Gökhan Surer live session
The 'Anadolu Psych' feature I made for MusicMap opened up a whole world of music I did not know existed. Turkey, it turns out, had one of the finest, most interesting scenes that you have never heard of, with the musical characters to match.
After immersing myself in the music of Anatolia, I was lucky enough to catch a performance by Gökhan Surer in Barcelona, a Turkish jazz pianist who showed me that psych rock was not the only music this fascinating country could fuse with its own. Jazz and Anatolian folk, it turns out, go rather well together too.
After the gig, I invited Gökhan to our Barcelona studio for a quick chat and the chance to hear him play us a couple of tracks from his recent EP, Chimera. It's an album that sees Gökhan and his band give a selection of folk songs and original compositions a Turkish harmonic twist, using the ney, saz, microtones, insane time signatures – the lot.
He spoke to me about his musical education in Istanbul, his relatively late discovery of the piano and the huge potential that mixing jazz and Turkish folk offers, while also waxing lyrical about some of the great Turkish jazz and psych rock artists who have influenced his sound.