İlhan Erşahin

İlhan Erşahin is a Swedish-Turkish musician and bar owner. Raised in Stockholm, he has been based in New York City since 1990. As a musician, Erşahin has performed and recorded with various musicians as well as his own projects/bands, Wax Poetic, Love Trio, Our Theory, I Led Three Lives, Wonderland and Istanbul Sessions. Most of those bands formed or sparked because of Nublu, the club he opened on Avenue C on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2002. The club was then on the cusp of intensive gentrification. It became a hub for musicians and DJs. Being a club in Manhattan, the music of Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil also became part of the Nublu mix, and the club became well known for its Wednesday night Forro in the Dark Brazilian sessions. Key to the scene was the creator of Conduction, Butch Morris, long a downtown fixture. Erşahin became part of different Morris projects in the late 90s. When Nublu began, they devised a new project that would apply Morris's Conduction methods to the Nublu sensibility. The result was a new direction for Morris; within the context of The Nublu Orchestra he began incorporating more beats and electronica into his sound. The ensemble became a big part of the club's identity. Erşahin's family were not musicians, but Stockholm is a long-established jazz and music center and his elder brother and sisters brought home records that exposed him to the music of his generation, from rock to jazz to bossa nova and world music. When he was 14, Erşahin bought a reggae compilation album featuring the work of pioneering Jamaican DJ/toaster, U-Roy. The thrill of the sound confirmed his direction as a musician. This early passion led to Erşahin eventually recording with U Roy, on the Love Trio in Dub album. Throughout his teens, Erşahin expanded his musical horizons, turning on to the more marginal sounds of punk, hiphop, reggae and dub. As Erşahin began to teach himself to play saxophone in his teens, he knew that in order to accomplish his dreams, he had to move to the United States. Arriving in the United States in his late teens, he enrolled briefly at Berklee School of Music in Boston in 1986. By the early 1990s, Erşahin was living in the East Village, then still a hub of underground creativity. During his first ten years in the city, Erşahin studied with sax masters Joe Lovano and John Purcell, and honed his jazz skills playing at various clubs with musicians like legendary trumpeter Eddie Henderson, Larry Grenadier, Wallace Rooney, Kevin Hays, Ben Allison, Jeff Ballard, Cindy Blackman and many more. Throughout the decade, Erşahin worked at the jazz club Sweet Basil, where he formed a band that played for Sunday brunch. Erşahin gained experience by leading both a trio and a quartet at Sweet Basil and began performing in international jazz festivals. In 2002, Erşahin opened the Club Nublu on Avenue C. Nublu is regarded as the last hold-out of the free-wheeling spirit that the Lower East Side was known for, pre-gentrification. More than simply a club, it has become known round the world as a workshop and breeding-ground for musicians interested in trans-cultural, uncharted and multi-disciplinary music. While performing his Saturday brunch sets at Sweet Basil, performing modern jazz, Erşahin attracted the attention of a small independent label in San Francisco called Golden Horn and recorded two albums for them. His first record was called "Our Song," (1997) and featured Eddie Henderson, Doug Weiss, Jon Davis and Kenny Wollesen. ("Our Song" was originally released in Turkey as "She Said.") Erşahin's second release, "Home," (1998) was a trio album featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Kenny Wollesen. His sound was described by critics as "post-bop," and he was praised for his original compositions. The cosmopolitan, edgy ambiance of late 1990s New York reoriented Erşahin's creativity. In 2000, he released two albums with a new approach. On "Virgo," he worked with voice and words in a new way, by adding the political hip-hop poet, Saul Williams to the mix of drummer Brian Blade, pianist Jon Davis, bass player Larry Grenadier and Val Jeanty, a vocalist and electronic sample player. In late 1990, the first phase of what would become a long-running project, "Wax Poetic," was also released on a deal with Atlantic Records. The band had developed playing at Lower East Side after-hours joints, notably the long-running Save the Robots on Avenue B. The first Wax Poetic album showcased Erşahin's new direction, featuring spoken word and trip hop techniques. Norah Jones was the band's lead singer for two years and her first released recorded song was "Angels," on Wax Poetic's first self-titled record. Initially released on Atlantic Records in 2000, it was re-issued on Nublu Records in 2013. Other musicians on that record were Arto Tuncboyaciyan, Marlon Browden, Eddie Henderson, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Guyora Kats. Its sound is a snapshot of downtown NYC at that time, and the video features the band in iconic Lower East Side locations such as Tompkins Square Park. Released two years after the opening of the Nublu club, "Wax Poetic Nublu Sessions," 2004, was equally a time capsule of the energy of the club's live shows and jams. This incarnation of Wax Poetic had a strong spread of voices, including Norah Jones, soul-jazz performer, N'Dea Davenport, Saul Williams, Marla Turner, and Turkish singer Nil Karaibrahimgil. Erşahin delved more specifically into the modal textures of Turkish music in his atmospheric album "Harikalar Diyari (Wonderland)" in 2002. Wonderland also features the sound of Hüsnü Şenlendirici, a third generation Turkish clarinet virtuoso. This record was a particularly important release in Turkey, as it featured four then unknown up and coming artists who went on to become famous: Hüsnü Şenlendirici and vocalists Nil Karaibrahimgil, Bora Uzer and Dilara Sakpinar, who was 14 at the time of the recording. Its blend of traditional 'world music' with electronica and dance beats, was new in Turkey and made the record extremely successful and influential. To capture the sound of his creative Nublu community, Erşahin founded Nublu Records in 2005. Among their first releases were three releases under the name Wax Poetic; however, in that period, the band was not active and Erşahin adopted the name for his experiments with local musicians in different countries. The result was a conceptual trilogy: "Copenhagen" (2006), "Brasil" (2007) and "Istanbul"(2007.) The next Wax Poetic release, "On A Ride," (2012) was an encounter between Erşahin and Swedish pop producer Klas Wikberg. In 2013, Wax Poetic released "Tonight," an album of remixes by Nouvelle Vague and Rob Garza from Thievery Corporation; and Erşahin started yet another version of Wax Poetic, working with producer Gus Oberg, who produced the last two albums by the band, The Strokes. Erşahin released two albums as part of the Love Trio, together with Californian bassist Jesse Murphy (who went on to play with The Brazilian Girls,) and drummer Kenny Wollesen who plays with Tom Waits and John Zorn, among many others. The improvisational trio gave Erşahin the opportunity to explore his roots in reggae and dub, along with turntablism and the new electronica, which dub had inspired in a generation, mixed with dance music. They released two albums on Nublu Records, "Love Trio" (2003) featuring contributions from Erşahin's longtime partner, legendary trumpeter Eddie Henderson, vocalist Marla Turner, Kenny Wollesen, Brazilian Girls bass player Jesse Murphy and DJ Logic; and "Love Trio in Dub with U-Roy," (2006.) The voices of The Brazilian Girls' Sabina Sciubba and Marla Turner are featured on this album as well. Also in 2006, Erşahin played in and produced the Nublu Orchestra album under the direction of Butch Morris. As Morris resided on nearby East 7th Street, Nublu became not just a welcoming but a convenient laboratory for the creator of the Conduction sound. From the club's opening