Mehmet Ali Sanlikol: The Electric Oud Man Speaks And You Listen…

Jazz has long operated with something like an open-door policy, absorbing influences from classical, folk, rock, and beyond. Turkish-American composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol extends that tradition in a particularly personal way on The Electric Oud Man Speaks...And You Listen, a five-track project that brings Turkish makam, jazz improvisation, and rock energy into a shared musical language.

Sanlıkol's musical background reflects that synthesis. Raised in Istanbul by a classical pianist mother, he grew up surrounded by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin before discovering jazz—a turning point that led him to study the music more deeply and eventually attend Berklee College of Music. Boston is now his home base, and jazz music has become part of his musical DNA. Alongside jazz, however, he has remained equally drawn to rock, citing artists such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix as formative influences.

Yet his connection to Turkish music remained central. The oud, a staple of Middle Eastern and Turkish traditions, was one of his primary instruments—but its acoustic limitations made it difficult to function within a modern jazz or rock setting. Working with luthier Mac Ritchey, Sanlıkol developed a semi-hollow electric oud capable of handling the volume and dynamic demands of a contemporary rhythm section. That instrument becomes the defining voice of this album.

With the electric oud at the center, The Electric Oud Man Speaks features a tight ensemble, including Mark Tipton on trumpet and flugelhorn, Edmar Colón on saxophone, James Hazlewood-Dale on bass, and George Lernis on drums, all well-equipped to navigate the album's shifting modal and rhythmic terrain.

The music itself is both inviting and distinctive. While accessible to listeners grounded in Western jazz and rock traditions, it draws deeply on the Turkish makam system, in which each mode carries its own emotional and structural identity. The concept of modes, of course, is already familiar territory for jazz listeners, making the Turkish variants feel surprisingly intuitive to Western ears. Sanlıkol moves fluidly between these worlds without treating them as separate categories, allowing the music to unfold organically rather than as a surface-level fusion.

The album opens with "Pickin' a Shuffle Alla Turca," offering a driving, rhythmically engaging track that immediately establishes the project's hybrid character. Its blend of modal phrasing and blues-inflected energy sets the tone for what follows: a recording that feels less like a fusion experiment and more like a natural extension of a fully integrated musical voice.

Several compositions had existed in earlier forms, but only found their full expression with the electric oud. Nowhere is this clearer than in pieces like "Talk About a Turkish Blues," where a blues framework is reimagined through Turkish modal language, resulting in something familiar yet subtly transformed. As Sanlikol puts it, "imagine Stevie Ray Vaughan meeting electric Miles Davis somewhere in a Turkish coffeehouse."

"No Big Deal" closes the album with something of a Hendrix-inspired riff set against a soulful funk groove, neatly encapsulating the project's range. But what makes The Electric Oud Man Speaks compelling is not simply its blending of styles—it is the sense that these musical languages were never separate to begin with. Sanlıkol doesn't fuse traditions so much as reveal their underlying compatibility, resulting in a sound that feels both expansive and entirely his own.