How Did Jazz Arrive in Turkey?

Imagine a genre of music that has crept from where it was born into the nightclubs, radio programmes, and even everyday language of a city thousands of kilometres away. I'm talking about jazz, of course. Born in the narrow streets of New Orleans, it crossed continents within a few decades and reached all the way to Istanbul. But how that journey happened, and whose hands it passed through on its way to Turkey, is a story most of us don't know. Let's start where it began.

Where It All Began: New Orleans

Jazz's birth date is generally placed at the turn of the 1900s, and its birthplace is certain: New Orleans, Louisiana. At the time, the city was a rare place where a French and Spanish colonial past, the musical traditions carried by the African-American community after slavery, and a population of European immigrants all lived side by side. This mixture gave rise to an entirely new style, one that brought together the rhythm of ragtime, the feeling of blues, and the harmony of church hymns. Trumpeter Buddy Bolden is credited as the man who formed history's first jazz band, right at the start of the 1900s.

1917 was a turning point: when the federal government shut down Storyville, New Orleans's entertainment district, the musicians who played there scattered to cities like Chicago and New York in search of work. This forced migration spread jazz across all of America. That same year, as the First World War broke out, American soldiers crossing the Atlantic carried the music to Europe with them. By the late 1920s, jazz was no longer just an American phenomenon; it was being played and listened to in the great cities of Europe, from Paris to Berlin.

The Journey to Turkey

Perhaps the most comprehensive work on how jazz entered Turkey is director Batu Akyol's documentary "Türkiye'de Caz" (Jazz in Turkey), which he began filming in 2011 and released in 2013. Akyol traces the idea's starting point to a few pages he came across at the back of İlhan Mimaroğlu's Caz Sanatı (The Art of Jazz) from the late 1950s and Cüneyt Sermet's Cazın İçinden (From Within Jazz) from the 1990s; in a country with such a shortage of archives, he set out to fill that gap.

The documentary opens with a moment of tribute to the venue that opened in 1924 under the name Melek Sineması (later becoming Emek Sineması, demolished in 2013). It takes us to the spirit of the era through footage of 1920s Istanbul, of Beyoğlu. It's built on interviews with around 50 pioneering musicians, among them Cüneyt Sermet, Emin Fındıkoğlu, Muvaffak Falay, Bozkurt İlham Gencer, Selçuk Sun, and Hülya Tunçağ; in other words, it was assembled by listening directly to the people who lived through that era.

Jazz's entry into Turkey happened largely through the efforts of artists of Armenian and Jewish descent, as a current brought in from the West. We can see that the gap left by the intellectual class who emigrated after the war in the 1950s was filled, in the multi-party era that followed, by jazz, and by Turkish music more broadly, evolving on its own terms. Akyol says he chose a more modest title over something as bold as "Turkish Jazz History"; in a country with such a shortage of archives, he felt making that kind of claim wasn't his place.

First Names, First Places

Turkey's first jazz club opened in Bebek in 1956: "306," founded by harmonica master Hasan Kocamaz. But before that, in the 1940s, two names stand out as the first voices to introduce jazz to Turkey: Sevinç Tevs and İlham Gencer.

Sevinç Tevs holds the title of Turkey's first female jazz vocalist; she's known as the "mother of jazz." She won first place in a competition in New York in 1948 with a composition by Arif Mardin, and became the first Turkish artist to appear on BBC and Berlin television. To sum it up in drummer Erol Pekcan's words: "To me, jazz is definitely interpretation, and that interpretation is Sevinç Tevs."

İlham Gencer, meanwhile, is remembered as the most important male voice in jazz from the same era; the two hosted a jazz programme together on Istanbul Radio, which is why they're usually mentioned together. Considered one of Turkey's first singing pianists, Gencer taught the famous American singer Eartha Kitt the song "Katibim" in 1953. Çatı Kulübü, which he opened in Şişli in 1960, became what he himself called "Turkey's own private conservatory"; it shaped the careers of names like Ayten Alpman, Ajda Pekkan, Barış Manço, and Cem Karaca.

Alongside these two voices, there's a pioneering name in instrumental jazz too: trumpeter Muvaffak Falay. His story is a striking one: he started playing trumpet at 12 in Kuşadası, and since playing jazz was forbidden at the Ankara Conservatory, he performed on the radio under the pseudonym "Mafi." He later became known as "Maffy Falay," a name easier to pronounce in Europe, and in 1960 he joined a well-known bandleader's radio orchestra in Cologne. When jazz's legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie visited Ankara in 1956, Falay was among those who greeted him at the airport.

The TRT Istanbul Light Music and Jazz Orchestra, founded in 1982, became Turkey's first official jazz orchestra. And we shouldn't forget Ahmet Ertegün, born in Istanbul in 1923; he and his brother Nesuhi became passionate jazz collectors in their youth, amassing more than 15,000 records. That passion led them to Atlantic Records, founded in New York in 1947 for gospel, jazz, and R&B music; Ahmet would go on to become one of the most influential figures in the American music industry. It's a lovely detail that a name of Turkish origin left such a deep mark at the very centre of jazz's world.

Where Is Jazz Today?

Jazz is still very much alive in Istanbul today, kept going through the annual Istanbul Jazz Festival, which began in 1994 and completed its 33rd edition in 2026. Nardis Jazz Club, founded in 2002 by Önder Focan and his wife Zuhal Focan, remains one of the most important jazz stops in Istanbul's nightlife. Saxophonist İlhan Erşahin, meanwhile, has built a bridge between jazz, African, Caribbean, and electronic music through the Nublu clubs he's opened in both New York and Istanbul. Names like Kerem Görsev, Jehan Barbur, and Fatih Erkoç are still on stage today too, keeping Turkish jazz alive both at home and abroad. This long journey, from the narrow streets of New Orleans to a small club in Bebek, and from there to a festival that still fills Istanbul every summer, keeps going today through ever-changing influences and new venues.