Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC, Nat Hentoff Songs of Lost Freedom According to a decree of June 7, 1981, the citizens have to stand at attention when they see the head of state, General Kenan Evren. Not...
...Their album is Songs of Freedom from Turkey/Behind the Iron Bars (Folkways Records FSS 37705, 43 West 61st Street, New York, NY 10023...
...In Poland, there are maybe 10,000...
...But Moe Asch operates on the principle that if anyone has something he or she feels must be said, and there's no other recording home for it, well, Moe will try to find a place in his catalogue...
...M Choice Cuts Although there are now annual Women's Jazz Festivals and a few regularly working all-female combos, it's still hard for a woman to move into the big leagues if she plays a horn or, for that matter, drums or bass...
...The three now work for a democratic Turkey from Germany...
...Yet, although Ameling—the Dutch singer with the radiant soprano voice—is entirely within the European classical lineage, her directness of emotion and supple dynamics are not all that different from those of Jane Ira Bloom...
...Why is so little attention paid in the American press to this model of a classic totalitarian state...
...The undulating rhythms, and particularly the warm, urgent textures and shadings of Demirag's voice, make the songs sound like music for what one young woman I know calls "deep love...
...They must keep following General Kenan Evren with their heads and eyes so long as his noble rear stays in their view...
...Phillips 6514 199...
...professors suspected of dissent are thrown out of the universities (more than 100 in one week in February of this year), and independent newspapers are terminated...
...As if the odds weren't long enough, Jane Ira Bloom decided to break through decades of macho jazz horn playing by concentrating on the soprano saxophone...
...Actually," he says, "the figure is closer to 100,000...
...Enja has become one of the two or three leading jazz labels in the world in terms of quality of performance and the scope of its authentically original jazz figures on the ascendant...
...From exile, telling in music of the plague of spiders that has come upon their land and of its roots in the past, are Melike Demirag, a twenty-seven-year-old singer and film actress, and Sanar Yurdatapan, a forty-one-year-old composer...
...Not entirely still, for they must also turn their faces toward him, as though he were the sun...
...It is important for us that they begin to find out...
...What can the sales be...
...All labor unions but the "sweetheart" ones have been shut down...
...It figures that Moses Asch, who is Folkways Records, would release this set in the United States...
...For an especially luminous illustration of Ameling's lyrical intimacy, there is her new collection of Ravel, Dupac, and Debussy with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Edo de Waart...
...There has to be, of course, some musical merit to the message (though Moe has sometimes given houseroom to some sounds that can only be called music because there's nothing else they can be called...
...This is Turkey, taken over by a military coup in September 1980...
...What makes their album so singularly compelling is that it is enraging, poignant, and yet always sensuous...
...That is music for unrestrained, albeit consensual, sex...
...Where, oh where, is Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...We have a desire, a need, for freedom and democracy that most Americans know nothing about...
...No color pictures of peasant children eviscerated by vengeful government troops...
...The instrument is not easy to keep in tune, and it usually takes a long, caring time to get the sound of the long horn soaring and lyrical rather than querulous...
...And they must salute him, remaining in that position until he has passed by...
...Meanwhile, there are singers and musicians, exiled from Turkey, who hold to the stubborn notion that somehow music can penetrate consciousness even when The New York Times and the television networks are not taking care of business...
...My guess is that if Elly Ameling were ever to hear Jane Ira Bloom's pungent jazz on the soprano, her reaction might be like that of the traveler-in-fantasy in Ravel's She-herazade: "A language unknown and charming, like music out of tune...
...With Bloom is a truly big-league rhythm section: bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Ed Blackwell, and pianist Fred Hersch...
...No arguments in Congress about whether our utterly essential military ally, General Evren, should be held to at least minimal standards of what are quaintly called human rights...
...She has worked in mixed groups (mixed by sex as well as race) and she heads her own unit...
...Nor is the citizens' obligation toward their protector quite finished at that point...
...In this instance, however, the quality of the music is clear...
...Furthermore, after two previous, first-class albums under her name, which she also produced, there is now Mighty Lights (Enja 4044...
...All his work is now banned by the junta, of course, including his love songs, which have no political content at all...
...A Turkish political scientist, Ersan Illal, currently teaching at the New School in New York, tells me that according to official government statistics, there are now 38,000 political prisoners in his country...
...No guerrilla bands detonating the countryside...
...Jane Ira Bloom has made it...
...Hardly anyone else would even consider the possibility...
...But then, love can be distracting, can take one's eyes off General Evren as he passes, so the junta's banishing of the love songs, too, is understandable...
...Turkey is of small interest to the American print and broadcast press because the story lacks immediacy...
...Yurdatapan has been a wide-rangingly successful composer for some twenty-four years, often hitting the charts in Turkey...
...You may not believe it," political scientist Ersan Illal tells me, "but in between the dictators, we had court decisions, based on our constitution then, that go considerably beyond your First Amendment...
...The decree included their eighteen-month-old daughter, who is now a nonperson as well...
...In January 1981, the military dictatorship also stripped Demirag and Yurdatapan of citizenship...
...But the lyrics in the accompanying booklet are about deprivation of soul and body in Turkey, and about the hard struggle in that land to create and protect a constitution that will defend everyone...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
