LOVE TRIO Epiphany Hearing a compilation containing a track by U-Roy, the legendary Jamaican dub master in Sweden when he was 13 years old, Ilhan Ersahin, in what was one of his first record purchases was transformed by his experience, realizing in that moment that music would be his calling. With the accusation of a tenor saxophone and a latter ticket to gotham, his fate was sealed. A nine year apprenticeship at downtown Gotham's then famous Sweet Basil led to association with outstanding denizens of the jazz world and weekly workshops with the like minded. These nine years were to culminate in a shift to the Lower East Side and Nublu. The genie was now out of the bottle. From this long gestation, Love Trio was born.
Among those making the trek east with Ersahin were bassist Jesse Murphy, a young California native who would become bassist with Brazilian Girls, and drummer Kenny Wollesen of Tom Waits renown. The music the trio would make would seek to defy genre. It would be, as Ersahin would insist - just music - his music: "It's the city - its also where we live. I live here, and on the road, and there is the night life mixed with studio life; in a way also DJ life gotten to our compositions because every where we play there always electronics and DJs. In the culture now, it is really a part of everything. I am just trying to live in the moment, in what is now."
Borrowing from the dub and rock steady beats of his earliest influences in programming the various keyboards and electronica added to his oeuvre as well as the jazz legacy of his apprenticeship and the sonorities of his ancestral Turkey, the result of the varying styles as an approach to the music the trio would make has been broadening of the possibilities of his composition and trio's improvisation.
Working often with guest artists among whom have been the aforementioned U-Roy, trumpet legend Eddie Henderson, vocalist Marla Turner and DJ Logic as on their seminal, eponymous recording, Love Trio, the music arrived at suggest a hypnotic journey through a spare yet muscular landscape that might best be described as a quest in a minor mode - the ethereal quest for the fabled Nublu. A land far away from Tin Pan Alley.
