Music of the Silk Road: Tomoko Sugawara & Ozan Aksoy
8 – 9:30PM
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) presents Show & Tell: Tomoko Sugawara & Ozan Aksoy, an evening of early music and conversation with Kugo (ancient Japanese harp) player Tomoko Sugawara and percussionst/string player Ozan Aksoy. Sugawara, who played at CRS in the spring, returns to cover more rhythmic and up-tempo compositions from the Silk Road stretching from Spain to Japan.
“… astonishingly striking…simply stunning, a sophisticated elegance wrapped around a harp.” — T.J. Nelson, WorldMusicCentral.com
SHOW & TELL is a live music series providing a chamber-music like setting for the performance and discussion of mostly acoustic music, primarily of international origin. The series is also open to jazz, classical, and “new” music, and multi-dispclinary collaborations.
Ms. Sugawara plays a harp invented nearly 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and often shown in Buddhist caves along the Silk Road. There it takes the place as one of the glories of Paradise (“the Pure Land”). Indeed, these harps can sound celestial and refined but also, in the hands of Ms. Sugawara, deeply expressive. As an seventeenth century Turkish writer observed “it is a great instrument … and its sound is astonishing. Few can play it because it is a difficult instrument.” The difficulties may have become too great, for it disappeared shortly thereafter. It was last observed in Istanbul three centuries ago. Now Ms. Sugawara has brought it back on the world stage.
Ms. Sugawara plays a reconstruction. It is unique, and so is her repertoire of pieces from regions where the harp had once flourished. Some are from the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 CE), others from thirteenth century Iran and Spain. In addition, many modern composers from the US, Japan, and Iran have written especially for Ms. Sugawara. She has just recorded the CD “Harps on the Silk Road.”
Ozan Aksoy is a musician specializing on music of Turkey and the Middle East and a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York focusing on the music of the Kurdish Alevi in Germany. He was trained on the bağlama (long-necked lute) by his father, also a professional musician. Ozan received his undergraduate education at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Between 1995 and 2003, he was an arranger, composer and performer the well-known progressive experimental folk music ensemble Kardes Türküler (Ballads of Solidarity), performing musics of Anatolia, the Balkans and Caucasus. With Kardes Türküler, he recorded five albums and played over a hundred concerts in Turkey and elsewhere in Europe. Since moving to the United States, Ozan has performed in venues such as Miller Theater, Makor, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University, M.I.T, and Cornell University, with two groups he founded namely “Nour” and the “Ozan Aksoy Trio” in New York City. He has also taught bağlama and ney (end-blown flute), and is the founder and the director of the CUNY Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. Ozan has published articles in the journal Music and Anthropology, and has received a number of research and writing fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the CUNY Graduate Center.