Hijazz: Jazz Meets Classical Turkish Music

Sunday, December 18, 2011 in Ethno Jazz, Hijazz, Jazz, Turkish Classical Music, Turkish Music

I write some articles about Jazz recently. Today, I will review a Jazz album combined with Turkish Classical Music elements. There are so many ethno jazz albums which combines eastern music and Jazz. Although many of them are average, there some perfect arranged albums including Hijazz Project. Everybody knows some eastern albums such as Mozart Oriental, Beatles A la Turca, Bach a L'oriental. Those albums and similar ones are good albums technically but they are not as polyphonic as Hijazz Project’s album. If an archivist is reading article, I suggest this album extremely. It is not and average west meets east synthesis album. It is a masterpiece. Official MySpace page of Hijazz will be given in the end of the article. You can listen to some previews. There is an Arabic band name is Hijazz Band. Hijazz Band and Hijazz Project are different bands. Please, pay attention for confusion. Everybody knows more about jazz. Let’s get closely acquainted with Turkish Classical Music and let’s see how Turkish Music makes Jazz interesting and likeable. Turkish Classical Music consists of various forms, notations and scales known as Makam. Actually Hijazz name is a word game comes from Hedjaz Makam. A wide range of instruments such as oud, the qanun, tanbur, nay, kemenche, double drum are used in the music. I don’t write all instruments in Turkish Classical Music, otherwise this article will be extremely long. Some western style of instruments like violin, cello, harp, clarinet, and flute are used too.

Hijazz is a project and the project consists of some Turkish artists. Artist and performers are well-known, reputed and virtuous artists. Erkan Ogur, Aziz Senol Filiz, Birol Yayla and Alper Berksu are some of them. You could check their names from Google to see their musical background. Hijazz blends jazz with this wide range of notation system in the album. We will not only listen Jazz with Turkish music elements, we will also listen some composition from Mozart, Bach and Hasselmans.

Performers’ own compositions, Classical Music arrangements, and Classical Turkish Music composers’ music were performed by merging those music styles. The album consists of 2 CD’s and its track list is given below. You could see some information written in song names.

CD1

Hijazz
Turku (Turkish folk songs are named in Turku)
Lom
Alfo La Source (Alphonse Hasselmans)
Air (Johann Sebastian Bach)
Lau date Dominium (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Yuzundur Cihani Munevver Eden (music, Ismail Dede Efendi, intro, Itri)

CD2

Sohbet-i Visal
Nikriz Dirto (Tamburi Cemil Bey)
Bab-i Esrar
Segah (Tamburi Buyuk Osman Efendi)
Saba Pesrevi (Nayi Osman Dede)
Mindos

 All songs’ musical background was arranged successfully. There are some vocals in songs. Especially, vocal in Saba Pesrevi (CD2) contains elements from Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism. The song named in Segah also contains some Sufism elements. The album is a perfect album gathering the most famous performers. If you are an archivist, don’t lose Hijazz.

Main performers of Hijazz Project Birol Yayla and Senol Filiz perform mystical music with guitar and nay. Their group name is Yansimalar. I can suggest their Bab-i Esrar album as well.

Please find their official MySpace link to listen to Hijazz Project’s music.

http://www.myspace.com/projecthijazz

Bye for now