White (ECM)
Marc Sinan / Oguz Büyükberber
Released May 18, 2018
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
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Marc Sinan’s third ECM release is an evocative duo album with Oğuz Büyükberber which subtly covers a lot of ground. The German-Turkish-Armenian guitarist and the Turkish clarinetist have worked together in many contexts since meeting in Istanbul in 2009 and Büyükberber previously appeared on Hasretim: Journey to Anatolia, released in 2013. The individual musical directions of the two players have effectively converged from opposite poles: Marc was trained as a classical guitarist in the western European tradition, but has increasingly been drawn to improvisation and Turkish material, while Oğuz grew up surrounded by Turkish music, and was originally self-taught before heading for the Amsterdam Conservatory, subsequently making his way as both improviser and composer.
For White, recorded in Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in October 2016 and produced by Manfred Eicher, both musicians provide new music. Sinan’s five-part “Upon Nothingness” includes his musical response to recordings of songs of Armenian prisoners deported to Germany during the First World War. These historic field recordings are woven into the fabric of Sinan’s pieces, which also make liberal use of electronics, blurring the distinction, as he puts it, “between the real and the surreal”. Oğuz Büyükberber also contributes a series of linked pieces, “There, I-V”, which incorporate completely written areas, guided improvisation and free playing.
Sinan and Büyükberber met shortly after the release of Marc’s Fasil album with Julia Hülsmann in 2009, introduced to each other’s music via ECM’s Turkish distributor, Tansu Özyurt. Marc: “Tansu suggested I might like Oğuz’s work, and I did, a lot. His musical approach is both very abstract and very tasteful. So, when I was living in Istanbul for three months in 2012 and had a chance to invite a few musicians for a concert for the Goethe Institute, I contacted him.” That first concert, with Marc, Oğuz and ney player Burcu Karadağ, was based around Sinan’s fragmentation of material by Dimitrie Cantemir, the poet and pioneer in the notating of Ottoman music. Büyükberber continued working with Sinan in contexts including the radio play/audio piece Oksus which Marc describes as “a musical road trip through Uzbekistan”, and the “docufictional” music theatre piece Komitas, about the Armenian genocide, which premiered at Berlin’s Gorki theatre in April 2015. The field recordings heard now on White were deployed also in the Komitas project.
Marc Sinan: “The songs all have a revolutionary background or atmosphere as well as a brokenness that you can sense when you listen to the original recordings. I’m responding to the musical content and the emotional expression in the songs, making audible what they make me feel and sharing my own perception of them by putting them at the core of my compositions.”
Authorship of “Upon Nothingness, White” is co-credited to both musicians. Sinan: “It’s basically a solo composition for guitar written by Oğuz and which I changed so much that we now consider it our linking mutual composition. So, it’s also a gesture, recognising that we are very symbiotic as a duo. As the collaboration has developed we’ve become close friends and have an enormous amount of trust in each other’s musical decisions which is, I think, reflected in the way we play together.” Marc Sinan also acknowledges Büyükberber’s influence in the area of electronics: “The guitar is manipulated most of the time on this recording, and that’s not always audible. What interests me mostly is dissolving the clarity of what is real and what is virtual. This is something I’ve been developing since working with Oğuz, though he has gone much further than me in this regard. He also has a second life as a performer of modular synthesizer, which has become part of our recent concerts.”
Oğuz Büyükberber was playing electronics – inspired by Ligeti, Varese, Messiaen and Stockhausen (“all the old masters”) – before he became a clarinet player and never really stopped, as he says. “I’ve been using live electronics in performance for close to 20 years, and often use it also to expand my palette as a clarinettist – although in my own compositions on White I’m playing acoustically.” Jazz has also been a major inspirational force in his life. In the early 1990s he worked as “simultaneous translator and tour manager” for artists including Cecil Taylor, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach and Steve Lacy. “These masterful musicians shaped the foundation of my perception of music performance in general, whether we call it jazz or not. I’m totally in love with that tradition.” While acknowledging the formative influence of Eric Dolphy as “inevitable” for a bass clarinet player, he also says he has not felt called to be a “flag carrier for jazz or any other genre.” Nonetheless his most recent recording under his own name features deconstructions of Thelonious Monk (Off Monk on the Kabak & Lin label), and some frequent musical partners have included Simon Nabatov, Jim Black and Gerry Hemingway. For a few years Oğuz worked as an assistant to conductor-composer-trumpeter Butch Morris and recalls with pleasure mediating between Morris’s ensemble and a Turkish Sufi group, an experience that could be seen to prefigure some of Marc Sinan’s experiments between the idioms. “I’ve also worked a lot with Greek musicians and players from all over the Balkans. And I’ve been fascinated and influenced by the overlapping musical traditions across the huge geographical area that stretches from Hungary to Iran.”
Track Listing:
1. upon nothingness, yellow (Marc Sinan) 05:19
2. there I (Oğuz Büyükberber) 03:01
3. upon nothingness, blue (Marc Sinan) 07:23
4. there II (Oğuz Büyükberber) 02:35
5. upon nothingness, green (Marc Sinan) 04:49
6. there III (Oğuz Büyükberber) 02:33
7. there IV (Oğuz Büyükberber) 03:50
8. there V (Oğuz Büyükberber) 04:26
9. upon nothingness, white (Marc Sinan, Oğuz Büyükberber) 01:59
10. upon nothingness, red (Marc Sinan) 03:52
Personnel:
Marc Sinan: guitar
Oguz Büyükberber: clarinet
Recorded October 2016, at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Cover Photo: Fotini Potamia
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Review:
Guitarist Marc Sinan, who in the past has combined German, Turkish and Armenian musics, has been collaborating with clarinetist Oguz Büyükberber for about a decade. The pair’s latest work together, White, is split between its “Upon Nothingness” pieces, largely composed by Sinan, and a “There” sequence, written by Büyükberber, each of these being interleaved to create an unfolding conversation. The crackle of vintage 1916 recordings infiltrates the “Upon Nothingness” sections, a series of field recordings that document the folk singing of Armenian prisoners of war. Sinan and Büyükberber engage in a sparse dialogue, the latter issuing some of his darkest, mournful phrases on bass clarinet. The card pack is shuffled with “There I,” these earlier tracks being somewhat brief. Later, they expand, and the “Upon Nothingness” passages seem to be truncated. A mirage of a guitar forest spreads to the horizon on “Upon Nothingness, White,” imprinting a ghostly after-image. The pair’s highly expressive phrases diverge, but periodically arrive at a striking juncture, either by chance or design, their every note and gesture a sonic delicacy.
Martin Longley (DownBeat)
