Grammy-nominated Turkish composer and musician Mehmet Ali Sanlikol wish to introduce his one-of-a-kind dream instrument. It’s been a long time within the making, and on Wednesday, March 26, his custom-built electrical oud will take the stage with the Dünya Ensemble throughout a free live performance on the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Corridor.
Sanlikol’s singular oud transforms centuries-old Turkish sounds and — when the urge strikes —permits him to unleash his internal rock star.
It began in Istanbul, the place Sanlikol grew up and performed classical piano. However as a teen, he additionally needed to rock. “I used to be actually into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple — bands like that,” Sanlikol mentioned, then paused earlier than including, “Jimi Hendrix, oh my, how did I overlook him?”
He additionally cherished jazz and moved to Boston to review composition at Berklee School of Music in 1993. “After which, surprisingly sufficient, seven years after my arrival in the USA, I rediscovered my roots and began studying Turkish music.”
The musical polymath’s dwelling studio in Belmont is stuffed with Jap and Western devices. Over time, he’s amassed a set that features synthesizers, a child grand, a cream-colored Fender Stratocaster guitar (just like the one Hendrix performed), Turkish flutes, kettle drums and pear-shaped ouds.
“The oud is definitely widespread everywhere in the close to and the Center East,” Sanlikol mentioned. “Greeks, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs — all of us play it.”
His Turkish oud has a protracted, skinny neck and it makes resonant, twangy sound.
“Each my grandmothers performed the oud,” he defined. “Which will have performed a job in me choosing it up.”
Sanlikol recalled how his musician buddies used to ask him to convey his acoustic oud to jazz exhibits. “And really rapidly it grew to become obvious that simply placing a mic in entrance of it was not going to do it,” he mentioned. “Particularly when the drums begin taking part in louder, what occurs is you must flip up the mic, and naturally it begins feeding again.”
So Sanlikol started attempting to find electrical ouds. However he solely discovered examples with rudimentary amplification and nylon strings that, to his ear, sounded horrible. “For somebody who has grown up with what the electrical guitar has achieved, I began pondering, ‘The classical guitar went by a sure transition to get to that time, why not do it with the oud?’ ”
It took 20 years to discover a luthier prepared and capable of tackle the problem. Seems that craftsman was Sanlikol’s pal Mac Ritchey who additionally performs the oud. Collectively, they got down to design and construct a contemporary model of a centuries-old instrument. Sanlikol had gone by the same growth course of after he commissioned a 3D-printed, digital microtonal keyboard.
“Once you’re within the preparation part for this stuff, you possibly can turn into anxious a bit of bit,” Sanlikol mentioned. “You understand, it may be a flop.”
However when the second of reality arrived, Sanlikol picked up the fantastically crafted, steel-stringed oud, and realized, “it was form of meant to be,” he mentioned. “It’s a semi-hollow physique instrument — and it’s nonetheless pear-shaped — however the physique is barely smaller than an acoustic oud.”
This electrical oud seems to be and sounds a bit like an electrical guitar, however its timbre is completely different. The instrument permits Sanlikol to remodel age-old Turkish music modalities, that are complicated methods of scales. “I can discover completely different sonic potentialities, and I nonetheless mix Turkish modes.”
Sanlikol’s nimble fingers flew throughout the electrical oud’s 11 strings (six double, one single) as he demonstrated its cross-cultural versatility. Now, he can channel the spirits of Ottoman Turks alongside along with his rock guitar heroes, like Stevie Ray Vaughn. “In fact, I began exploring some fairly laborious distorted sounds as nicely,” he mentioned with a smile.
Sanlikol was additionally compelled to experiment with the myriad musical languages he has beneath his belt. He filmed a video for a tune he wrote titled “Speak A couple of Turkish Blues.” He mentioned, “I’ve performed the American blues for thus lengthy on the guitar, after which one way or the other it got here out of me.”
As Sanlikol’s blues composition builds to a crescendo, he lets free with blistering, unbridled riffs. “After I flip the distortion on, and I begin happening that wah-wah pedal, I do not really feel like I am 50 — I really feel like I am 15,” he mentioned, laughing. “That’s a very good feeling.”
Lately, the musical explorer started finger-picking his electrical oud in a Bluegrass type. “I’m bringing a brand new sound, a brand new imaginative and prescient — to not simply jazz or the blues — but in addition to live performance music,” he mentioned.
Sanlikol sees himself as a musical translator, and hopes he expands individuals’s appreciation of the musical types he’s been merging for greater than 20 years. He’s internalized international sounds, he mentioned, that may’t be outlined by the oft-used phrase, “East meets West.” For him, “It’s truly not likely a gathering, they’ve met a very long time in the past. Ever since I used to be born, my mom was a classical piano instructor.”
Sanlikol, who’s on school on the New England Conservatory, seems to be ahead to taking audiences on a musical journey by time — from seventeenth century Istanbul to the longer term — with a bit of assist from his electrical oud.
