İlhan Erşahin

İlhan Erşahin — Biography

İlhan Erşahin is a Swedish-Turkish saxophonist, composer and jazz musician born in Stockholm in 1965; although his family were not musicians, a reggae record by Jamaican DJ U-Roy that he discovered at fourteen proved decisive in turning him toward the saxophone, and as a teenager he also explored punk, hip-hop and dub.

To pursue his ambitions he moved to the United States, enrolling at Berklee College of Music in 1986 before settling in New York, where he studied with saxophonists Joe Lovano and John Purcell and spent years leading a trio and quartet at the club Sweet Basil. His debut album, Our Song, appeared in 1997 and was followed by Home (1998) and Virgo (2000); around the same time he founded the project Wax Poetic, whose first record featured Norah Jones as lead singer for two years, including her first recorded song, Angels.

In 2002 his album Harikalar Diyarı (Wonderland) drew on the modal textures of Turkish music and helped bring then-unknown musicians Hüsnü Şenlendirici, Nil Karaibrahimgil and Bora Uzer to wider attention, making it an influential record in Turkey. That same year he opened the club Nublu on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which became a key meeting point for jazz, electronica and world music through its Wednesday-night Forró in the Dark sessions and the Nublu Orchestra he developed with Butch Morris; Erşahin remains active today as the club's founder and a performing saxophonist.