ISCMS 2010 gets grooves going

So with the help of the founders of Creative Music Studio in New York, several İstanbul musicians made Sıral’s dream a reality. The new İsmet Sıral Creative Music Studio (ISCMS) opened the first three-day international, intercultural music school in İstanbul in 2006. This year, it expanded to 11 days, is under the aegis of İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture, and offers a jam-packed schedule of workshops, concerts and unusual outdoor projects. It opened on July 29 and continues through Aug. 8. The lineup of over 60 superb improvisational musicians from around the globe reads like a “Who’s Who” in the field.

Hip-hop and much more

Based in Santralİstanbul in Eyüp this year, the ISCMS is now in full swing, and I attended a concert on July 31, and two workshops and a rehearsal on Aug. 1. The concert, “JazzHopRevolution,” involved hip-hop artist Rahman Jamaal, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Tani Tabbal. I walked in thinking “hip-hop’s not my thing, so if I don’t like it I can leave.” I stayed and loved it. It also introduced me to the underlying philosophy of the ISCMS: Open your mind to limitless possibilities.

Bassist Lindberg, one of the long-time New York CMS members, saw Jamaal rapping in a film in 2005 and was so impressed by his musicality that he contacted him to work together. Since 2007, they have fused hip-hop, jazz and free-form improv that is immensely entertaining and strikingly original. Jamaal talks a lot about combating fear in our lives. “It keeps us from going where we want to go,” he says. Lindberg’s accompaniment to Jamaal’s vocalism of urban poetry and sung lines was another example of fearlessness: His richly sonorous playing is innovative, witty and rhythmically robust.

I usually feel that so much free-form jazz strives to be as raucous and chaotic as possible -- but these three revolutionized my thinking. Free-form, at its best, is like a human conversation with sensitivity, humor, energy, wisdom and silence. More of this revelation was to come the next day.

Enlightening workshops

On Sunday, I stepped into two workshops. The first was Steve Gorn’s class on North Indian ragas, using Indian bamboo flutes and singing. His detailed explanation of the raga tradition was fascinating. “There are thousands of ragas,” he said, “and they are used for specific times of day, for devotional moments and playful moments. Masters specialize in 25-30 of them and they can go on for hours. I once went to a concert in Bombay that lasted 72 hours.”

The techniques of playing versus singing ragas are different. “Singing a raga involves highly nuanced sliding within the scale tones, and a flute cannot do that because of a register break,” he explains. “Also, a sitar cannot sustain a note, while a voice or a flute can.” The exact tuning of certain scale tones is considered very critical. Gorn’s attempt at performing the second tone of the scale (Re) exactly right was met with a warning from an Indian master: “If you play it wrong, you’ll be reborn as a donkey!”

And listening to the overtones of one note over a period of time is an inner exploration. “The properties of Re, for example, involve pitch [shruti] and taste [ras],” he explains. “Just sitting on one note, letting the harmonics nest in the atmosphere, allows it to radiate deeper and deeper.”

With my mind in a relaxed, non-linear mode, I then went to Lindberg’s workshop on improvisation, where he had a small orchestra of players invent as they went along. “It behooves an artist to truly open up to try anything; there are always layers underneath we can discover,” Lindberg advised. A cello begins, a clarinet joins, a drumbeat starts, a voice sustains a distant note. All respond to each other in unexpected ways, creating an energized texture, full of mounting swells and decrescendos, until it finds its own natural end.

“Now what kind of music was that?” asks Lindberg. The students were hard-pressed to come up with terms, but some suggested “streaming,” or loftier nomenclature. “Why do people need labels for everything?” he queried. Improvisation, it seems, is an ephemeral thing. “The only problem is that you’ll never hear it [exactly the same] again,” Lindberg jokes. But the experience of going fearlessly into the unknown, for both player and listener, is one of being suspended and surprised, and refreshingly free of cliché.

‘GO: Organic Orchestra’ performing tonight

“Gotta be tight and ready! OK? Let’s go, you guys, ready? You’ve got three days to get it together, and I wanna hear the right chords. No faking!” Conductor Adam Rudolph nudges and cajoles the 20-piece ensemble in rehearsal for Wednesday night’s concert. His three-page score, which is the same for each musician, is line drawings and graphs with squiggles and circles and a system of hand signals for cueing. His take-no-prisoners style is getting results. “When I say quiet, I mean quiet!” He taps gently on a drum-skin. “That’s quiet. If you can’t hear the soloist, you’re too loud.”

And the results are astonishing. The seeming chaos of improvised solos and grooves (“This one I call #5, the ‘Cool Groove’”), not arranged in traditional simultaneous lines but in rhythm blocks, sounds actually very organized. And exciting. All grooves were glowing. “Tight!” he demands of the players. “Don’t freak out, just enjoy!”