Listening for Jazz in Post-Armistice Istanbul

Abstract

On the evening of 14 July 2013, while living in Istanbul, I walked down Kumbaracı Yokuşu away from the sounds of protest to the city's contemporary art museum. As part of the Istanbul Jazz Festival lineup, the Istanbul Modern screened director Batu Akyol's documentary Türkiye'de Caz (Jazz in Turkey), which gathers interviews with Turkish jazz musicians intimate with the country's jazz scene from the 1940s onward. The emergence of a jazz ecology of musician-composers, entrepreneurs, jazz promoters, and collectors runs in tandem with the history of the Turkish Republic, beginning in the years leading up to and including World War I and gaining momentum in the 1930s and 1940s. The documentary does not present a hermetically sealed nationalist understanding of Turkish jazz, but rather affirms a vibrant celebration of the music. To date, Istanbul's arts organizations host international jazz summer festivals and yearlong jazz programs. There are jazz clubs, radio programs, and magazines that highlight international and local events. Turkish university music departments offer jazz studies and formal performance opportunities for musicians. But there are also informal venues, such as the streets, cafes, and bookstores. While out late in Istanbul when I lived there, I would frequently listen to a lone street musician stationed outside of Narmanlı Han playing “My Funny Valentine” on his trumpet. On more recent trips, I have come across a jazz band playing Dixieland tunes along İstiklal Avenue. This is all to say that Istanbul is a city where one can listen to jazz standards, Dixieland, bebop, cool, and fusion as well as take lindy hop dance lessons from a local group. Although Akyol's documentary uncovers a jazz soundtrack dating to the 1930s that is composed of personal stories of local musicians becoming jazzers, the post-Armistice period (1918–23) remains mute, mired in what I consider to be a standard version of the city's origin story of jazz. I want to consider the case of jazz in post-Armistice Istanbul to think about how master narratives erase some sounds and privilege others.