Don Cherry / Okay Temiz, Music For Turkish Theatre 1970
$
30
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Description
Very fine condition. Kkaudio cleaned upon arrival. Played twice. Great sound and presentation. The story: James Baldwin, living in Istanbul and directing Engin Cezzar’s Turkish-language staging of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (a play about a prison and gay relationships), brought Don Cherry and Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz together to score the production in 1969 . The play caused enough controversy that the Istanbul Governorship banned it in February 1970, despite it having drawn 30,000 viewers in 60 days . The tape sat unreleased for over 50 years until Caz Plak restored it from the original master, entrusted to them by Engin Cezzar’s biographer Gökhan Akçura, with mastering by Shawn Joseph at Optimum in Bristol .
The music: Reviewers describe it as tonally distinct from Cherry and Temiz’s other collaborations of the era — shorter, more structured pieces shaped by the needs of stage action, but still carrying the blend of jazz and global rhythmic language typical of both players at that fruitful point in their careers . It sits between free jazz and something closer to incidental/theatrical music — sparser and more functional than a Cherry studio date, which tracks given its purpose.
(CAZLP-009) is part of Caz Plak’s “Turkish Jazz Trilogy,” hand-numbered, mono, European press capped at 1000 copies, with liner notes from Zeynep Oral, Akçura, Temiz himself, and producer Erinç Güzel — solid provenance trail for something with this much backstory. No red flags on authenticity turned up in the trade press; the master-tape chain of custody (Cezzar → Akçura → Caz Plak) is consistently corroborated across outlets. Given the small run and the Baldwin connection, it’s the kind of release likely to hold or gain value in the archival/collector market rather than just the listening market.
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