This review appears in the January 2012 issue of The New York City Jazz Record.
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Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Sessions
Night Rider (Nublu)
By David R. Adler
As founder of the club Nublu, tenor saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin has had a notable impact on live music in New York, increasing the creative traffic between jazz improvisers, beatmakers, world music bands and avant-gardists of all stripes. Ersahin’s reach also extends to Istanbul and the nightspot Nublu Istanbul@Babylon, where jazz and club music come into contact with the sounds of Turkey and the surrounding region. The quartet project Istanbul Sessions is solidly representative of these efforts. It features the leader with Alp Ersönmez on electric bass, Izzet Kizil on percussion and Turgut Alp Bekoğlu on drums.
Ersahin has a rich and full tenor tone and good instincts as a soloist, but he’s not pushing to be the sole focus of these nine tracks. He plays through a variety of electronic effects, distorting and manipulating his sound and rendering the horn as an element in a sonic mosaic. Thanks to smart post-production and mixing, each instrument yields unexpected sounds, different ones on nearly every track. Yet the group’s previous effort, Istanbul Sessions with Erik Truffaz, featuring the renowned “nu-jazz” trumpeter, had a more alluring tonal and harmonic palette, and stronger compositions.
At a tight 40 minutes, however, Night Rider is a good listen, with vibrant beats and subtle interlocking patterns from Bekoğlu on full kit, punctuated by Kizil’s dumbek and frame drums. Ersönmez combines low bass lines with a more guitaristic and polyphonic approach, overdubbing a slick wah-wah part on the opening “Etnik” and starting his own composition “Gece Inerken” (“night descending”) with beautiful rubato fingerstyle passages. “One Zero” growls with distortion, while “Hadi Gel Artik” skips along with poppy syncopation and “Huzur” (“peace”) sounds like spacey but energized indie-rock. Is it Turkish? Somehow, yes, but this is music that wears its cosmopolitanism on its sleeve.
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