Alexandra Ivanoff

The Count Basie Orchestra, led by Dennis Mackrel, presented the opening concert of the 20th Akbank Jazz Festival on Sept. 23 at the Lütfi Kırdar Convention Center. İstanbul's Akbank Art Center is celebrating the 20th year of presenting its jazz festival, and this year offers a grand total of 68 events.

They range from big-name bands, such as Count Basie and Sun Ra, to films that feature jazz and even casual jazz brunches. In addition, there will be oddities like T-shirt and record label design workshops and, believe it or not, a jazz and chocolate pig-out with a designer chef at the helm. Stretching their horizons further, there will be a panel to focus on dance -- a first for the festival -- integrating jazz music and movement. "One, two; one, two, three, four" counted down the Count Basie Orchestra's leader, Denis Mackrel, and listeners were immediately thrown back in time to the glorious Swing Era, as the band plunged into the incredibly rich arrangements that defined decades of American jazz. This was the festival's opening concert on Sept. 23 in Lütfi Kırdar Convention Center. Count Basie's legend lives on with this band, and some of its current members actually played with him. I must admit, I was expecting something a bit musty and slow, designed for the senior set, but I was very wrong. This band was hip and sparkling as they totally infused this timeless music with modern energy, and the audience was happily snapping its fingers along with the music.
Mackrel told us about the gifted arrangers who set this music on paper for posterity: Frank Foster, Ernie Williams, Eddie Durham and Neal Hefti. The latter's "Li'l Darlin'" exemplified what Mackrel described as "their trademark of subtlety." Indeed, this down tempo tune's exceptionally wide wave of delayed syncopation is a classic of the kind of phlegmatic approach that signaled the next generation's genre of ice cube-cool jazz. More subtlety continued with mellifluous solos by saxophonists Marshall McDonald and Doug Lawrence; but the most subtle of all was pianist Tony Suggs' exquisite minimalism. He only played the bare essentials, strikingly well-chosen and, as a result, totally swinging.

John Surman's 'St. John Passion'

It had all the earmarks of a Bach Passion or a sacred Cantata: the drama, the recitative, the aria and the chorus's reflections and exclamations, all with an underlying tragic transparency. And in the most perfect of venues: Aya İrini. British composer/saxophonist John Surman's sublime original music was the festival's program for Sept. 24, with Surman himself on soprano and baritone saxes and the Trans4mation String Quartet and bassist Chris Laurence.

His sophisticated combination of classical stylings and jazz improvisation often showed an English countryside folk flavor that had a tinge of melancholy. But that convention was mixed with plenty of unconventionality, especially where his sax solos became whole-tone explorations, the bass' expressive and sometimes explosive responses, or the semi-organized chaos of his "Hubbub," which recalled the glorious traffic jam of Gershwin's "An American in Paris."

He also gleefully tipped his hat to his exposure in his student days to Turkish music, with "Leylek Gelmiş" (The Stork Has Come), with typically infectious rhythms and intense interwoven motives. His "Stone Flower" exploited a huge stylistic range in addition to painting a vivid picture of a boozy backroom scene with a brilliant sax exegesis that ended without warning.

But many of his compositions on this evening revealed a Baroque predilection: a bass ostinato, a chorale, a soaring aria for the soprano accompanied by throbbing strings, a fugue here and there and improvisations laced with appoggiaturas. From the opening moments of the strings' spooky overture, his music vividly captured a feeling of theatrical drama, articulating a single voice's expostulation and its immediate sensory reply within the emotional harmonic setting. Though it stands beautifully on its own, Surman's music, I imagined, might have included a giant pipe organ in that reverberant and ancient church, if only as a mightier sonic complement to St. John's blazing saxophone.

Paganini potpourri

Nineteenth century virtuoso violinist Niccolo Paganini wrote a suite of 24 Caprices for solo violin that are classic bravura showstoppers. The newly formed Paganini Trio of violinist Atilla Aldemir, pianist Sabri Tuluğ Tırpan and percussionist Burhan Öçal took some of it and arranged it for themselves, and included the oud, the bağlama and percussion instruments. For this concert in Aya İrini on Sept. 25, I suspect the reputation of Öçal's celebrated creative projects was the more powerful magnet, rather than Paganini, whose music decidedly doesn't fall into the jazz category. It was an interesting experiment but one that only partly succeeded in its attempts to form a new hybrid identity.

Taking the most famous theme, that of Caprice No. 24 (used by Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Fazıl Say), Tırpan's ambient noodlings, Öçal's oscillating oud and Aldemir's velvety viola stretched it into their own distinctive overture. They ran a nice gamut of stylistic approaches including Fats Waller, Latin, Gospel, Vince Guaraldi and their own. At best, they used Paganini's speed to their advantage as a joy ride; at worst, adding an inflexible pulse to the melody's need for give-and-take caused it to feel square.

The problem of balance continually dogged my satisfaction. The amplification system, from where I sat, favored the low end of the spectrum so that the drum and piano completely drowned out the violinist. Because I couldn't hear what Aldemir was doing much of the time, I lost the essence and the thrill of Paganini's music. Friends who sat in the balcony reported that they heard the violin and drum but not the piano. So why use amplification at all? I've heard small ensembles perform in Aya İrini acoustically many times and witnessed perfect balance. Without microphones and an engineer in control, musicians themselves instinctively regulate their own balance with each other.