Name: Timuçin Şahin
Occupation: Guitarist, composer
Nationality: Turkish
Recent release: Timuçin Şahin's Funk Poems for 'Bird' is out via New Focus Recordings / Panoramic. It features his Flow State quartet, further comprised of Cory Smythe (piano), Reggie Washington (bass) and Sean Rickman drums).

If you enjoyed this interview with Timuçin Şahin and would like to find out more about his work, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, twitter, and Facebook.  



When did you first start getting interested in musical interpretation?  

It was during my high school years that I become serious about music and pictured myself being a musician.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances captured your imagination in the beginning when it comes to the art of interpretation?

It was Eddie Van Halen and John Coltrane in the beginning before I could play anything decent.

I was a kid that has no knowledge and did not come from a musical culture, I was drawn to the soundworld that Eddie and Trane created. Their influences grew each day and still they remain inspiring to me.

Are there examples for interpretations that were entirely surprising to you personally and yet completely convincing?

Yes those times, any Van Halen record was magnetic for me. I am talking about the end of the 1980s, maybe 1990.

 I was in a boarding school and was listening to a radio program and heard John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.” Those were the first cornerstones that triggered my intuition to discover and explore this path that I am on.



About 10 years later, when I was introduced to Karnatic Music and started to scrutunize the works of composers from avant-garde, singer Jahnavi Jayaprakash, Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis had the similar impacts.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to interpretation? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage?

My work embodies a lot of traditional concepts and influences. However, the majority of my creative practice operates in personal approaches that I’ve been working on for quite some time.

The recalibrated definition of tradition is important here for me to designate whether I am part of a tradition or not.

Could you describe your approach to interpretation on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

My creative works over the last decade employs real-time generation combined with through composed musical materials.

I value all my musical experiences greatly. But my recent works, Funk Poems for ‘Bird’ and Nothing Bad Can Happen could be more descriptive here.



What was your own learning curve / creative development like when it comes to interpretation - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

It was not fast. I did not have any musical education until I was 19.

After I had the chance to study music, I did work a lot. I think my generation and the generation before us are lucky in terms of experiencing different times / ages of learning curves. It was slower for us, there was less technology, less people around to learn from. I had to travel, literally change country and continent for the search of sound and act of music making at the highest level.

Nowadays there’s an abundance of information brought to you at your home. But we had less distractions than this generation. Our imagination worked and improved so much and took us to a lot of musical places. Also we could relate better to the older generations and legends.

The stories that we heard meant so much for us while creating our own stories.

In many cases, the score will be the first and foremost resource for an interpretation. Can you explain about how “reading” a score works for you?

It’s a great tool and a skill that I advise all my students to develop. But the music does not happen in the score, maybe it happens a bit through the score. But just a bit.

Without the internalization, interpretation and imagination of the musicians, the music will not come out and breathe.

What role does improvisation play for your interpretations?

I think I’ve partially answered that above. But I want to add a term coined by George Lewis that can bring more light into how I think of musical structures that employs real-time generation.

Lewis defines the through-composed parts in a composition as “composer specified.” And improvised parts as “performer supplied.” The balance and the combination of both creates the aesthetic and the compositional language of the creator.

What a performer brings to the band stand and the road map that has been drawn by the composer makes the music, essentially.

Interpretations can be willdly different live compared to the studio. What is this like for you?

I like them both.

I love going into the studio, and playing live. They don’t have to be the same or different. You can make a studio session as spontaneous as you want, just like a live session.

The sound, space and the audience definitely has a huge impact on things.

With regards to the live situation, what role do the audience and the performance space play for your interpretation?

Huge! Acoustics and the vibe generated by the musicians together with the audience will definitely impact the interpretation.

With regards to the studio situation, what role do sound, editing possibilities and other production factors play for your interpretation?

Sometimes it does play a big role. Because editing is composing. Sound is probably almost everything.

Some works seem to attract more artists to add their interpretation to it than others; some seem to even encourage wildly different interpretations. From your experience, what is it about these works that gives them this magnetic pull?

Being unpredictable and willing to explore the possibilities of the unknown creates a unique temporality.

If an artwork can create different impacts each time, that’s a timeless quality.

Artists can return to a work several times throughout the course of their career, with different results. Tell me about a work where this has been the case for you, please.

As jazz musicians, we have to emulate Charlie Parker at some part of our lives. So Bird is someone I keep coming back to. I can say that for Coltrane as well.

As a composer, Morton Feldman always generates an immaculate inspiration every time I re-visit him.

Part of the intrigue of interpretations is that the process is usually endless. Are there, vice versa, interpretations that feel definitive to you?

No, not really. That’s probably the best part.  

If our profession has one saving grace, it’s that there is no end to discovery if one is willing to keep pushing.