Mehmet Ali Sanlikol “7 Shades of Melancholia”

I don’t know anything quite like Mehmet Ali Sanlikol’s Turko-jazz playing. (I invented the term.) I am glad it’s here for us to enjoy.

Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, 7 Shades of Melancholia (LP, CD, on Dünya)

Turkish-American pianist Mehmet Ali Sanlikol begins the notes to his new session, 7 Shades of Melancholia, with a gripe aimed at musical “tourists” who play what is to them exotic music without understanding the depths of the culture they are dipping their toes into. His path has been different. The 50-year-old Sanlikol was born in Istanbul and studied classical piano with his mother. By the time he was in high school he was playing with progressive rock bands. (Poor mom.) He subsequently became fascinated by jazz and eventually enrolled at Boston’s Berklee School of Music. By the late ’90s he had become a “dedicated jazz composer/pianist” who didn’t feel much interest in Turkish music. In a talk, I heard Sanlikol say that a chance hearing of a traditional Turkish song on the radio led to a new creative orientation. What followed was “a decade of intense study of a variety of Turkish and related musics.” At this point, he has played “hundreds” of traditional Turkish music concerts as well as jazz sets that seem imbued with both traditions.

In his notes to the album, Sanlikol asserts that Turks, if not unusually melancholy, have a long cultural history filled with  meditations on gloom. (Perhaps Brits as well: I am thinking of Robert Burton’s almost endless 17th-century tract, The Anatomy of Melancholy.) On 7 Shades, Sanlikol plays piano, a microtonal keyboard of his design called the Renaissance 17, and sings. Here is his translation of a chorus in “Nikriz semai”: “If you were to touch the string/ of the inner instrument/ Once it’s out of tune, even after/ a thousand compliments/ it cannot be fixed.” Moral: don’t mess with people’s inner instruments. Depressing as the lyric sounds, the piece begins jauntily, with a perky phrase on solo piano, which is reiterated over the drums and bass of James Heazlewood-Dale and George Lernis. Then Sanlikol sings in Turkish, hitting on notes and tones that Sarah Vaughan never would have thought of, drawing out long lines and occasionally holding notes that waver in pitch via an exaggerated vibrato. At times, he almost barks the beginning of a line but eventually he improvises in falsetto. Turkish bop, I would call it.

The session begins with “A Children’s Song.” The pianist begins the traditional tune with a rhythmically intriguing introduction that is followed by the innocent-sounding melody. Surprisingly, in his notes Sanlikol writes that he had trouble envisioning this performance. He couldn’t come up with an arrangement that satisfied him, but then he remembered the simplicity of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” which seems to me an unlikely influence. After McCoy Tyner’s intro, Coltrane just beats out the melody almost as written, but with a deliberately swaying motion. Sanlikol’s ‘favorite thing’ begins with a repeated phrase that moves from right to left hand. Eventually, the pianist bursts out of this composed section with intense, wide-ranging improvisations that supply complicated figures and Tatum-like downward scales until he returns to the memorable melody. Which still sounds innocent.

The earliest written piece is entitled simply “My Blues,” which includes the always welcome trumpet of Ingrid Jensen. The other horn on the session is soprano saxophonist Lihi Haruvi-Means, whose solo begins with a series of chirps and restless, half-swallowed phrases. Jensen is warmer: the piece seems to bring out the whole range of her trumpet, agitated phrases that disappear into the treble, only to return to more peaceful melancholy.

“Sedd-I Araban Sarki” features the tones and microtones of Sanlikol’s Renaissance 17, which he is able to match in pitches with his vocal. It’s a virtuoso achievement, a rendition of a poem that asks a sultan (real or figurative) “whose beloved are you.” Gershwin fans like myself will hear “Summertime” in the initial phrase. “Hüseyni Jam” is a cheerful uptempo piece that swings from start to finish. I don’t know anything quite like Sanlikol’s Turko-jazz playing. (I invented the term.) I am glad it’s here for us to enjoy. 

from https://artsfuse.org