İsmet Sıral Creative Music Studio planting seeds for music of the future

More than 60 prominent musicians, like Karl Berger, John Zorn, Oliver Lake, Trilok Gurtu, Adam Rudolph, Erkan Oğur and Ömer Faruk Tekbilek, have gathered in İstanbul for the same project: the İsmet Sıral Creative Music Studio (ISCMS).

This is the second time the project is being held. Events got under way on Thursday and will continue until Aug. 8, with a wide range of activities across 41 events in total. The project started at Santral İstanbul and will continue with concerts, workshops, seminars and conferences in various venues such as the Sepetçiler Kasrı, Heybeliada and Eminönü.

The ISCMS is the culmination of many years of effort. “Actually, I was thinking of filming a documentary in 2001,” recalls Dost Kip, the project director of ISCMS and son of late jazz musician Ali Kayral Kip, in an interview with Today’s Zaman. “My father gave me the idea to work on the life story of [the late Turkish jazz musician] İsmet Sıral because I had the opportunity to know him for 22 years until he passed away in 1987. My father had started to play in an orchestra for the first time, and the professional orchestra that İsmet Sıral conducted was my father’s orchestra.” Sıral was one of the founders of the first professional jazz orchestra in Turkey, and he also gave lessons and concerts at the Creative Music Studio (CMS) in Woodstock, New York, from 1978 to 1980.

When Kip finally decided to make the documentary on Sıral, a multi-instrumentalist of winds including saxophone, flute and ney (reed flute), he researched Sıral’s life and contacted Sıral’s friends and colleagues; however, the boundaries of his research exceeded beyond his original expectations. “The content of the documentary grew so much that we thought it could either be made into a series or [we could] resuscitate the CMS,” which had ceased in 1984, explains Kip. “[Thus we would] realize Sıral’s dream, which was to found an international music school,” he says. “These two options had the same objective so we put these two names together and ISCMS came to life.”

As details of Sıral’s experiences in New York emerged, Kip and his friends learned new aspects of Sıral’s personality years after his death. “He used to say that he had been in Woodstock, but he never said what happened there, nor boasted about it,” says Kip. “During my research I found out that Sıral gave lessons and concerts at the CMS and he left his mark there.” For Kip, this proved Siral’s humble personality. “He was modest, deep and principled, and he was interested in the Sufi philosophy.”

In 2006, the first ISCMS was realized, but on a rather smaller scale: Three days instead of 11, without any thematic concerts and with only 10 workshops instead of this year’s 41. “This is not a commercial project … so we didn’t market it. But we thought that it would be appropriate for the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture.”

“We really worked hard on it, but every step you take is determined by your budget, and we had to work with a very small one. There’s a great gap between the content of the project and the budget,” says well-known composer Garo Mafyan, the music director of İstanbul 2010 ECOC Agency.

Sıral in Woodstock

“In 2004, Kip came to New York and interviewed the CMS office,” recalls Karl Berger, the founder of CMS. “He already had it in mind to do this and he asked us whether we’d like to participate.”

Sıral’s influence had been deep and intense according indications by CMS musicians. “He was there for almost two years,” says Berger. “He came to Woodstock to teach and we conducted orchestras together. The concept of the music studio was that the teachers and the students -- who were also advanced musicians -- played in orchestras together. We were interested in bringing together orchestras from different traditions, improvising and playing together. So for those two years we held quite a few performances in New York and also in Woodstock, and we have about six or seven recordings that we’re now digitalizing. Together we formed a group called ‘Five Feelings’ because it was from five different traditions. So we had a pretty intense musical communication,” Berger says.

“I met Sıral in 1979, and I was invited to teach at the CMS in Woodstock,” says Adam Rudolph, percussionist and composer who will be directing the concert “İstanbul’u Çalıyoruz” (We’re Playing İstanbul) on Thursday at the Eminönü overpass. “İsmet and Ahmet Hacı Tekbilek were already there when we started, and we immediately became very good friends. We would teach during the day and in the night after dinner, İsmet and Hacı and myself, we would play music all night until the sun came up -- played every night for almost two months. We would exchange ideas, İsmet would bring some Turkish folk melodies and we would play my rhythm ideas and compositions and we would play and really communicate through the music.”

Why so late?

“Sıral is gaining fame more than ever these days,” says Mafyan, referring to the fact that such significant figures of Turkish music were not well known in Turkey. “But what is more important is that these international figures are coming to İstanbul to share something with Turkish musicians. They’re going to share the treasures of Sıral. He had once dreamt of this. They are going to share their creativity. This is very important.”

Yet, it cannot be denied that this is a belated effort, so one wonders why Turkish music and why many Turkish musicians -- despite their mastery -- are not recognized internationally. “It’s because of the Turkish people themselves,” notes Berger. “Turkish musicians who came to New York told me that Turkish music was not of any interest. They thought that Indian music was more important, African music, European music was more important. They did not believe in their own music. İsmet was probably the first one who really understood that Turkish music is really powerful because it has all the influences from all these different places. But it was exactly for that same reason that Turkish musicians in New York did not believe that Turkish music was important, as they thought it’s just a mix of other [countries’] music. But that was the power of it.”

For Mafyan, Turkish society is forgetful of its own history and musicians. “Every day there’s a new [singer] on the TV,” says Mafyan. “And the next day you forget him. However, there is more enduring music but unfortunately it is not among the average Turkish listeners’ fields of interest: They seek the popular ones and they confuse a singer with a songwriter. For this reason, they always forget. They forgot Onno [Tunç], they forgot [Münir Nurettin] Selçuk, they forgot Uzay [Heparı]. We have to make them live on.”

“We’re used to making ‘copy and paste’ jobs,” says Kip. “Nevertheless, it’s a duty for this country to create something totally unique. Something which is not just an imitation of anything else but one which carries the values and heritage of this land with its prosperous and deep culture.”

In this respect, both the organizers and artists taking part in the ISCMS want this project to be a firm start for future projects and become more long term. “It’s like a seed,” says Rudolph. “When we played in Woodstock we played music together, it was a manifestation of something in that moment of creativity, but it was also a seed. Now the seed has grown and we’ve manifested something, but we hope that from this tree today more seeds will be planted. It’s very important what we share. The seed is something that goes beyond the music because somebody who attends the concert could be motivated and inspired to do something even more creative, so this is what we hope for as artists.”

“There’s a great opportunity here,” says Kip. “All the artists say that one of the best places to contemplate music is İstanbul. If we lose this opportunity it will be a pity. This is a powerful project, and it should be maintained. We’ve now begun a very serious adventure, that’s for sure, but if this cannot be maintained over coming years, the achievements of this year will not mean a thing.”

Today at ISCMS

8:30 p.m. public concert “Aabi”

Featuring ISCMS musicians

Location: İskele meydanı (ferry pier square), Heybeliada

ISCMS stars including Ömer Faruk Tekbilek, Adam Rudolph, Hacı Ahmet Tekbilek and Steve Gorn will present an improvised session rooted in jazz, paying a musical tribute to the late saxophonist, ney player, orchestra conductor and composer İsmet Sıral, or “İsmet abi,” as he was compassionately known among his colleagues, in this admission-free concert.