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Ahmet Kadri Rizeli:
Kemençe is my first love
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A master of Turkish classical music and an established kemençe virtuoso, Ahmet Kadri Rizeli, best-known for his series of albums performing Turkish classical music, Ottoman music and songs dedicated to Atatürk, released his newest album, titled "Jazz Alla Turca," in which he fuses kemençe and jazz music.
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The album is the outcome of a project which Rizeli has been planning for a long time. "While trying to see what we can do with the kemençe, we experimented a lot with my friends. These experiments go back 15 or 16 years even! Once, Nail [Yavuzoğlu] and I worked on Turkish folksongs sung with jazz melodies with a woman on stage. Probably this stayed somewhere in our minds," Rizeli says during an interview with Sunday's Zaman, adding that before deciding on jazz, he toyed with other ideas, such as pop and symphonic music, before finally deciding on jazz. While giving information about the structure of the album, Rizeli explains that they first tried to combine the rhythmic structure of jazz and Turkish music during the improvisations. "We pushed the boundaries of kemençe performance and using the various makams [Turkish musical scales providing a framework for improvisation] of Turkish music we produced different sounds and tones," the veteran performer elaborates. "Actually, I have accompanied many other music styles with my kemençe. I have performed in a lot of famous artists' classical, pop, symphony and folk music albums. I have worked in every area that the kemençe can perform," he continues, adding that he does not regard any musical style as being superior to others, listening to all of them. "But the place of our classical Turkish music is always different, of course. In order to perform it, you have to love it and listen to it a lot. From good performers and good singers one can learn this music well. We used to listen to the radio a lot in the olden days." The album includes a lullaby, two jazz standards, two folksongs and five compositions from Yavuzoğlu, who also arranged all the music on the album. "In any case, we were going to record a lullaby. I wanted it especially. Perhaps it is related to the first melodies I heard from my mother. We had to perform jazz standards and we picked two that could go along with the kemençe," Rizeli says about the songs. He underlines that he wanted to see what he could do with his kemençe and push the boundaries. "The kemençe is an instrument that draws attention abroad as well. The sound and the way we play the instrument grabs people's attention," he says, adding that once they were performing with a baroque orchestra and at the end, a member of the audience came and tried to see if the kemençe had a microphone in it. Rizeli says that music is a lifestyle. "The kemençe is my first love. For 30 years, it has never left me and I have always gone after it. One should go after his love and I will continue to the end," he adds. Following his new album, Rizeli is going to release another album again under the Sony Music label, focusing on two historical musicians. "Ali Ufki and Kantemiroğlu lived in the 16th and 17th centuries and they are the first names who wrote out music in Western-style musical orthography. They were both accepted to the Ottoman porte; one was Polish and the other was a Moldavian prince," Rizeli explains.
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RUMEYSA KIGER
İSTANBUL
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