Presenting Turkish Roman

The advent of “world music” as a commercial genre in 1990s impacted Turkish music markets. Turkish producers tapped Istanbul Roman musicians to blend local sounds with musical elements marked as “Western.” Drawing on techniques of keriz and doğaçlama, musicians explored changes in instrumentation, incorporated Western European harmonies and jazz riffs to sound an enlarged cosmopolitan social identity. Through exploiting “Roman-as-World-Music,” producers and managers drew on locally-instantiated ideologies about jazz to forge a transnationally-marketable project. A historical review of jazz in Turkey uncovers the historical precedent for forging musical interlinkages beyond Turkish borders, which musicians dew upon as an expression of actually-existing cosmopolitanism. Musical analysis of several works illustrate the process of metaphoric accretion of older iconic musical sounds with new and “Western” elements to signify new cosmopolitan social references. This chapter also investigates modalities within discrepant cosmopolitanism to reveal the contingent nature of cosmopolitan social formations and power differentials.