| Jazz |
The new album by Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol does not so much begin as it emerges a slow, deliberate unfurling of sound, a doorway quietly opening onto another world.
Pianist, multi-instrumentalist, composer: these labels, though accurate, hardly begin to contain him. Sanlıkol, born in Turkey, speaks a musical language at once contemporary and ancient, somewhere between the cracked beauty of tradition and the restless spirit of modern jazz. His music resists clear borders; it is eclectic, mercurial, and yet the journey he offers is never disjointed. It is a gradual immersion, a kind of slow spell, leading the listener into the currents of his culture into what feels, more and more with each track, like a spiritual voyage.
Speaking of the album’s title, 7 Shades of Melancholia, Sanlıkol recalls: “In the region now called Turkey, melancholy has a long cultural lineage, stretching back to ancient Greece. Even in the most exuberant [Turkish] dances, the lyrics often mourn lovers parted by war.”
Hüzün — the Turkish word for this particular flavor of melancholy saturates the country’s music, its literature, its cinema. For Sanlıkol, it is both a reservoir and a point of departure: a feeling to be honored, refracted, and transformed. His compositions are not built to impress; they are chosen, almost shyly, from melodies that first stirred his own heart.
The album has found admirers beyond his circle. Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón, who collaborated with Sanlıkol on the 2023 Turkish Hipster project, praised 7 Shades of Melancholia as “a particularly accomplished project from Mehmet and his formidable ensemble, offering the leader’s conceptual, deeply personal writing, performed with great force and clarity.”
This is a kind of world-jazz, but the label feels almost too crude. Each piece seems infused with reflection, as if the music had to live for a while inside the composer before it could be given away. Listening to the album is less like attending a performance than like being invited to accompany someone on an interior voyage: a jazz spiced with distant flavors, richly textured and emotionally charged.
Unlike others who tread similar paths, Sanlıkol makes no overtures to fashion or commercial taste. His work is both steeped in his native culture and rigorously conversant with the codes of contemporary jazz, a careful, intricate hybrid that never dilutes either source.
The human voice, so central to Sanlıkol’s imagination appears here like a thread running through the fabric, sung less as songs than as invocations: timeless, borderless, untethered to any single moment in history. In a time when difference is often met with suspicion, 7 Shades of Melancholia sounds like a hand extended across centuries and across oceans.
The album closes with My Blues, a piece swathed in darkness, almost unbearably heavy, until the piano soft, insistent begins to rise like light filtering through clouds. Track by track, the album surprises: not through virtuosity for its own sake, but through its quiet conviction, its refusal to compromise, its depth of feeling.
It is, unmistakably, a personal document and it would not be surprising if, in the years to come, 7 Shades of Melancholia stands as a landmark for those seeking to chart the shifting currents between cultures and sound.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, April 27th 2025
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Musicians:
Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, piano, Renaissance 17, voice
James Heazlewood-Dale, acoustic bass
George Lernis, drums, gongs
Ingrid Jensen, trumpet
Lihi Haruvi-Means, soprano saxophone
Tracklist:
A Children’s Song
One Melancholic Montuno
Şedd-I Araban Şarkı
Hüseyni Jam
Buselik
My Blues