by Paul Klemperer

This summer I spent most of August and part of September in Turkey, meeting and playing with a variety of musicians, as well as gaping at the products of a culture over 3000 years old. I tried to bone up on my history (Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Seljuks, Ottomans) but finally left the history books in my bag under my dirty clothes and just wandered around. I met so many people and experienced such a variety of new things that of course it is difficult to sum up the adventure, but one thing struck me as it relates to music, which I will try to convey here.

Contemporary Turkish musicians are exploring and defining new musical directions. This is both objectively true in the music they create, and subjectively true in their self-conscious desire to break out of old definitions. Talking with some of these players, I was immediately struck by how much American musicians are grappling with the same artistic and cultural issues. Here's a sampling of the issues we discussed:

How do you create your own sound while being faithful to the musical traditions you grew up in?

How do you explore new ideas without watering down established ways of playing?

For an American musician this might mean taking elements of jazz into your playing, and blending them with other ideas. The risk is that the result will not gel, and that the "jazzy" elements will sound lame and artificial (like a rock drummer trying to play bebop). For a Turkish musician this might mean using traditional scales (such as lydian or phrygian) over a contemporary pop song chord structure. The risk is that the result will be creatively limited and less melodically expressive than traditional Turkish music, which doesn't use chord progressions. For both the American and Turkish musician in these examples there is no set answer: You just experiment and learn from the result.

How do you develop your own sound in a musical marketplace dominated on the one hand by traditional genres with strict stylistic criteria and on the other hand contemporary genres dominated by generic pop criteria?

How can you have artistic freedom and still make a living?

While it is historically true that European and Turkish audiences tend to be more musically educated and more open to experimental ideas than American audiences, the musicians I talked to over there were struggling with a shrinking marketplace for creative music. Most of the gigs are either for traditional types of music, supported by tourists and/or traditional demographic groups, or youth-oriented dance venues. Over here an American musician might have to make his nut (the minimum necessary for survival) playing country or top-40 gigs. Over there a Turkish musician might have to make his nut playing loud behind a whirling dervish at a tourist restaurant, or guitar behind a Whitney Houston knock-off. The similarities are clear.

There are also some positive similarities. American creative musicians draw strength and inspiration from America's heritage of ethnic diversity. Some of the most exciting musical groups today freely explore jazz, rock, rap, Latin, klezmer and bluegrass, just to name a few common musical genres. Anyone who has seen Brave Combo can appreciate what homegrown Texas weirdos can accomplish. Similarly, in Turkey there are many groups combining elements of rap, trance, jazz, rock, Latin, and traditional Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, even Afghani music. On a rhythmic level alone, the experimental blending of Latin and Middle Eastern rhythmic patterns has created some great music.

The similarities in creative attitude between American and Turkish musicians is, I think, twofold: Faced with a global music marketplace, musicians are trying to create experimental hybrids as a way of bringing people together, honoring their various traditions, and all that good philosophical stuff. It's easy to rip off someone's musical culture, sample a shakuhachi or a ney to get that mystical, ethereal flute sound and then just slap it on top of a hiphop beat. Then wait for the mailbox money to trickle in. But there are a lot of Americans and Turks trying to rise above that, which leads to the other similarity: the colonial heritage.

Both the U.S. and Turkey have complicated colonial legacies. Of course Turkey's stretches further back, but the point is that each country represents a land mass that includes a variety of colonized peoples, with different ethnic and cultural traditions. In each country there are still political, economic and historical issues of colonialism that haven't been fully resolved. The musical traditions of each country reflect this colonial heritage. Thus, American musicians inherit issues pertaining to racism, slavery, and cultural misunderstanding embedded in musical styles like jazz, blues, salsa and tejano. Turkish musicians face similar issues, complicated by the fact that Turkey is the bridge between Europe and the Middle East.

I could go on, especially with the prospect of an American war with Iraq hanging over our heads (Turkish musicians are very nervous; they would rather play beautiful songs than have a ringside seat for WW III). But I'll stop with an optimistic thought. There are a lot of creative musicians in Turkey, and they are very curious about what like-minded musicians are doing over here. They want to share their music, and use it as a tool for cultural understanding, education, and development, and they appreciate the fact that there are artists over here on the same wavelength. So let's jam.