Sunday December 8,
ALİ PERRET, TİMUÇİN ŞAHİN & VOLKAN ERGEN
In my blog in May, I wrote that the pianist Ali Perret ‘was responsible for training up a large number of the fine young Turkish jazz pianists we hear today while he was teaching in the Jazz Department of Bilgi University – a department that he helped found. An expert both at laying down mainstream jazz and at providing musically appropriate accompaniment to free improvisations, he has a versatile aesthetic that is all his own.’
I saw Ali Perret more recently – on November 1 – at the ‘Clash of the Titans’ concert at the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall. He was conducting a jazz orchestra of (mostly) Turkish musicians. Also on stage was an orchestra with a large number of foreign musicians, conducted by the saxophonist and former Bilgi University jazz mentor Ricky Ford. The two ‘Titans’ did not, of course, clash: they harmonised within disharmony (the kind of jazz being played was mostly atonal). It was the most fascinating musical experience I have had for a long time, and I would love to hear a recording. (Hint!) Mr Perret, a highly original voice in Turkish jazz, is always well worth hearing. On this occasion he will be accompanied by guitarist Timuçin Şahin and percussionist Volkan Ergen. (For more on Ali Perret, visit his website.)
Saturday December 14
ECE GÖKSU SINGS THE BEATLES
Ece Göksu is one of Turkey’s up-and-coming jazz vocalists. A native of Ankara, she sang in the Ankara State Opera and Ballet Children’s Chorus. After training as a pianist at the Hacettepe University State Conservatoire, in 2002 she moved to Istanbul, where she received further instruction in piano playing at the Mimar Sinan University State Conservatoire. It was while at university in Ankara that she began to take an interest in jazz, and formed her first group. In 2007 she won a Fulbright Scholarship, which allowed her to receive lessons in jazz vocal at William Paterson University in New Jersey; there, she was taught by Nancy Marano, Cecil Bridgewater, Mulgrew Miller and others, meanwhile taking private lessons from Roberta Gambarini and Jay Clayton.
Currently residing partly in New York and partly in Istanbul, she has taken part in festivals in the United States, Budapest and Dubai as well as in Turkey. In 2014 ‘Slow, Hot Wind’, an album of jazz classics featuring her along with Neşet Ruacan and Volkan Hürsever, was released. ‘Live in Assos’, meanwhile, appeared on March 1 this year; accompanying her on this latter album are trumpeter İmer Demirer and guitarist Eylül Biçer.
Monday, December 16
BORA ÇELİKLER TRIO
Guitarist Bora Çeliker, who is also a singer, is both a highly experienced performer of mainstream jazz and blues, and a gifted improviser. At university in Ankara, he founded blues groups by the name of ‘The Crawling Snakes’, ‘The Jukes’ and ‘The King Bees’. Having up to that time played mainly blues, in 1999 he launched out into jazz in a group headed by Janusz Szprot, a Polish musician who had come to Ankara to head up the Jazz Department of Bilkent University. Two years later, in 2001, he started playing in the Alan Ginter Quartet with the legendary Turkish pianist, saxophonist and composer Tuna Ötenel, and that same year began a two-year stint as presenter of the ‘Blues Machine’ programme on 92.3 Radio Kozmos in Istanbul. In 2005, he played with the guitarist Sarp Maden as the opening act at a Jethro Tull concert in Istanbul’s Harbiye Open-Air Theatre. Bora Çeliker, who carried out postgraduate studies in Performance at the Bilgi University Music Department, has in the past played with a number of leading Turkish jazz musicians including Nilüfer Verdi, Neşet Ruacan, Cem Aksel, Erdal Akyol, Burak Bedikyan, Kağan Yıldız, Ferit Odman, İmer Demirer and Selim Selçuk, as well as with former Bilgi University jazz mentor Ricky Ford.
Thursday December 19
SARP MADEN 5
Sarp Maden is one of Turkey’s finest jazz guitarists and composers. He has his own unique style that combines outlandish chords, atonal sweetness, sudden swoops and agonised gut wrenching (his name translates as ‘precipitous metal’). In my review of a concert involving him that I attended in January 2019, when he joined forces with Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon at the Touché Club in the Zorlu Centre, I wrote the following:
Even when Sarp is playing a slow, floating melody in a high register, his liquid, light-filled tone always has a wistful edge to it – a tortured timbre if ever there was one. And, of course, the atonal arpeggio outbursts are ineffably Scorpionic in their asperity (guess what sign he is?) – hunks of screaming metal hurtle towards you like out-of-control motorbikes cartwheeling through the air as they spin off the race track; indeed, you almost have to duck.
The next occasion was in September 2021, when he gathered together the members of his ertswhile group ‘Quartet Muartet’ – pianist Genco Arı, bassist Alp Ersönmez and drummer Volkan Öktem – at a concert in a former shoe factory in Beykoz that I described as ‘inspirational’.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
