İlhan Erşahin is İlhanErşa Swedish–Turkish musician and bar owner, raised in Stockholm and based in New York City since 1990. As a musician, Ersahin has performed and recorded with various musicians as well as his own projects/bands, Wax Poetic, Love Trio, Our Theory, I Led Three Lives, Wonderland and Istanbul Sessions.
Most of those bands formed or sparked because of Nublu, the club he opened on Avenue C in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2002. The club was then on the cusp of intensive gentrification. It became a hub for musicians and DJs. Being a club in Manhattan, the music of Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil also became part of the Nublu mix, and the club became well known for its Wednesday night Forro in the Dark Brazilian sessions. Key to the scene was the creator of Conduction, Butch Morris, long a downtown fixture. Ersahin became part of different Morris projects in the late 90s. When Nublu began, they devised a new project that would apply Morris's Conduction methods to the Nublu sensibility. The result was a new direction for Morris; within the context of The Nublu Orchestra he began incorporating more beats and electronica into his sound. The ensemble became a big part of the club's identity.
Background
Ersahin's family were not musicians, but Stockholm is a long-established jazz and music center and his elder brother and sisters brought home records that exposed him to the music of his generation, from rock to jazz to bossa nova and world music. When he was 14, Ersahin bought a reggae compilation album featuring the work of pioneering Jamaican DJ/toaster, U-Roy. The thrill of the sound confirmed his direction as a musician. This early passion led to Ersahin eventually recording with U Roy, on the Love Trio in Dub album. Throughout his teens, Ersahin expanded his musical horizons, turning on to the more marginal sounds of punk, hiphop, reggae and dub. As Ersahin began to teach himself to play saxophone in his teens, he knew that in order to accomplish his dreams, he had to move to the United States.
In the United States
Arriving in the United States in his late teens, he enrolled briefly at Berklee School of Music in Boston in 1986. But his urge to be actively involved in music outweighed the importance of a degree. By the early 1990s, Ersahin was living in the East Village, then still a hub of underground creativity. During his first ten years in the city, Ersahin studied with sax masters Joe Lovano and John Purcell, and honed his jazz skills playing at various clubs with musicians like legendary trumpeter Eddie Henderson, Larry Grenadier, Wallace Rooney, Kevin Hays, Ben Allison, Jeff Ballard, Cindy Blackman and many more.
Throughout the decade, Ersahin worked at the jazz club Sweet Basil, where he formed a band that played for Sunday brunch. Ersahin gained experience by leading both a trio and a quartet at Sweet Basil and began performing in international jazz festivals. In 2002, Ersahin opened the Club Nublu on Avenue C. Nublu is regarded as the last hold-out of the free-wheeling spirit that the Lower East Side was known for, pre-gentrification. More than simply a club, it has become known round the world as a workshop and breeding-ground for musicians interested in trans-cultural, uncharted and multi-disciplinary music.
Bands and albums
While performing his Saturday brunch sets at Sweet Basil, performing modern jazz, Ersahin attracted the attention of a small independent label in San Francisco called Golden Horn and recorded two albums for them. His first record was called "Our Song," (1997) and featured Eddie Henderson, Doug Weiss, Jon Davis and Kenny Wollesen. ("Our Song" was originally released in Turkey as "She Said.") Ersahin's second release, "Home," (1998) was a trio album featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Kenny Wollesen. His sound was described by critics as "post-bop," and he was praised for his original compositions.