Biography
Ilhan Mimaroglu, born in Istanbul as the son of an architect, established himself early on as a Turkish composer, writer, and photographer who helped shape the first wave of electronic music while also guiding key jazz sessions through the 1960s and 1970s. He began his professional path in his homeland as a broadcaster and music critic before the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to the United States in 1955. Once there he enrolled in musicology courses at Columbia University. A few years afterward he entered the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he worked under his mentor Vladimir Ussachevsky; several pieces from that period later appeared on CRI recordings.
At New York’s public station WBAI he spent seven years producing programs devoted to electronic music. For three decades he also operated under the Ertegun brothers—fellow Turks—at Atlantic Records, where he oversaw landmark sessions by Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, applying his distinctive perspective to their exploratory directions. The longstanding ties at Atlantic enabled him to launch the Finnadar label, which issued major modern compositions by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen alongside his own works.
Although Mimaroglu’s discography remained modest, its essential entries have stayed in print on compact disc, whether issued under his own name on collections such as Criminal Record and Outstanding Warrants or included in anthologies of early electronic music. He kept composing from his Manhattan residence well into the twenty-first century until he succumbed to pneumonia in that same borough in July 2012 at the age of eighty-six.
At New York’s public station WBAI he spent seven years producing programs devoted to electronic music. For three decades he also operated under the Ertegun brothers—fellow Turks—at Atlantic Records, where he oversaw landmark sessions by Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, applying his distinctive perspective to their exploratory directions. The longstanding ties at Atlantic enabled him to launch the Finnadar label, which issued major modern compositions by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen alongside his own works.
Although Mimaroglu’s discography remained modest, its essential entries have stayed in print on compact disc, whether issued under his own name on collections such as Criminal Record and Outstanding Warrants or included in anthologies of early electronic music. He kept composing from his Manhattan residence well into the twenty-first century until he succumbed to pneumonia in that same borough in July 2012 at the age of eighty-six.
Albums
