Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Session

Bio

Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Session is one of the most interesting contamination projects in the contemporary musical panorama. It was founded by saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin and has the goal of exploring Turkish sonorities from Ilhan’s childhood mixing them with jazz music, typical of his mature production and formation.

Ersahin, a cosmopolitan personality, was born in Sweden to a Turkish father and a Swedish mother and in 1990 he moved to New York to study jazz saxophone. In 2002, Ilhan opened his own club: Noblu, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The club started to become a meeting point for musicians who were interested in contamination and were ready to take a chance to create something new. Noblu attracted artists like Herbie Hancock, David Byrne, Sun Ra Orchestra and became also Ersahin’s record label.

In 2008, Ilhan Ersahin started the Istanbul sessions project, which was born from the will to « create another project settled in Instanbul», after the creation of the previous Wonderland project. The group is composed of Ilhan Ersahin, Alp Ersonmes, a bassist who collaborated with major contemporary Turkish pop stars, Turgut Bekoglu, a drummer who played with famous Turkish singers like Sezen Aksu and Ajda Pekkan, and Izzet Kizil, percussionist known for several collaborations both live and in the studio. The group presents itself as a meeting point between the Turkish musical scene and the western-American one, thanks to a sound that mixes rock, dance, and instrumental music.

Ersahin said about the group: «We wanted to take instrumental music towards an audience that dances around, without necessarily doing it with electronics but with an authentic sound». Until now, Instanbul sessions produced four albums: Night Rider (2011), Istanbul Underground (2016), Solar Plexus (2018), and their most recent Bin Zamanlar Simdi (2020). In November 2018, they performed in Italy at BASE Milano as part of JAZZMI where they engaged the audience with a high-quality level performance.

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