I don’t know all that much about Turkish jazz-funk music, but the good thing about an album like this is that you don’t really need to know the stories behind the (in this case proggy-soul) bands before they went a whole different direction, broke up, or descended into relative obscurity. The songs stand on their own without context. Or maybe the lack of context just makes the whole listening experience better, by casting that sense of mystery and myth that eludes some bands you already “know.”
What I can tell you about this compilation is that it was curated by Roskow Gretschman, a German hip-hop/club music DJ associated with the Jazzanova project. It’s fitting that the songs stray toward jazz throughout the album much more than they approach full-fledged funk. Needless to say, the choices are diverse and flat-out fun.
Ferdi Özbeğen’s “Köprüden Geçti Gelin” has been the track I’ve returned to most often just because it was sampled for an Action Bronson song and I have a friend who’s obsessed with the food-obsessed rapper. The song contains a wonderful hi-hat riding drum arrangement, and it’s easy to understand why a rap producer would want to chop it up. Erkin Koray is the name on here you may actually have heard of. His album Elektronik Türküler came to my attention years ago, because it is a masterpiece of Turkish-folk-infused psychedelic prog music. I’m pretty sure his is the only song on the compilation to use a Bağlama.
Besides that, I had to dig for information about each band. Most of them are fronted by percussionists it seems. Aksu Orkestrasi reach toward Sun Ra’s “Space Is The Splace” with “Bermuda Seytan Üçgeni” — opening the song with sounds of the seashore and closing it with crescendoing spacy keyboard jabs. Drummer Erol Pekcan contributes two excellent tracks. The first is a sprawling modal piano-centric jazz number (“Şenlik”) while the second (“Gel Sevgilim”) is more of a traditional call-and-response soul song equipped with a killer horn section. Drummer Okay Temiz probably contributes the most well-blended fusion of Western soul-jazz and Turkish folk for his track, while another drummer, Durul Gence, leads his group through “Hilal,” which is apparently a famous Ottoman military march jazzed up, disassembled, and put back together again. Gence, having worked with experimental-leaning artist Sonny Sharrock, frames the album’s context for those who need that kind of thing. This isn’t traditional jazz or traditional funk music. It’s just a pretty damn great collection. Check out Volume 2 here.