The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with pianist and composer Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol. His new album, 7 Shades of Melancholia, featuring trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, soprano saxophonist Lihi Haruvi-Means, bassist James Heazlewood-Dale, and George Lernis on drums and gong, will be released 25 April via DÜNYA. A link to Sanlıkol’s website can be found at the end of this article.
Jazz musicians are endlessly called ‘inventive,’ but Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol is actually an inventor. No, really: on 26 March, at Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory (where he teaches), Sanlıkol will premiere his Renaissance 17, a digital microtonal keyboard with 17 keys per octave.
Beyond its heady cultural context, it’s simply a lovely, brain-tickling sound to behold: check out how it seems to burrow into the centre of ‘Hüseyni Jam’, a skittering track from 7 Shades of Melancholia, in a way a typical keyboard can’t.
Microtones also function metaphorically, for how Sanlıkol views the nuances of respectful cultural exchange: internalisation, to him, is the ultimate bulwark against stereotype or reduction.
“It is jazz language, and it is uptempo, and it is improvisation,” he contends. “But I think it somehow satisfies all of these, you know, sensitivities and sensibilities that I have developed.”
Read on to learn how he applied this to 7 Shades of Melancholia, and where that somber title came from.
UK Jazz News: You’ve spoken often about the cultural history of melancholia in Turkey. Given your long history exploring your Turkish heritage, what made now the time to fully address this aspect of it?
Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol: I’ll be honest: it’s not like I had the concept first. I actually had the music first. But because all the pieces clearly had that Turkish connection, to varying degrees, I was thinking about how to frame all that.
I started thinking about how melancholia is something that has stayed with me since my childhood, and it does have very deep roots in the region. So, it was more like looking at the music from a distance, and seeing an emotional thread that connects all of it.
Otherwise, it really is quite varied, if you think about it musically. Some of the pieces are very compositionally complex, and have intricate designs. Then, others are more like tunes – quite straightforward.
Growing up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Turkey was not technologically anywhere near some of the more advanced European countries, or the United States. I grew up with just one channel: state TV, all black and white.
I remember when my mom would take me to pray at Sufi saints’ tombs. They were all kind of broken. They were not restored. They had this sense of melancholia. So, I identified that feeling, even from my childhood, very easily.
UKJN: It’s interesting thinking about how certain emotional essences linger in cultural memory for eons. Traditional Korean music has been described to me almost as a traumatised cry, given the embattled history of the peninsula.
MAS: Yeah, totally. I’m very familiar with the abstract nature of what you’re talking about.
I think that it’s possible to find a similar sense of melancholia in Greece and in other neighbouring countries. It’s not specific to Turkey, but because I grew up there, in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, in the ways it existed when I was a kid, it was very melancholic.
But more importantly, it’s an emotion that goes back thousands of years. The ancient Greeks talked about it. And like I noted in my liner notes, folk songs are a great testimony to it. So many of the folk songs in the region are very upbeat, and people happily get up to dance to them, but the lyrics, quite often, will be sad, talking about some emotional thing.
UKJN: What made these particular musicians ideal to transmit this cultural and emotional information?
MAS: First of all, George and I are both Cypriots. Yes, I grew up in Turkey, but both my parents are from the island of Cyprus. So, while I have my connection to the island of Cyprus through Turkey, George has his connection to Cyprus by Greece.
In many ways, he’s an ideal partner when it comes to music; not only jazz, but in traditional musics from the region too.
James was my student at NEC when he was doing his masters, and we’ve been playing ever since. I saw something in him, and I got him in my trio with George, so he’s come a long way. He just finished his PhD.; his expertise is in video game musicology. He’s a very smart person, extremely sensitive and sensible on the bass, and he has been ideal [on the instrument] for me over the past seven years.
Lihi is also from the Middle East. I’ve known her for a long time. I was looking for a very tender soprano saxophone timbre – and, as you know, on the album, there’s only soprano saxophone. I knew that she was the person who had that tone, working with her in large ensemble projects and [beyond].
With Ingrid, it’s the exact same thing, and it’s not just sound, but style. For this music, I was always hearing a sound and approach that’s like Kenny Wheeler, who I grew up with.
I listened to a lot of Wheeler and classic ECM in my late teens, early 20s, and the album isn’t necessarily calling for someone to just bring the bebop or hard bop language, but something that I identify with the ECM sound. That kind of mood. I knew that Ingrid had that tone and sensibility.
I’m so grateful that she somehow trusted me, because we had never played together before. I wrote her a cold email and she responded, and she listened to some of the examples I shared, and said that my music is gorgeous and she liked it.
Some of the pieces she played on were really demanding and unusual, but she nailed it in every possible aspect: improv, sound, timbre, approach, drama.
UKJN: Can you talk more about how Turkish musical concepts refract through their Western counterparts – such as the makam, or mode?
MAS: That’s the key to this album. I think one big takeaway this album presents is that there’s no one correct way of dealing with that, whether it’s in the context of concert music or pop music [even]. When you bring influence from another culture, there are many ways of dealing with it.
I’m telling you this after at least 25 years of fully coexisting in these two different worlds. I’m not even counting my early years of growing up in Turkey, because I was not conscious of my own culture at the time. But over the past 25 years, I’ve become much more aware and conscious.
The real trick is that if the composer, the practitioner, has fully internalised these languages, then I think these varying degrees of interpretation somehow become more refined, less reductive. It doesn’t approximate or appropriate.
Even when you’re doing something that’s far more simplistic, like the tune that opens up the album, ‘A Children’s Song’ – I mean, it doesn’t get more naïve than that.
That being said, it was harder to pull that one off, because I had that idea for years, decades, and I just couldn’t get it right. Somehow, I was trying to do more with it than required, trying to get grooves in there to make it this, make it that.
Then, somehow, one day, with the intuition I’ve internalised, I was like, Wait a second – the way Trane did it! That’s the way I’ve got to go for it!
On the extreme opposite, the piece ‘Hüseyni Jam’ is a folk melody which I confronted in a more spiritual realm, like a Sufi song. When I delve into the sacred stuff, I’m even more careful. But knowing the Bektashi Sufi brotherhood and how they incorporate folk music into their rituals, I was like, You know what? I’m going to treat this one just like Art Tatum treated ‘Dark Eyes’. A simple folk song, but jamming over it in the spirit of jazz.
