Mehmet Ali Sanlikol Reveals Jazz's Ottoman Musical Origins

On February 27 at Jordan Hall in Boston, two musical traditions will meet when a Turkish mehter band joins the New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra. The concert marks the culmination of a full day examining the musical connections between Istanbul and American jazz—connections which have shaped popular music for over a century, hidden in plain sight.

For Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, the musician and NEC faculty member who organized the event, these musical intersections reflect his life's work. "The marching band roots of jazz actually go directly to Turkey, to these Ottoman Janissary bands," Sanlikol explains, referring to the military band of the elite infantry units of the Ottoman Empire. "I suddenly discovered, or it became obvious to me, that the jazz orchestra, big band—one of my huge passions—has its origins there."

The morning begins with a workshop introducing the mehter band tradition. The workshop will feature instruments such as the zurna, a double-reed wind instrument that Sanlikol enthusiastically describes as “ a very loud instrument with a very nasal sound that really cuts through everything.” Traditional mehter bands combine zurnas with Middle Eastern–style bass drums, small kettle drums called nakers, cymbals, and large timpani-sized drums fitted with camel skins.

Following the workshop, presentations will explore two pivotal Turkish influences on American music: the Zildjian cymbal makers and the Ertegun brothers of Atlantic Records. "These families belonged to an upper-class Ottoman Istanbul society," Sanlikol notes. "They were all aristocratic families, and yet it was these families that came right around the same time to this country and changed the history of music forever."

The Zildjian company crafted cymbals for mehter bands in Istanbul for three centuries before establishing their American operation in Massachusetts. The Ertegun brothers founded Atlantic Records, bringing their Ottoman heritage—grandsons of a significant Sufi sheikh—to their work with jazz artists. Along with producer Arif Mardin, they formed a remarkable bridge between Turkish and American musical cultures.

A Grammy-nominated composer who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2016, Sanlikol's path through these musical traditions begins with his childhood in Istanbul. "I grew up with a very Western-facing family," he recalls. "My mother is a classical piano teacher, so I really grew up more with Western music in the house. My exposure to Turkish music was mostly whenever I was on a bus, TV, or radio."

Sanlikol moved to Boston in 1993 at age eighteen, during what he calls “the end of the giants.” He studied with Bob Brookmeyer, George Russell, and Herb Pomeroy at Berklee College of Music. His talent as a composer emerged early. At nineteen, he formed his first big band, with future Jazz at Lincoln Center trombonist Elliot Mason in the ensemble and Anat Cohen on second tenor saxophone.

The transformation in his musical outlook came during a game of Risk. A friend began downloading and playing mehter band music as a joke, a way to accompany the moves of the armies on the board, during the game. "For secular Turks, and especially for some hip jazz musicians, that kind of music—there's no way any one of us will take it seriously," Sanlikol explains. "Often when those bands play in Turkey, they put on costumes, fake mustaches, and they play repertoire that's very touristic."

But as the game stretched on for hours, Sanlikol found himself listening with new ears. A simple sixteen-measure folk song caught his attention because he couldn't identify its tonal center. The next day, still puzzling over the music, unable to find the tonic or first note of the scale the song was in, he brought it to his lesson with guitarist John Abercrombie. "I'll never forget this, because I was obsessed with it, so I said to John, 'Hey John, I listened to this song, and it's a Turkish folk song, I can't tell where the "do" is, do you think it's here?'"

Neither musician could resolve the puzzle because, as Sanlikol later realized, they were trying to hear the music through Western harmonic conventions. "Those musics from the Middle East, I learned later, they have a hidden verticality. They're more horizontal."

This realization led him to pause his jazz career for nearly a decade and intensively study Turkish music and culture. He learned to read Arabic script to study historical Turkish musical texts, immersed himself in traditional forms, and began exploring Sufism. The price of this devotion was professional momentum—“People almost nearly forgot about me,” he said—but the musical understanding he gained proved transformative.

One outcome of this synthesis of traditions is the Renaissance 17, a microtonal keyboard Sanlikol conceived to bridge Turkish and Western musical forms. The idea first came to him during his master's studies at NEC, when professor Dan Pinkham demonstrated an organ tuned to historical temperaments. "When he started playing Frescobaldi, Cavalieri, these great early Baroque masters—and they sounded so crazy—I was like, 'What?' And when I heard that, the first thing that popped up in my head was, 'Wait a second, you could play Turkish music on that.'"

Creating the instrument took over two decades, multiple prototypes, and collaboration with engineers from MIT and Harvard. The first version, built by a harpsichord maker with electronics by an MIT Media Lab engineer, failed after a year and a half of development. A second engineer successfully implemented the electronic systems, but the wooden prototype proved too unwieldy for regular performance. Working with Harvard's 3D printing lab, Sanlikol has developed a portable version, which he recently debuted in Turkey.

The musical inheritance Sanlikol explores extends beyond composition and performance to physical preservation. His father, Hüseyin Parkan Sanlikol, collected musical instruments, amassing around three hundred pieces. Just before his unexpected passing in 2015, the elder Sanlikol had convinced the mayor of Nilüfer, Bursa, the Sanlikols' hometown, to establish a museum of musical instruments. "The sad story is that he shook hands with the mayor and three days later he passed because of a stroke and heart failure," Sanlikol recalls. "It was a sudden loss, but I think because of the dramatic nature of his loss and passing, the mayor felt almost obligated to finish this project."

Sanlikol brought his expertise to the project. Between 2011 and 2012, he was a consultant for the Musical Instruments Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, helping curate their Turkish exhibit. "To this day, they still have my design up. They tweaked it a little bit, but it's still there." This experience prepared him for his role as curator of what would become the Nilüfer Municipality Dr. Hüseyin Parkan Sanlikol Musical Instruments Museum.

The collection has grown significantly through notable acquisitions. When NEC could not properly maintain some of their historical instruments during the pandemic, they approached Sanlikol. "They said, 'Mehmet, if you're up for it, and if you can arrange for the transportation, we'd like to donate these instruments to you.'" The donation included fifty-two instruments, some dating back four hundred years, including a Venetian lute from 1609. Turkish Airlines sponsored the careful transportation of these precious artifacts, with Mehmet, his wife, and daughter preparing the packages themselves.

Parallel to his work preserving musical heritage, Sanlikol has explored the spiritual traditions that shaped Ottoman musical culture. His investigation of Turkish music led him to the Sufi traditions, particularly the Bektashi order. "Being fully secular was not necessarily for me, maybe because spirituality is important to me as a musician. I always loved A Love Supreme—it spoke to me very differently."

This spiritual dimension informs his understanding of music's transformative potential. He quotes Rumi's observation that "words are never going to trigger them as strongly as music," referring to moments of mystical awakening. "He says ‘wordless, just music,' because he says a taqsim, an improvisation on a neyor a rebab will trigger that kind of mystical awakening if your mind and spirit are ready for it much quicker than your intellect trying to decipher words."

The February 27 concert at Jordan Hall brings these various strands together. The evening begins with traditional mehter band music performed by an ensemble including NEC faculty and students. Sanlikol's new composition "Echoes from a Forgotten Past" follows, combining the mehter band with the NEC Jazz Orchestra. The program then moves to selections from Atlantic Records' jazz catalog, including John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," pieces by Charles Mingus and Jimmy Giuffre, and concluding with an arrangement by Arif Mardin.

Throughout the day's events, scholars including John Edward Hasse, Curator Emeritus of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution, and Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University, will help illuminate these musical connections. The presentations and panel discussions will examine the contributions of the Zildjian family and the Ertegun brothers, whose influence helped shape twentieth-century American music.

For Sanlikol, these musical connections reveal something essential about cultural exchange. "Someone needs to always lead the way," he observes. Through his performance, scholarship, and preservation work, he illuminates paths between traditions many assumed stood apart. His own musical language, whether played on a traditional instrument or his innovative Renaissance 17, speaks to the possibilities that emerge when artificial boundaries dissolve.

Join Mehmet Ali Sanlikol on February 27 at Boston's Jordan Hall for Zildjians, Atlantic Records and Jazz: The Legacy of Istanbul in America. Learn more about Mehmet Ali Sanlikol and the Renaissance 17 project at sanlikol.com. Follow Mehmet Ali Sanlikol on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.