Sarp Maden is one of Turkey’s finest jazz guitarists and composers, with his own unique style that combines outlandish chords, atonal sweetness, sudden swoops and agonised gut wrenching (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 Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon at the Touché Club in the Zorlu Centre. 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’.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
