Cool and Partly Notated

Working pretty intensely these two weeks, as much with recordings as with heavy texts, and only after a day of starkly contrasting beauty and frustrations did I remember that I'm the one who has to announce my own Spring Break, so that's what I'm going to try to do this week - that is to say, nothing much. But I did get a lot done - came up with some interesting angles on what I've been gathering, wrote a few dozen pages of the dissertation (things that need to be said even before analyzing all the performances, framing...), bought and partly read a few good books on Turkish music theory (in Turkish, of course), devised a novel way of notating taksim improvisations on a structural level (see clouds in above picture), saw and recorded more concerts, met yet more fine musicians ready to help out with my work... all in all the project is coming together promisingly, I think.

So, leisure... Friday night played ud and sometimes frame drum with a group of (mostly non-Turkish, all inexplicably francophone) 'classical Turkish' musicians in Molly's café near Galata Tower (the tall, red-eyed thing in the picture) - whole lot of fun, and we even played a couple of pieces I wrote myself. Molly's off to the Ukraine next week, but I think we're going to try to make it a regular Friday night gig. I'm hoping to write something new for us during the 'break' - that's play time, for me. I'm a little torn between trying to write and play in a style approaching 'authentic Turkish' and just leaning into whatever feels good - it's all in 'legitimate makam,' but sounds a little funny to the locals (at least I've got it to the point where they've mostly stopped saying, 'oh... sounds Arab' - nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've been shooting for just 'sounds good'). I usually say, 'it's California makam' - gets a laugh and you can't really argue with it.

Meanwhile, my Mevlevi ayin-playing group has got a gig in May (if you can call it a 'gig' - we'll be playing for a 'whirling dervish' ceremony), and I've got to see if I can borrow the appropriate robe and tall woolen hat from someone. Going to play Nayi Dede Salih Efendi's Acemaşiran ayin-i şerif - good stuff.

Yep, looking forward to resuming the work, actually, but this week my aim is strictly vegetable.

Hoping you and yours are well. Oh, here's a song and video someone (someone? Why, it was Ms. Erica Ruhl, lately of Berlin) shared with me and and I just can't let go of it - maybe you'll like it, too: Oren Lavie's "Her Morning Elegance" (it'll start playing the tune immediately, but hit the stop button and scroll down to the get it with the video - it's worth it). And that reminds me... I recently came across the website of graphic artist and photographer Ms. S. Zaza, whose depictions of Istanbul are better than I'll ever be able to share with you, myself... go wander around there a bit to see what it looks like, here.

A thought goes out to my beloved aunt Norma, who last week moved along into the next thing after life, having filled this one up rather nicely. Olev ha sholem. Enjoy it now, kids!

Further Springiness

Happy Passover and Easter, for those celebrating them, and happy springtime for all of us (in the northern hemisphere)!

I got to a seder the first night of Passover after fellow Fulbright-Hays researcher Josh W. found a connection to the Chabadniks here in İstanbul through someone he knows in Saint Louis. They're a bit underground; figuratively because they don't have any official recognition by the state and are apparently none too tight with the local tribesfolk, and literally as the very nice dining hall (with industrial kitchen, two bathrooms, small library, etc.) are in a basement apartment with a bank vault door that only opens a third of full - kosher little bunker. Started at 9pm and for those of you who haven't been, this is a four or five hour sort of ritual supper - I had to leave around 1am to catch the last boat back to Asia, but ended up sharing a taxi with a lady and her little son who live close-by. Finished the ritual drinking and reading at home alone, but it was a nice trip overall. I can't stand eating most fish, the less so when it's been gefilted, but my perfunctory nibble had a very complex taste and I imagine a fish-loving person would've thought the rebbetsin's treatment of it sublime - I liked her chicken soup, anyway, and praise all the work she had to do to get us 40 adults and 15 or so kids through the evening, working like a coast guard galley hand all night and four kids of her own there, to boot. Thanks and chag sameach Reb and Mrs. Mendy.

Spring comes ambivalent recently, the weather as like to close as open you day to day and day to night. Yesterday a freezing wind down from the Ukraine brought the mufflers and beanies back just as I was fixing to burn my socks and tie on sandals. People (that is men) tell me 'in İstanbul you can't trust the women or the weather.' I have no close experience with the former, but I'm about ready for some sun with more confidence in its gait.

My recordings are coming along well; I'm now up to 44 of them and feel I'll be able to relax that part of the hunt after I've got four or five more key musicians on video. Looks as though I'll both have and need fewer than originally planned (90), which is fine, though I may keep going since it's by far the most fun part of my labors.

Not laboring, of course, brings its own pleasures as well, and aside from attending some fine concerts I've spent time recently with fellow researcher/musicians Tristan D., Nicholas E., and Nicholas R. (lately of Brussels, Paris and Montréal respectively), the latter having found a few regular restaurant gigs, asked if I'd like to play ud with him in one; he heard I also write music in makam (that is, in a traditional Turkish style) and we played through a handful of pieces in my apartment, which he liked and is practicing for the gigs. Nice! Tristan and I spent a day visiting ud makers and ended up running into Sagra and Pedro, two Spaniards who'd come all the way from Córdoba just to buy an ud from the first luthier they found on the Internet (Faruk Türünz, rightly accounted one of the best Turkish luthiers and a very nice fellow) - turns out Tristan and I are both fluent in Spanish and we took them around to see 'our' luthier Mustafa Copçuoğlu (another of the three or four 'best' in Turkey, though he was out of town that day at an ud conference in Afyon) and ud master Necati Çelik. A strange and pleasant series of coincidences was all that, and I imagine all the more so for Sagra (a bandurria player) and Pedro (her patient boyfriend), who'd never been here before, don't speak any Turkish or English and are complete novices to the instrument they'd come to seek.

Also finally met up with Jaynie Aydın, PhD, folklorist, anthropolgist, belly dance teacher extraordinaire and Santa Barbara friend of friends who lives in İzmir, eight hours south of here - we've been Facebook pals since our mutual friends virtually introduced us and we get along like folk (in a good way, that is). She's leading a tour of İstanbul sponsored by the Smithsonian, and we hope we'll get to dine together again while she's up here. She and her husband Cenk have very kindly invited me stay with them to extend my research to İzmir (where Cenk is a grad student in music at Ege University), and I'm looking forward to hosting her SB cousin Kathryn here for a couple of days next month.

So, as the young ones are saying, 'it's all good.'

And that's about it for now. I'll leave you with a poem that spilled out during a recently aesthetically escalating e-mail exchange with fellow traveler Rami G., who's coming in June and for whom I am having an ud made by way of luthier Ali Nişadır. The poem, untitled but amounting to an Ode to an Ud Yet Unbuilt, was just a fancy way of conveying 'we got the details ironed out and I've ordered the thing,' but I'm pretty happy with the way it came out:

Ancestral tulip blooms in wood and silk

Singing from beyond the gathered border of this world.

Who plants in spring, among the buzzing renaissance, defies he gifts abundant?

Not greed but lifely come and go he celebrates, and cerebrating plans

Not more for more but more for yes! requests.

This ape so wise to know his season and the next

In summer reaps reward surpassing reason.

Upon his lap will sit his lover and her song

For celebration foolish and forever!