All five of the performers at this concert have extensive experience of playing improvised music. In my blog on a concert at the Bova Club on February 18, at which all the musicians who will be playing on April 25 were present except drummer Şenol Küçükyıldırım, I said the following:
As the trumpet/saxophone dialogue progressed it was Meriç, rather than İmer, who let rip, and in doing so contributed a great deal towards the success of the evening in terms of musical satisfaction. It is precisely this lack of restraint that can give improvised music, at its best, a ‘straight-from-the-heart’ quality that is extremely difficult to replicate in a scripted performance. This is not to say, of course, that İmer, whose playing is invariably tasteful, was anything less than magnificent. … A significant part of the ensemble’s success was due to the underpinning provided for the soloists by Ali Perret and Naci Pişmişoğlu. When I say that atonal music is a tightrope with gaps in it, I mean that it is all too easy for the accompaniment to steer the music towards a particular scale, thus predicating a dominant tonality, rather than allowing the other musicians to arrive at a communally-agreed aesthetic that is not based on any scale whatsoever. The fact that these gaps in the tightrope were never, for one moment, fallen into is a tribute to the musical nous and long experience of Messrs Perret and Pişmişoğlu.’
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
