"I'm Marcus Miller"

This article was originally published on jazzdergisi.com on October 26, 2018

Fotoğraflar: Fatih Bilgin

This year, we are participating in the third edition of ‘1 Festival Izmir’ with Tuluğ Tırpan’s project  ‘From Mevlana to Anatolian Poets’. We will be playing on October 24 in Ahmed Adnan Saygun Art Center and we will probably have played when this article is published. Tuluğ Tırpan on piano, Zara on vocals and Burcu Karadağ on ney are the soloists of ‘Mevlana - Alchemist  Symphonic Poem’, written by Tuluğ Tırpan for ‘Mevlana year’ in 2007.  Okan Yalabık reads passages from Mesnevi and Su Güneş Mıhladız presents a modern sema show. Naci Özgüç conducts the symphony orchestra consisting of the members of Karşıyaka Chamber Orchestra and Izmir State Symphony Orchestra. The first half of the concert consists of Erdal Erzincan’s bağlama concerto and interpretation of some songs by Anatolian poets.

The only classical concert at the festival is ours, the others are jazz concerts. We have two days of rehearsal before the concert and I stay two more days after the concert. I intend to write about the concerts I can see. I miss dinner with the team to attend Victor Wooten Trio feat. Dennis Chambers & Bob Franceschini concert. I find out later that they had a great time without me but my time at the concert was not bad either. I had been waiting for this concert eagerly and I think we can relate this to me being a bass lover. I've also been listening to this trio's 2017 album ‘Tryptonyx’  for a while and I’m more than ready for this concert. I think this project started in 2016, they had a concert at Zorlu PSM the same year under Garanti Jazz Green concerts but I missed it. Better late than never.

It was surely fun to watch but is hard to write about. Once again I struggle with ‘music is not write, it is to feel and interpreted differently by everyone. So I'm not even going to try to tell about the music, these guys are already super league players, and there is no need to write about how skillfully they play. Besides I don’t think trying to describe the music make sense. How and why? I will talk about my own experience. You can watch a short video from the concert below.

First, we hear Take Off and DC10 from ’Tryptonyx’ album in playback. The stage is dark. “Please fasten your seat belts” and there he is, our captain Victor Wooten. He walks the stage from one end to the other, greeting the audience. He salutes all in the hall. Then, along with the announcements in playback, Bob Francheschini comes from the right of the stage and Dennis Chambers from the left. Music is no longer playback. An impressive start. To me, regardless of what you perform, if you're on stage, you're in show business and this guy knows well about it.

After the first piece, he presents his band mates and himself. ”I'm Marcus Miller“. Of course he gets the reaction he expects from the hall. “Marcus Miller is my hero. Stanley Clarke, Larry Graham, Jaco (Pastorius), Sting, (Louis) Johnson, Mark King ... They are my heroes, my teachers.” Victor Wooten likes to point out and quote from the bassists who have inspired him. In the track Bass Tribute from his 2005 album ‘Soul Circus’, he salutes some important bass players of all time who had inspired him, both with his words and by playing some of his parts. ”Bass players used to stay behind / when Jaco first played Donna Lee, he totally changed that.“

You can find the lyrics here and the music here, I couldn’t find a source with both together.

Victor Wooten is definitely not the type of bassist who stands in the back. He offers you a full package with his technique, his mastery, and his show. This is a package that some might find exhausting. As musician and jazzdergisi.com author  Çağlayan Yıldız  wrote in his concert review of 2016 “My initial opinion about the concert was that it was similar to “a ceaseless action movie”. Çağlayan defined this movie, which he did not question the quality value of the production, as devoid of any story and as a work that the majority would appreciate, but he thinks the quality was lost in the pursuit of quantity. Yes, if I were going to compare the concert to a movie, I would also define it as an action movie but I think the script was more developed over the past two years. I agree that the technical skills and running from adventure to adventure were at the forefront, but I did not find the relations of three characters as shallow or disjointed, I found the role distribution to be balanced. They are all soloists but accompanists also. Relationships must have been strengthened in time or simply, I love jazz funk unlike Çağlayan 😃 Perhaps, if we had watched the same concert, we would have less of a difference in interpretation or if I could listen to the music with musician ears but that’s not the case thanks to mandolin lessons in elementary school 😏

Anyway, I still think the same way. Music can evoke different feelings and find different responses. Everyone's filter is different, what is deeply penetrating to some, doesn’t touch another. This is how I felt, it made me feel good, I wanted to share. They will play in Zorlu on October 24 and 25 within Akbank Jazz Festival. A concert I would surely recommend to groove lovers like me.