Mustafa Özkent

Turkish composer Mustafa Ozkent worked for decades as an underrecognized yet pivotal presence within Ankara’s music community before listeners in the West finally embraced his output more than forty years after his start. He entered the profession in 1960 by heading the Turkish pop ensemble the Teenagers, a group whose members were all under nineteen. An inventive guitarist who routinely altered his instruments to produce distinctive timbres, Ozkent soon acquired a reputation for creative independence; by the early 1970s he was frequently sought after as a session musician, arranger, and producer whose hybrid style merged psychedelic and pop/rock elements with R&B rhythms and jazz-derived solos. In 1972 he began a collaboration with the Turkish imprint Evren Records, renowned for exacting production values and audiophile engineering; he reserved a studio among Istanbul’s premier facilities and assembled a select ensemble to lay down tracks built around funky vamps, lengthy percussion passages, driving organ figures, and wah-wah guitars. The resulting album, Genclikle Elele (Hand in Hand with Youth), possessed the sort of break-heavy architecture later prized by hip-hop DJs, even though the sessions predated the emergence of the South Bronx scene by several years and occurred on another continent. When the British label Finders Keepers reissued this work in 2006, it drew enthusiastic notices in both the United Kingdom and the United States; Ozkent assisted the reissue project and has continued working in Turkey, issuing the album Dijital Guitar in 2005.