (Mazhar-Fuat-Özkan), Sertab Erener and Neco.
Two important developments in his career took place in 2002. Firstly he began to perform as a jazz pianist outside Turkey, giving concerts mostly in Germany – in fact, on many occasions he had the privilege of playing with the legendary Austrian keyboard-player and jazz composer Joe Zawinul. Secondly, it was in that year that his long-time cooperation with the Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra, then headed by its founder, the late Ali Nihat Gökyiğit, commenced. This led to the creation of a large number of orchestral pieces such as the Concerto for Ney and Orchestra, the Black Sea Rhapsody, the Symphony No 2(subtitled Symphony of Three Seas) and concertos for various traditional Turkish instruments.
The pieces Mirzayev played on January 11 were from his album Blue Red Green, a suite of jazz compositions first recorded in Kiev in 2000 and subsequently released as a CD by Universal Music in 2004. (Blue, red and green, by the way, are the colours of the flag of the Republic of Azerbaijan.) After a lively opening number entitled, appropriately, Hoş Geldiniz (Welcome), he launched into Inca’s Gold which, after a quiet, reflective passage marked by some interesting harmonies, became quite atonal, its rapid running passages winding down to a relaxed ending.
He played ten pieces in all. One of them, Leyla, had been written as a wedding present for his wife, while another, Mermaid, worked itself up from some Debussy-like chords to a highly rhythmic climax that had an improvisational feel to it. The last number, Goodnight, ended the recital in a restful E major. What I found most impressive about Mirzayev’s overall performance was his impeccable piano technique. Even in the rapid-fire octave passages and the highly complex chords that kept all ten fingers busy simultaneously, I never once spotted a wrong note. All in all, it was a remarkable tour de force from a consummately professional musician whose compositional skills are unquestionably of as high an order as his pianistic virtuosity.
