An angry Turkish jazz musician who relaxes when he beats his drums
In Okay Temiz’s music, rhythmic Turkish folk and gypsy melodies fuse with international jazz. TRT World’s Murat Sofuoglu follows the iconic jazz musician as he marks his 80th birthday. We look back on his exceptional life.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — “Turn up this machine’s volume. It should sound amazing,” Okay Temiz yells to the technicians as he prepares for the concert that will mark his 80th birthday here at Istanbul’s Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall. Temiz could almost be mistaken for a mechanic when he’s onstage, as he tests the sound quality. Yet this highly tactile man has dedicated nearly half a century of his life to becoming one of Turkey’s most renowned jazzmen.
Asked how he feels about his 80th birthday: “Nothing. I feel nothing, I am youthful. I have a childlike spirit.”
Behind him is his “orchestra”, comprised of amateur Turkish players. They will be performing in the second part of Saturday’s concert, and are still trying to find their rhythm as they beat on African drums. Their ages range from 22 to 60. The majority are women. “Don’t talk. You’re breaking my concentration!” he roars to the orchestra, dismantling their chatter during a break. He’s in an angry mood.
“Six minutes left!” his chief assistant warns. Temiz is glancing around anxiously as his nervous assistant whispers “Bismillah” (meaning “In the name of God”) in a soothing tone. A tight circle is forming around him with the musicians who will perform in the first part of the concert — his Oriental Wind band, all professional musicians — like football players huddling around their captain.
Just seconds are left before the concert, and he suddenly disappears. His team looks around anxiously. It turns out Temiz is in the bathroom. His assistant steps in to buy time, telling the audience how the jazz player grew up on a farm. He has just bought a 1950 model Ferguson tractor, she says, out of nostalgia for those days.
The jazzman appears back onstage. With a few quick steps, he is standing with his team. They bow together to the audience. He does not waste any time and starts playing his drums, falling into a trance. This is a drummer who not only plays the drums, but who also leads an orchestra at the same time.
His playing style changes dramatically from one song to the next. Sometimes he majestically hits the drums with his sticks, like a head drummer in the Janissary mehteran bands which accompanied Ottoman-era armies on their military expeditions. Then comes a gentle transition with the ney, an ancient type of reed flute used by sufis, and suddenly his style radically transforms into that of a sufi drummer, softly tapping his drums as if he is afraid of hurting them. And then he transforms into a more typical jazz musician.
When he plays, the 80-year-old embodies different worlds, travelling as fast from one place to another as a sovereign khan, or a Turkic king, of the universe of drums.
He visibly relaxes after he starts to play, taking his son’s photo with his smartphone. Tomi Gunes Temiz, his 22-years-old son, himself a pianist, is playing his keyboard.
“He’s not a normal father,” Tomi Gunes Temiz says. “He is an unusual father because he’s all about being a musician, thinking about music around the clock.”
The young musician is Temiz’s only child, from his Finnish fourth wife, who has travelled from Finland to Turkey to play with the father’s Oriental Wind in order to celebrate his birthday.
A MEMBER OF THE JAZZ FAMILY
This youthful-spirited musician has played with a number of jazz greats. He worked with Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Dexter Gordon, Clark Terry and George Russell, to name a few.
“The family of jazz is something different. You must be honest and natural. As you are. You can not be macho. Even if you do not play well, that honesty is your code,” he says.
In the 1970s, Temiz played with the pioneering American trumpeter Don Cherry and Norwegian double-bassist Arild Andersen at the music festival in Hämeenlinna, Finland, a popular jazz event attended by jazz greats.
There he encountered the famed American jazzmen Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. He was just breaking down his drum pedals and picking up his cymbals as the concert ended.
I heard somebody calling my name, ‘Okay.’ I turned around and what a surprise. It was Sonny Rollins. I had never met Sonny Rollins in my life. But I recognised him as soon as I saw him. A big man with a beard. He called my name. My God! I stood up. He called out Okay again and hugged me.
“‘You played very well man!’ he said. I replied simply ‘Thanks,’ but I was so humbled,’” he said, his eyes lighting up.
A few years later, Temiz had a second similar encounter with Sonny Rollins, who did the same thing again, this time in Stockholm.
THE LOST YEARS
Embarking on an experimental jazz career in the Turkey of the 1950s and 1960s was no easy feat. He spent most of 19 years playing in military clubs and dance halls — performing Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, and Cuban melodies — in Turkey and elsewhere in Europe. Temiz views most of those years as having been wasted, both on a personal level, and for Turkish music more broadly.
“There was not an ardent effort to discover the dynamics of our music, or to modernise it,” he says.
During that era, many casinos and clubs were run by Turkish mafia groups who had a tight grip on controlling which musicians would become famous, and how the music was performed. That created a kind of macho culture in Turkish music, Temiz explains. Male performers sang like female singers, and vice versa.
In addition to the dynamics dominating popular culture, the Turkey of his youth was going through an especially tough period. The new republic tried to create a kind of new identity based on Turkishness, but post-war Turkey struggled to compete with the glorious times of its freshly lost empire.
As the country was tried to recover from its territorial and political losses, nihilistic music reigned. Turkish music during those years centred on themes such as abandonment and disappointment, which Temiz criticises in strong terms. Turkish music, much to his disdain, focused repetitively on men pleading women not to leave them, without any deeper messaging.
In contrast, traditional Turkish folk music was, in his view, much more lively, with centuries-old messages and bold rhythms. Temiz drew inspiration from these, adapting Turkish folk tunes into international jazz music.
“Jazz could be compared with folk music. A [Turkish] folk performer, who sings in a field, inspires us more than anything else. Our poet-singers have a simplicity and pure honesty.”
A TURKISH JAZZ DEBUT
In the 1970s, the world of jazz also needed new inspiration. Swedes were among the first during this era to start exploring new frontiers and Don Cherry, who moved to Sweden that decade, was one of the first jazz musicians to understand that particular need. He found a good partner in Temiz.
“Jazz was looking for something else because they were running out of new concepts. They were repeating the same motifs and they were bored,” Temiz said. “They were incredibly enthusiastic [about our entrance into their world].”
His Scandinavian years were to last more than 20 years. Temiz met Cherry, Muvaffak “Maffy” Falay, another prominent Turkish jazz musician, who had partnered with Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz and Elvin Jones.
“They told me ‘sit and play.’ When I played, they admired my technique. I knew I had very good technique, but I also knew that I needed a jazz experience because drummers who had less technique than I did were playing jazz so well. The art of playing is something different,” Temiz said.
“‘Tell us Turkish themes and play them,’ they said to me. I came back to Turkey and got musical notes from my mother who was playing oud [an ancient Middle Eastern instrument]. I brought the notes and cassettes to Sweden. So I was the one who carried over Turkish culture from Turkey to the world. Sweden was a perfect place to make this kind of interaction.”
In the early 1970s, Temiz and Falay established in Sweden the group Sevda, or love. The group created a multicultural music platform which synthesised melancholy Turkish folk tunes with Western jazz concepts.
“IN THE DIRT”
Temiz traces his love of music to the time when he was a baby in his mother’s womb:
That was the very beginning of my music life. I got those melodies from the beginning from my mother when I was inside her. I learnt vibration from my mother. She was always playing the oud in our house.
His mother was an oud player and played the vibrating wooden string instrument during her pregnancy. She had played oud since her youth and was a musician graduated from a conservatory in Turkey’s Aegean province of Mugla.
Temiz was born in 1938, in Istanbul’s Fatih neighbourhood, to a military family. His father was a pilot in the Turkish Air Force and his maternal grandfather was a general in the Ottoman Empire. His paternal grandfather was a kadi, a judicial and religious authority in Afyon, in what is today a province of the region of Aegean.
After spending his earliest years in old Istanbul, in his early teens the drummer found himself suddenly uprooted.
His father resigned from the army in the early 1950s, because they were going to deploy him to fight in the Korean War. Instead, he bought a huge farm in Catalca. Catalca, which lies to the west of Istanbul and is today an industrial hub, was back then an agricultural haven with endless beautiful sunflower fields. But even now, the district has sustained its renowned sunflower fields with its melon, watermelon, and other vegetable gardens.
“I grew up in this farm with sheep and lambs. Suddenly, we entered a big farm life. I experienced my childhood barefoot in the dirt. I grew up walking in the dirt,” Temiz said.
They had money, but preferred to live a simple life. He drove to middle school each day on a tractor.
“When I was in the class, I was always checking my tractor parked outside,” he recalled, with a smile on his face.
This farm life left indelible marks on the young man.
“My childhood was a perfect one. I never played with toys because I had real ones. I knew how to fix our tractor,” he said. “What I got from technology [back then] has done much to enable me to develop my own music. I made my own tools. I made my own drum.”
He says this childhood infused with nature has had a profound impact on his music. “I inherited my musical side from my mother and my technical side from my father.”
HIS DESTINY DECIDED FOR HIM
Temiz had no other choice but to play the drum.
It was his oud-playing mother who encouraged him to go to conservatory to study classical music. He hadn’t been at the Ankara State Conservatory very long when he overheard some senior students play jazz music. Entranced, he decided from that moment that it was jazz music that he would play. His teachers refused to allow it.
And the school was equally rigid regarding the type of instrument he could play. “I wanted to play trumpet. They said ‘Your teeth are not good enough.’ I wanted to play double bass. They said ‘I was not tall enough.’ I wanted to play trombone. They said no, again. They basically treated me like somebody who was handicapped,” he narrated.
“Anyway, one day, one of the people there came to me and looked at my hands and fingers. He said ‘You will be a drummer.’ And with that I became a percussionist. That was a defining moment in my life.”
Temiz speaks with a note of regret; he had originally intended to be a trumpeter. But he threw himself into drumming.
“If I became a trumpeter, I could have been one of the best trumpeters in the world,” he said. “They made me so angry. When I get angry about something, I do very well.”
He studied classical music during his year in the conservatory, but defiantly kept persisting with jazz. Although he was a talented and hard-working student, his rebelliousness ultimately led to him being expelled.
After he was kicked out of the conservatory, he had to carve out his existence in Istanbul. He bought a drum set and began playing in the music halls reserved for NATO officers.
Through the cultural exchanges this permitted, he took every opportunity to soak up American jazz.
“We were asking the officers who came to the clubs, for the latest jazz albums — Charlie Parker, Ramsey Lewis, Chet Baker, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan, Ahmad Jamal, and Miles Davis,” Temiz said.
“We matured to the tune of jazz, listening to the songs over and over again,” he said.
He and fellow jazz-loving friends got a small radio and listened faithfully to a popular jazz programme produced by Willis Conover from Washington DC for the Voice of America, an influential show Temiz credits with helping to build a shared understanding of jazz with musicians across the region.
Yet he was also seeking inspiration closer to home. He looked to Turkish folk and sufi music, and further east to India. Gypsy music has been another lifelong passion of his. In his bands, he uses both Western and Turkish musical instruments.
Temiz has always been a successful organiser, an unusual trait for a jazz musician. In 1992, he founded the Black Sea Orchestra with musicians from the countries bordering the Black Sea. Later, he founded another group, the Balkan Orchestra, “bringing together the best musicians of the peninsula.”
“If you want to do an innovation in music, you need to understand the essence of what you like to innovate. They know they need uncorrupted forms to make good jazz,” he said. “Folk music is the core of what we are looking for.”
