The Bova Jazz Club, towards the Taksim end of İstiklal Caddesi, regularly hosts some of Turkey’s finest jazz musicians. They organise events every day of the month, and are especially strong on modern and improvised jazz. The performance space is small, to say the least, and advance booking is advised (sitting on a crowded staircase isn’t particularly comfortable). The staff are friendly and helpful, even in the face of unreasonable requests. Here are six events not to miss.
MONDAY, JUNE 8
Volkan Polat & Barış Doğukan Yazıcı & Enver Muhamedi & Berkay Sümbül
Volkan Polat studied classical guitar at the Istanbul Pera Fine Arts Lycée before entering the Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatoire, where he specialised in Turkish classical music (including a course in improvisation using makam – the scales used in Turkish music), jazz and Western classical music. While at university, he also took lessons in jazz guitar and harmony from Kamil Özler, Neşet Ruacan and Donovan Mixon. In 2012, he won First Prize in the Nardis Jazz Club’s Young Jazz Guitarists Competition. These days, in addition to playing with various Turkish and foreign musicians at jazz clubs in Istanbul, he also teaches. His fellow musicians on June 8 are trumpet-player Barış Doğukan Yazıcı, double-bass-player Enver Muhamedi and drummer Berkay Sümbül.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10
Ercüment Orkut Trio
Ercüment Orkut is a pianist, composer and arranger who is definitely worth listening to. Born in İstanbul in 1984, he received many years of training in piano, composition and conducting at the Mimar Sinan University State Conservatoire before graduating in 2005. In addition, he has in the past taken lessons in jazz piano from Aydın Esen (in 2004), as well as from Dan Zemelman and Peter Horvath (in San Francisco in 2007). At the Nomme Jazz Festival’s competition for young jazz pianists in Tallinn, Estonia in 2009, he represented Turkey as a pianist, and was placed second by the jury and first by popular acclaim. That same year, he also completed a master’s degree in composing and conducting at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatoire. He has also played at major events such as the İstanbul İKSV and Akbank Jazz Festivals, and has undertaken projects with many of Turkey’s leading jazz musicians. Ercüment Orkut has created the music for a number of films and TV programmes. His first solo album, Low Profile, was released by Kalan Müzik in 2015; his second album, Persona, has recently been released by Lin Records.
THURSDAY, JUNE 11
Sarp Maden 4 Sarp Maden is one of Turkey’s finest jazz guitarists and composers, with his own unique style that combines outlandish chords, atonal sweetness and sudden swoops with a good deal of agonised gut wrenching thrown in (his name translates as ‘precipitous metal’). I first reviewed him in June 2018, when he played with pianist Çağrı Sertel at the İKSV building in Şişhane as part of the İKSV Jazz Festival. The next concert involving him that I attended was in January of the following year, when he joined forces with the Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon at the Touché Club in the Zorlu Center. In my review of that concert, I wrote: ‘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 third 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’.
MONDAY, JUNE 15
Tamer Temel 5
Saxophonist and composer Tamer Temel, born in Istanbul in 1975, began playing jazz while reading Economics at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir. Having been awarded a scholarship during the 2005 European Jazz Festival, he attended the Siena Master Class summer course in Italy, receiving further tuition from the distinguished saxophonist Mark Turner. He released his first album, Barcelona, in 2010, and this was followed in 2013 by Bir Kedi Kara (‘A Cat Black’). Serbest Düşüş (‘Free Fall’), his most recent album, was released at the end of 2016. Other musicians who have appeared on his albums include guitarists Dave Allen and Eylül Biçer, bassists Masa Kamaguchi and Volkan Topakoğlu, double-bass player Matt Hall, drummers Marc Miralta, Cem Aksel and Volkan Öktem, pianist Serkan Özyılmaz and vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen. Tamer Temel performs with a number of leading Turkish musicians, as well as with ‘Flapper Swing’, a group that keeps alive the musical atmosphere of the roaring 1920s. He currently teaches jazz at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul). His style is modern, and in my opinion musically very satisfying.
TUESDAY, JUNE 16
Cenk Erdoğan Trio
Guitarist, composer and arranger Cenk Erdoğan, who plays the fretless guitar, has developed a technique that is influenced by traditional Turkish stringed instruments such as the bağlama and the tanbur. Born in Istanbul in 1979, he studied Composition at Bilgi University (Istanbul), graduating in 2001. There, he studied guitar technique and self-expression with Kamil Özler, Neşet Ruacan and Şevket Akıncı, meanwhile receiving tuition in composition and musical arrangement from Aydın Esen, Ali Perret, Can Kozlu, Kamil Özler and Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris. His playing style and his compositions, in which he combines jazz harmonies with traditional Turkish melodies, have attracted international attention: in 2004 he was invited to demonstrate his skills at the Berklee College of Music and the Queens College of Music. In 2009, he won a prize for the music he wrote for the film Issız Adam; he also writes music for television series. The recordings he has so far produced are İle (2008), Kavis (2011), Kara Kutu (2014), Fermata (2018) and Lahza II (2019).
TUESDAY, JUNE 23
Engin Recepoğulları & Can Çankaya & Kağan Yıldız & Alican Bekoğlu
Tenor saxophonist Engin Recepoğulları, born in Izmir in 1980, decided to become a jazz musician at a young age. He began playing the saxophone in his school orchestra, and took lessons in music and improvisation from Ömer Gidel and Ricky Ford. In 2006, having performed in Claudio Fasoli and Antonio Zambrini’s ‘Open Jazz Orchestra’ at the Izmir European Jazz Festival, he was awarded a scholarship by the Izmir Culture and Arts Foundation to study in Siena, Italy, with Claudio Fasoli, Pietro Tonolo and other famous names in Italian jazz. He then moved to Istanbul, where he began to play with important Turkish jazz musicians such as Kerem Görsev, Önder Focan, Ferit Odman, Ediz Hafızoğlu, Sarp Maden, Alp Ersönmez, Cem Tuncer, Ozan Musluoğlu, Sibel Köse, Jef Giansily, Cem Aksel, Erkan Oğur and İmer Demirer. He also performed with famous foreign musicians such as Ricky Ford, Kurt Elling, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, Erik Truffaz, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Angelika Niescier and Jim Rotondi. Engin Recepoğulları is a member of Istanbul Superband, Boğaziçi Big Band and the TRT Istanbul Radio Light Music and Jazz Orchestra. On June 23 he is performing with pianist Can Çankaya, double bass-player Kağan Yıldız and drummer Alican Bekoğlu.
