 
The Mystical Music of Latif Bolatinterview by Tom Chandler Tom Chandler: The new album was recorded in kind of an unorthodox way, by sending tapes all over the country and having friends record their parts and send them back to you. Latif Bolat: Well, unorthodox for me. But I guess the record industry does things this way all the time. My favorite thing in a perfect world is to work together, and then have one single microphone in the room and record without stopping for corrections. Which corresponds to the 1920s style of recording, like Tanburi Cemil Bey or Kemani Tatyos. Even though Kudsi Erguner does it that way. But I’m realistic too, if I followed that dream I don’t think I’d have any recordings. Times are really weird, and people are speeding. Every one of us should get a speeding ticket with our own lives! Nobody is sitting around and just watching where the world goes. TC: Is it slow in Turkey? LB: Turkey is faster than here! They just discovered the merits of money and capitalism and rampant commercialism. The speed is much faster, and less careful, too. Everybody sells out anything! There are hardly any rules or regulations, from top to bottom. Machiavelism at its peak. TC: It’s still officially a secular government? LB: It is, officially. But it has all kind of confusion, just like here. Here we are supposedly the most secular, with church and state separation, but we are governed by fundamentalist Christians. The whole world is going to the right in terms of political agenda, and everywhere is very religious. I just came from Indonesia. That was an eye opener. I did a tour in the Phillipines. It’s amazing how Christian the whole society is there. Christmas starts from September on. Turkey is the same way. In a very funky way, the present governement supposedly fuses Islam with secularism. But it doesn’t work, but those two things are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, social and political agenda-wise. TC: Your album, Gul, the Rose, is self-released, and you’ve always released your CDs on your own. Do you feel like you would gain anything from a record label? LB: You know, I am a very realistic person. I could even compromise a little bit, in the ways of doing music, if I had a worthwhile offer. But the first five years at least, I shopped around, I sent CDs to everyone, you name it. These people don’t even reply to you, which bugs me so badly, it’s just a matter of courtesy. After getting an offer from Music of the World, they said they had a buyer, but I was supposed to re-record everything, but I wasn’t supposed to sing. And that wasn’t OK. The lyrics are very important in this music and also my forte is my voice. If I’m not singing what this music says, then what’s the point? Am I going to be an elevator musician, just easy listening for a rainy afternoon? That made me wake up and I said, “Just stop looking outside.” I just work hard, I charge the cost of the recording and manufacture on my credit card, and immediately, I go out on the road, like a road warrior. In a couple of months, I earn the money back. Remember, there is a way to do it, as long as once you get your CD, you shouldn’t just stack it in your kitchen and forget about your babies. These are our babies! TC: How do you feel that the new CD distinguishes itself from the previous discs? LB: First of all, I think almost sixty percent of the songs are my own compositions. That is a big percentage for me. Usually I’ve done traditional music from three or four hundred years ago, I revitalize them. But this CD, using poetry from the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century, I wrote my own music. Second thing is the instrumentalization, basically I contacted my musician friends and I said, this is a communal effort. So here is the master copy of what we’re going to play. You do whatever you wish to do, as if this is your own baby. Everybody did that very nicely. Then I put everything together. It is seriously a community effort. I’m very traditionalist, even though I’m very flexible, if I had done this exclusively, it would sound even more traditional than it does. There’s a very nice trumpet player from Santa Fe, very creative young man. It sounds like the thirteenth century Sufi mystics meets the Crusaders in the plains of Konya! There is no warring, but the music, the trumpet, lends it a martial, medieval crusader thing. It’s a very nice friendly encounter, though! Not like a historical encounter when they see each other, tens of thousands of people were killed! TC: That’s good! Throughout your CDs, you use some Turkish musicians, but also a wide variety of non-native speakers, and when you play concerts, you play with whoever is local, mostly Americans or non-Turks. Do you feel that that effects your music? Some would argue that people who didn’t grow up in Turkey could never fully understand makam (the modal system of Turkish music) and could never really play it truly. LB: That might be true. But my take on music is somewhat
different. Even though I’m very traditionalist in terms of the
cultural background of these things, musically speaking, but I pay more
attention to the spirit and the intention of the person. So no matter
what the nationality is, if I see enjoyment in these people’s
eyes and this great intention, then it really doesn’t’ matter
for me if that person is pushing the notes a little lower or higher.
In the big picture of life, that is really a small thing. I am very
dominant in this music, anyway, I try to push the right fret, so if
another musician has a little pitch problem ,that is not really a big
issue. TC: There must be exceptions to these generalizations. LB: Well, yes. Like here, exceptions exist, but do you have the time or energy to search for exceptions? Even with the exceptions, there are problems. I’m very happy with my non-native speaker musician friends all over the world. TC: Do you take on the role of teacher of makam to your musicians. Do you ever get in a situation where you have to tell someone what they’re doing wrong and set them on the right path? LB: I do play that role of teacher, not just in music, but in culture. Very gladly, as much as I know. But frankly speaking, my knowledge of makam is somewhat limited too. Makam theory is very fluid. It changes along the way. There are main rules, but the interpretation of those rules changes from musician to musician, and also my musical education is in Western classical music. I was supposed to be an opera singer! My makam knowledge is good enough for the kind of music I pursue, which is not really academic. There is much to learn for me, and I’m still learning. My teaching comes mostly by example. When people talk about a particular scale, I don’t think about the notes, but how it should sound to your ear, and how it should feel and how it should make you perceive the music or the sentiment. If you get stuck in the numbers, you might miss the spirit. TC: When you introduce a song, your taksim is much fancier than what I would ever play. Your ornaments suggest a little more knowledge than you’re willing to cop to. But you never show off your instrumental skills, instead you create a platform for others to play. LB: I know my limits. One instrument is a lifetime adventure. I see that from old fashioned musicians like Tanburi Cemil. Kemani Tatyos, “violinist Tatyos”, he didn’t play anything but violin. The mastery of an instrument is a lifetime adventure. The spirit of the music doesn’t really encourage you to be flashy or speedy. Unfortunately, the world music scene appreciates the speed and virtuosity. Because of that, whoever comes from foreign countries, when they come here you always hear this machine gun sound. They want to show off. I appreciate virtuosity, but music has more importance in the spirit than in the technicality. TC: Do you think of yourself as a Muslim? LB: Well, I’m a socialist person. I don’t believe in religious things too much. Ever since I started dealing with spiritual Sufi mystic music from Turkey, I realized religion is not just a belief system, or a faith related thing. It is a cultural thing. SO it becomes a part of your culture. You grow up in it. No one asks you if you’re going to be Muslim or Christian or Jewish when you’re born, so it becomes part of your growing up, what you eat, what you say, how you swear, what you drink. These are all very secular items, but they are defined by your religion. Because of that, I really appreciate the religion as a cultural entity. So because of where I grew up, I definitely have that stamp on me, on my personality. TC: There are those who would say that spirituality implies religion. You’re presenting spiritual music, and it’s even more specific than that. It’s not abstract spirituality in the sense of say John Coltrane, instead it’s Sufi Music. LB: That’s true. Unfortunately in Turkey and other countries, an independent entity of spirituality doesn’t exist. It’s always taken as the extension of religion. In America, somehow, we revamped that. I like that very much. In the West in general, there is an independent spirituality. Most of the people that I work with and also my audience, they are not really religious people. The American Sufis, they designate themselves “sufi”, they are not really Islamic. But they are very spiritual, and they find their spirituality fitting into this historical framework of Sufi spirituality. TC: How can you be a Sufi and not be Muslim? LB: That is how you’re defining Sufism. That’s a big debate, maybe a thousand years of debate. And from my own perspective, with the history and all these poets I deal with, it is perfectly fitting. You can be so spiritual, even if you don’t have any affiliation with any religion. In the big picture, the word “spirituality” implies “spirit”. Every human, every animal, every thing on earth has spirit. If historically, it’s affiliated with something, it still carries a commonality. Mystically oriented Christian people and mystically oriented Muslim people come to the same understanding in terms of universalism and humanism. TC: It seems to me that in America people just take what they want from a tradition. Can you only take the parts of Sufism you want, and still call yourself a Sufi? LB: Historically, that is not limited to Western culture. The same thing happened everywhere. In the Islamic world, as of today, there are at least a thousand mystic orders, Sufi orders. Everybody calls themselves Sufis, but when you look at them, they take traditional Muslim teachings, and this particular sheikh revamps it, fuses other things and something else comes out as an entity. That has been done many times before. St. Francis De Assisi versus Teresa De Avila versus John of the Cross. They are different because they interepret the philosophy different. The only that might bother me is if you ignore the historical roots of that. The rootlessness is something we like, because then we feel invigorated. If you’re following this path, you have to pay attention and learn and do your homework, and then fuse whatever you can get into your own life. It gives you a guideline, but then how you apply it is your own thing. TC: Are there any Sufi sheikhs who support gay marriage? LB: I’ve seen some Sufi sheikhs who supported the war in Iraq! They actually supported it! They gave practical support! Gay marriage, I have yet to see a sheikh confront that. TC: Do you have any formal training in ethnomusicology? LB: I don’t have a PhD or something, but my music work in Turkey, we had lots of folk-music related subjects that we study. You could take a class in how to make a saz. Traditionally, music teacher’s work was to transcribe and record the local music in your environment. Every teacher is a government employee even today in Turkey, so when the government assigns you to a location, which usually as a young teacher, they send you way out there, you are told to transcribe the music, the stories, the legends. We have at least thirty thousand Turkish folk songs recorded and transcribed by the government. I was the music director of a socialist folk theater, for three years. I worked on Arabesque music, which was the music of the alienated urban people. TC: What’s your process for finding songs? LB: Well, it has to appeal to my musical taste. There are thousands of traditional songs… TC: Would you hear someone else sing it and say “I want that song!” or would you spend time at the library going through the thirty thousand folk songs. LB: It happens usually in the first way. I hear it and something appeals to me, either the lyrics or the music or both. I write it down and learn it in my own way. Sometimes, not as often, I check out the lyrics and learn the music later. Like all those Rast songs on the last CD? I had never heard them, I just found them in a book. It may be the first time they are interpreted too. I recreated them and recorded them. The message must be really strong. TC: Was music your door into spirituality? Were you interested in Sufism and spirituality prior to your involvement with this music? LB: I think music came first. In a very strange way, though. I’m a socialist, since the age of sixteen. We dismissed anything spiritual. I dismissed all this amazing tradition in poetry and music for a long time. When I came to the United States, almost twenty years ago, I started doing music. And I’ve done a whole bunch of different kinds of music, Ottoman court music, Turkish folk dance music and one day I was traveling to Santa Barbara and I was listening to the Sabri Brothers, a song called “Ya Habib”. I listened to it maybe a hundred times! Over and over and over again! That was a transformation point for me, when I realized the power of music, simple, repetitive, but very powerful, hypnotic, ecstatic. And even though I have no knowledge of Urdu, I realized the power of lyrics, and I knew these people were singing about very deep subject matter other than, “oh baby, don’t go, I can’t live without you.” You cannot really sing those songs in this passionate manner. After that experience, I did house cleaning of my own spirit and musical experiences, I removed most of the prejudices that came with me and I dived into the Sufi mystic tradition. Not just with music and poetry, but also philosophically too. And interestingly, there I found a very appropriate extension to my own socialist beliefs. Very weird thing to hear, but that devotion for humanity and egalitarianism and anti-materialism, it was much higher than most of my socialist friends that I grew up with. These people were more of everything. More for justice and more for humanity than most of those high flying socialist theoreticians. I’m finding something that is filling what is missing for me, personally.
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