Concert Review: Aynur @ Proctors (GE Theater), 04/04/2023

What an amazing voice; what compelling soulfulness.

Just as a passport allows escape from oppression, Proctors Passport Series allows cultural and artistic escape.

Thursday brought a world-class singer from a very particular part of the world. Aynur (Dogan; she uses only her first name) sang like the most passionate of protest artists – especially Black women blues singers – of the forbidden, the brave. But she also celebrated love between people and peoples, and weddings and funerals.

A Kurdish woman from Turkey, she defied her double-minority status in her song “Kece Kurdan” – the Turkish government banned it, claiming it encouraged women to leave their husbands. Death threats prompted Aynur to leave her homeland for the Netherlands and international stardom. She has sung with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and other world-music heroes and sings at Carnegie Hall this weekend.

In Proctors GE Theater Thursday, the instrumentation onstage sketched her musical journey. Across the back of the stage, house left to right: a Baldwin grand piano, a Fender bass, a Ludwig drum kit, western instruments soon staffed by musicians who could have come from anywhere and formed a jazzy rhythm section.

Up front, folkloric musical tools. A chair stood center stage with two Turkish lutes called sazes, waiting for Aynur. House right, another chair held a dark-suited scholarly sort holding a large wooden clarinet that spanned near bassoon-range low notes to shrill cries.

An eager, hushed welcome turned to exultation in the crowd as a soft piano obbligato welcomed Aynur. In a long full skirt and matching dramatic black top, she sat and sang low, slow, elegiac, dignified, and deep, a tune many in the crowd signified their recognition with smiling glances. She stood after her band jazzed its melody and led into a bigger, declamatory theme that again brought knowing nods, her voice proud, soaring until she eased into a quieter coda.

The set list identified this 12-minute opening run as two or three songs, plus signs indicating segues. But these two (or three?) tunes evoked both sonic and emotional power amid shifts of tempo and dynamics.

Aynur never announced or explained the songs. Sung in Kurdish, their moods and musical impacts nonetheless somehow felt clear. Her trust in the power of what she sang and how she sang it seemed to absolve non-Kurdish speakers from decoding the lyrics. We could welcome and marvel as if to absolute music. And it was absolutely spell-binding.

As in many songs to come, after that first break, Aynur picked up a saz and plucked an intro of single-note runs that became a languid waltz as the band joined her. Drummer Patrick Goraguer sketched the beat with soft mallet taps before shifting to sticks after the bridge. Ilkin Deniz played sparse, resonant bass, and Kevin Hayes dropped pointillist piano phrases on and around the beats. As in many later tunes, clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski co-starred, playing in harmony with Aynur’s saz or wandering, never far from the main melody path but seeing new things alongside it.

In the next tune, Aynur wove a saz tapestry behind her eerie wordless vocal that built sustain and drama. As the band grew the groove, she sang with increasingly intense and insistent momentum, repeating phrases hypnotically until she unleashed a bold scream, the clarinet in quiet counterpoint.

Rhythm powered the next tune, a pulsating reminder of how jazz giant Dave Brubeck looked to Aynur’s part of the world for “Blue Rondo ala Turk” on his epic “Time Out” album – the biggest jazz smash before Miles’ “Kind of Blue.”

Aynur surfed on complex beats, putting aside her saz to roam the stage and free her voice to crest high as the crowd began to clap on the off-beat; here, Lumanowvski’s clarinet break earned the first applause for a solo all night.

She dazzled in the next tune’s intro, playing Van Halen-like hammer-ons, dueting with Lumanovski. The band built a groove that kept fans clapping as a bold fanfare gave way to a quieter mood.

Even without parsing the lyrics, the pace and shape of the concert generated moods and momentum. Things were growing, grooving, and grabbing the heart. Big applause greeted the plaintive ballad bookended between the preceding fanfare and fade tune and the stately dance-like roll that offered an emotional reverse mirror image, brassy skat vocals building a tower of feeling, then a serene glance from it, all around.

“Are we good?” Aynur asked. Assured by applause, she cued Hayes’s piano into a party mood, sang a repeating verse then introduced everybody onstage. Each soloed, closely following where Aynur’s voice had led, but Lumanovski’s clarinet reached furthest outside. Then Aynur reclaimed the melody with repeating fervor as the crowd clapped big. She stopped everything dramatically before re-starting, bringing laughs.

Now, Aynur was feeling the crowd’s energy flowing back onto the stage and sang at her most free and joyous. Fans flowed to the stage front, forming a line and dancing left and right as she proclaimed her once-forbidden song, “Kece Kurdan.”

Some ethnic folk-sonic traditions clearly challenge the notion of music as the universal language more than others. With its spiky off-center dance rhythms, long-form narrative lyrics, and quavery or bell-clear singing style, Kurdish music surely qualifies.

On Thursday, Aynur’s joyous countrymen and women brought the love and made it sing, in effect translating for the rest of us.

As Yo-Yo Ma said of her, “To hear Aynur’s voice is to hear the transformation of all the layers of human joy and suffering into one sound. It reaches so deep into our soul, tears into our hearts, and then we are for one moment, joined as one. It is unforgettable!”