By Michael J. West | Published May 2025
If the Melancholia of the title doesn’t tell you this is an exquisitely expressive album, the presence of trumpeter Ingrid Jensen as a featured guest should do the trick. Turkish-American pianist Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol groups Jensen with a Bostonian cohort on music both subtle and stunning — and, yes, melancholic.
Yet these seven tracks never become monotonous in their moodiness; if the music itself is subtle, the gradations between these “shades” are not. “One Melancholic Montuno,” for example, is in the same key as “My Blues”; there the resemblance ends. The former is a stirring-but-stately duo for piano and trumpet, with the Afro-Caribbean flair that its name suggests; the latter is not a blues, but a sad melody (played by Jensen and soprano saxophonist Lihi Haruvi-Means) that unfurls with such aching that its slow tempo does nothing to dampen its catharsis. Even the two tunes that share traditional Turkish modes, Sanlıkol’s self-invented Renaissance 17 microtonal keyboard (which sounds like a Wurlitzer electric piano) and his vocals are different: “Şeddi Araban Şarkı,” a downcast ballad, finds him wailing in a Bryan Ferry-like croon, while “Hüseyni Jam” is a medium-up swinger with bassist James Heazlewood-Dale and drummer George Lernis at a trot and Sanlıkol adopting a falsetto à la Milton Nascimento. That it manages to evoke melancholy at all is a minor miracle.
“My Blues” — which does adopt a bluesy feel in its middle section, pushed along with powerful solos by Sanlıkol, Haruvi-Means and Jensen — is well positioned as the closer, since it’s the album’s crowning moment. Yet the penultimate “Buselik” isn’t far behind. It’s a haunting tone poem, begun with wordless falsetto vocals and piano from Sanlıkol; Jensen and Haruvi-Means soon join with empathetic obbligati, then Heazlewood-Dale and Lernis come in just before the halfway point to ratchet up the tension with a double-time rhythm. Jensen’s note-bending cries brought a tear to this writer’s eye.
