Önder Focan - Funkbook A La Turc (2018)

“Funkbook a la Turc” project has a musical approach that aims to use Turkish themes and melodies along with the jazz harmonies and the improvisations over the forms of the tunes in the jazz funk style.

After the early periods of jazz, especially during the Swing period and later, jazz musicians took popular tunes into their repertoire to play them with their own interpretation. They arranged, reharmonized and improvised over these tunes. Honeysuckle Rose, I Got Rhythm, Bye Bye Blackbird in the Swing era, All The Things You Are, My Old Flame in the Be-bop era, My Foolish Heart, My Funny Valentine in the Cool era and following periods are a few examples of popular tunes that the jazz musicians picked up from the popular music realm. These made part of the whole repertoire called Jazz Standards.

The composers of a vast majority of great jazz standards of today’s jazz repertoire like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Rogers and Hart were originally not jazz composers but popular song writers. The beautiful tunes written by these composers turned out to be the essential tunes of the jazz repertoire through the hands of jazz musicians.

The repertoire jazz musicians are not confined with the tunes of the golden days of jazz. Jazz musicians in the later years took tunes from various sources such as rock, pop and folk. Starting from the 70s, Turkish jazz musicians fused Turkish music, mainly Turkish folk music, with jazz. There are numerous examples which were also showcased in international scenes with great success.

Being one of the most productive and pioneering Turkish jazz musicians, Onder Focan did not stayed away from this approach and incorporated Turkish music from different sources (folk or urban) since his early works in1990s. He released “Standard a la Turc” in 2002 and “Swing a la Turc” in 2007, both of which include the unique jazz arrangements of Turkish music. Contrary to the main stream of Turkish music and jazz fusion players who incorporated open solos on Turkish modes, Onder Focan used the tune structure and chord progressions in the improvised sections, mostly erring on the side of basic jazz structure.

The saxophonists Anil Salliel and Batuhan Salliel come from a rich Turkish music background. They have a great understanding of Turkish music microtonal colors and their phrasing reflects this.

In 2016 Onder Focan & Salliel Bros came together with 3 top Turkish rhythm section players and formed a 6 piece band and released an album entitled “Funkbook”. This album included Onder Focan’s tunes and arrangements of jazz funk genre. The band played in all the important jazz festivals and venues in Turkey and several international jazz festivals such as 2018 Baku Jazz Festival.

Considering the common interest of the band members in Turkish music, the band recorded a new album entitled “Funkbook a la Turc” which will be released in Spring 2018. The album has 6 Turkish tunes and 1 Onder Focan composition. 5 tunes are Onder Focan’s arrangements and 2 tunes are arranged anonymously. The style of the band is similar to the previous one, which is jazz funk. However; the origins of the tunes are Turkish and of course there are a lot of jazz lines along with microtonal colors.