Midnight at the Pera Palace

“THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”

Istanbul jazz: A four-piece band, probably in the 1920s, with the female vocalist using a megaphone, a typical amplification device of the period.

THERE IS NO WELL-DEVELOPED field of study called sonic history, but the changes in the audible world would have impressed themselves on anyone living in Istanbul in the interwar years. The first automobile in the city’s history had been exhibited in a showroom window on the Grande Rue during the reign of Abdülhamid II and attracted crowds of spectators for months, but now the vroom and sputter of motorcars filled the streets and alleyways. A trolley clanged its way up the Grande Rue. A horn announced the approach of a pilot boat on the Bosphorus. A train screamed as it came around the bend toward Sirkeci station. The low buzz of an airplane’s propeller droned overhead.

“At Pera, where I live, a perfect inferno of music is let loose from sunset until two o’clock in the morning,” said Marthe Bibesco, a Romanian princess and society maven. She watched weary-faced men and women drag themselves beneath the gaslights from bandstand to bandstand like a flock of sheep. Rival concerts were struck up downhill on the appropriately named Tomtom Kaptan Street, while phonographs wailed from open windows and organ-grinders passed by on the street below. As the night wore on, shouts drifted up from the harbor when sailors were bounced out of bars and made their way back to ship.

Istanbul was, in a way it never had been before, loud. Music spilled from clubs. The sirens of ambulances, military automobiles, and fire engines—a novelty introduced during the Allied occupation—shrieked and howled. “They exasperate and deafen,” said an editorial in the Orient News in 1919, “but they are probably not so effective in clearing the way as the ordinary horn.” Messages and annoyances that had been delivered by the naked human voice—the curses of a frustrated hamal or the insistent solicitations from a vendor in the Spice Bazaar—competed with sounds made from afar and conveyed through new technologies. It was now possible for Istanbullus to feel themselves intimately acquainted with people they had never met.

That change was evident in an industry that genuinely took the city by storm in the 1920s. Movies had been screened since the turn of the century, but they were mainly time-fillers between stage acts, one-reel shorts that could be cast on a wall or a makeshift screen while actors were changing costumes or assembling in the wings. Istanbul had its own well-established street theater and an indigenous form of kinetic art, the famous Karagöz, in which a puppeteer cast the shadows of flat, semitransparent figures onto a backlit screen. Especially popular during Ramadan and other holidays, Karagöz held its own against film until the First World War, when the first permanent movie venue—little more than a converted coffeehouse, in fact—opened opposite the British Embassy off the Grande Rue. In short order, the city’s elite politicians, businessmen, and military figures came out to see first-run films, often imported German or French productions. Men and women were kept chastely separate by a partition, but mixed crowds became more common during the occupation years. The venues were still rough coffeehouses that might double as bars and were generally unsuited to the genteel public. “There are a lot of ‘movie’ shows,” reported Billy Fox-Pitt, the Welsh Guardsman, “but they all look pretty bug-ridden!”

Proper cinemas soon sprang up around the city, however. Istanbullus could see French, Italian, and American films, distributed by companies such as Fox, Paramount, and MGM, at any number of often ornate and inviting establishments—the Melek, the Alhambra, the Magic, the Artistique, or the enormous Glorya, seating 1,400 people and opened in November 1930. By the beginning of that decade, the city had thirty-nine cinemas offering both silent films and talkies.

The huge popularity of imported films—and the lucrative job of distributing them—meant that developing a local film industry took time. The first talkie in Turkish, On the Streets of Istanbul, appeared in 1931, created by the firm that would become one of the principal film producers in the early republic, the pekçi brothers. Migrants from Salonica, the five brothers had owned a prominent department store in the Eminönü neighborhood before moving into the cinema business. On the Streets of Istanbul was crude, a romp about two men in love with the same woman, and it owed its soundtrack to Paris, where the film was produced, but its popularity did help finance a new Istanbul-based company. Two years later, pek Film debuted its first locally produced talkie, A Nation Awakes. Directed by Muhsin Erturul and with a score by the noted composer Muhlis Sabahattin, the film was a hyperbolic account of the occupation period, with Senegalese infantrymen molesting Muslim girls and Allied soldiers bayoneting Turks in their beds. For the first time, Istanbullus, and Turkish citizens in general, could see a sound-enhanced version of their own recent history flashing before them on the screen. Its impact on popular memory was immense. When later generations of Muslim Istanbullus looked back on the occupation, the uninvited gropings of French African soldiers became a common refrain, even though few people of the era probably ever encountered a Senegalese rifleman at all.

As in other parts of the world, film was emerging as an important medium for communicating exactly the messages that states wanted to get across—the duty of patriotism, the lineaments of civic virtue, the demands of national loyalty—but audiences inevitably voted with their pocketbooks. Tickets were reasonably expensive, as much as a quarter of an ordinary laborer’s daily wage, so visits to the cinema had to be worthwhile. Distributors seemed to understand that Istanbullus preferred exactly the same kind of content as their counterparts in western Europe and the United States. A detailed survey of first-run films in the summer of 1932 revealed the range of Istanbul’s viewing preferences: 96 percent of films showed characters using alcohol, 74 percent had a plot concerned with wealth or luxury, 70 percent centered on a love affair, 67 percent had actresses clad in suggestive clothing, 52 percent showed passionate romance, and 37 percent featured sexy dancing. Most of the movies—63 percent—were also determined to have an implausible plot.

Cinemas, like the city overall, were noisy, with people reading the subtitles aloud, standing up, walking out, stamping their feet to the musical score, or arguing with the main character. They were places where all of Istanbul’s social classes could, in theory, come together. That was a novel phenomenon that took some adjustments. In the past, most public gathering places in the city had made clear distinctions in terms of rank, with preferred positions or the best seating awarded not just to those who could afford it but also to those whose family ties and government station placed them above the hoi polloi. The Ottoman Turkish language had a multitude of ways of expressing rank, and that hierarchy was made concrete every time two of the sultan’s subjects happened to meet in the same place. But in a democratizing, republican city, this way of handling things was on the way out.

A widely reported legal case confirmed the transition. In March 1928, three assistant public prosecutors—Baha, Nesuhi, and Midhat—presented themselves at the Opera Cinema and demanded to be admitted, presumably free of charge, to the film then playing there. They further demanded to be seated in a box, the only location they believed appropriate to their position as government officials. The proprietor, Cevad, refused. A heated altercation ensued. The police were eventually called, and Cevad was arrested for insulting the prosecutors and obstructing them in the performance of their official duties. The Istanbul press came to Cevad’s defense, pointing out how ludicrous the charges were and objecting to the existing practice of requiring cinema owners to reserve box seats for high officials. The next month, Cevad stood trial. Given that he was going up against three government men, his prospects looked slim. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, he was acquitted. One of the pushy assistant prosecutors was removed from his post, and Cevad reported to the press that he intended to sue all three. Cinemas had become one of the republic’s great equalizers.

Movie houses were both public spaces and private ones, which is why Cevad believed there was no reason for him to cave to the demands of petty bureaucrats. The element of privacy was also important to people who went there precisely because they wanted to hide. The traditional separation of the sexes had never been an obstacle to determined lovers, even under the Ottomans, but with the rise of dark and comfortable cinemas, there was now a new environment in which the amorous could meet. Depending on their layout and the opportunities for concealment, certain cinemas became well known as rendezvous zones. Those with balconies and closed boxes were the most desirable, especially when tickets were discounted during matinees. After painstaking research in the six leading cinemas, one observer concluded that nearly all the audiences “contained couples who were ostentatiously love making and in many cases kissing and making obvious advances to each other.” The average number of amorous couples at each performance was determined to be just over six, while the total number for the twenty-seven surveyed performances was 177. In three cases, “professional women”—that is, prostitutes—were reportedly involved.

Unlike stage acts, however, film had the power not only to bring audiences into a performance venue but also to keep their attention long after they had left. People didn’t just watch films. They could imagine themselves inside the screen—having a passionate affair, whistling a signature tune, twirling through the lobby of a grand hotel. “For a city of its size and cosmopolitanism Constantinople is one of the most poorly equipped in the world for satisfying the aesthetic cravings of its population,” reported a foreign resident in 1923. But in relatively short order, film, popular songsheets, and recorded music were all within easy reach. Virtually any upper-class Muslim or non-Muslim family had long considered a phonograph to be an essential piece of parlor furniture, and after the arrival of the White Russians, the city was awash in the devices. Victrolas with large metal listening horns were dumped on the market by Russian families who had spirited them out of Crimea as part of their valued belongings. By the early 1920s, they could be had for as little as twenty to thirty lira, easily within reach of many families.

Throughout the decade, importers brought in more and more machines, and at music shops along the Grande Rue—Max Friedman’s, the Papadopoulos Brothers, Sigmund Weinberg’s—the proprietors found a ready market for mechanical players, recorded disks, and printed music from Europe and the United States. Pirated sheet music became such a large-scale industry that Western embassies increasingly regarded Istanbul as one of the prime offenders in the violation of intellectual property rights. Barely had a dance tune made it onto the market in New York or Paris than a low-priced version could be picked up in Pera.

The advent of international stardom, home entertainment, and recorded sound transformed street life in Istanbul. It also created a new set of careers. In the past, the fame of professional musicians had been limited by geography. Musicians might be highly regarded in a particular neighborhood or sought out for a wedding or other celebration across town, but national or international acclaim was hard to imagine. Now an audience could love someone they had never met and cry at a song they had never heard performed live. Music also came to be divided into clear genres, each with its own artists, fans, and expert critics: a folk song, or türkü, from Anatolia; a lyrical air, or arkı, based on Ottoman classical music; a kanto that emerged from everyday urban life and mixed in melodies and tonalities from the West.

Turks were eagerly borrowing forms of public entertainment from Europe. New words flowed easily into spoken Turkish, especially from French and English. A young man could spend an evening at a gardenparti while being served by a garson and imagine himself a member of the burjuazi before relieving himself at the pisuvar. In the late 1920s, ordinances proscribing signs in foreign languages did little to prevent Turkish businesses from simply altering the spelling without ruining their own reputation. That is why so many of the famous clubs and restaurants of the era had names that seemed utterly nonsensical in Turkish until you pronounced them phonetically: the Türkuvaz (or Turquoise), the Rejans (or Régence), the Roznuvar (or Rose Noire), the Mulenruj (or Moulin Rouge).

Turks also adopted a way of describing a feeling. It was now possible to remember, even pine for, a specific and imagined world at the exact moment when it seemed to be slipping into the irretrievable past. There was little that was Ottoman about these memories, at least not in the sense of thinking wistfully about sultans, harems, and the recumbent life of pashas and beys. Its themes were, rather, a northerly breeze on the Bosphorus, a furtive love, an old wooden house, sheep on a high meadow, or a faraway city to which it was impossible to return. Turks borrowed yet another French word and called the whole thing nostalji—nostalgia. It was the stock-in-trade of three musicians who came to embody the sonic landscape of a changing city.

Roza Eskenazi, Hrant Kenkulian, and Seyyan were all members of the last generation of Istanbullus to call themselves subjects of the sultan. They never shared a stage, and at the time they were born—at some point between about 1895 and 1915; they were coy about, or ignorant of, their actual birth dates—the social dividing lines within Ottoman society would have defined the directions and possibilities available to them. Roza was Jewish, Hrant an Armenian, and Seyyan a Muslim, and had it not been for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, their lives might have been mapped out mainly within the confines of those religiously defined communities.

But in the early Turkish Republic, their reputations were deeply intertwined. If you knew one, you probably knew all three. What they had in common was an ability to encapsulate loss and longing in a single vocal phrase or pluck of a string. In their own ways, they had a better claim than many artists to capturing the essence of an era—a time when coming to Istanbul, or leaving it, was the defining journey for hundreds of thousands of old Ottoman subjects and new Turkish citizens.

Roza Eskenazi was a native Istanbullu, the daughter of a poor Jewish rag merchant. While still a girl, she found herself caught up in the movement of refugees and opportunity-seekers occasioned by the Young Turk revolution and the Balkan Wars. At roughly the same time that the family of the photographer Selahattin Giz was moving from provincial Salonica to the Ottoman capital, Roza’s family set out in the opposite direction, toward a city where Jews were the single largest ethnic and religious group in a mix that included Greeks, Turkish-speaking Muslims, Bulgarians, and others. For a Jewish family looking to move up in the world, resettling in Salonica was a reasonable idea. Roza’s father seems to have found work in a textile mill, her mother as a domestic servant, and Roza grew up amid the street life of a city that was in many ways Istanbul in miniature—a cosmopolitan port, Muslim in its political identity, but where mosques shared space with Sephardic synagogues and Greek Orthodox churches in the maze of small streets and avenues winding down to the Aegean Sea.

The family remained there even after the Hellenic kingdom assumed formal control of the city in 1912, but five years later, an enormous fire reduced much of Salonica’s docklands and lower city to ashes. Jewish neighborhoods near the port were especially affected, and families had to think hard about whether, and where, to start over. Roza’s talent as a singer was noticed while she was still a girl, and through marriage and motherhood, she seems to have nursed the desire to appear on the stage. In the early 1920s, by then a young widow, she moved to Athens and began to work the cabaret circuit. She teamed up with Greek and Armenian musicians, some of them newly arrived “exchangees” from Turkey or migrants from the charred ruins of Salonica. She was already developing her signature style: the rough-hewn and smoky voice, the freewheeling sense of meter, the lyrics that seem to be pronounced with a cigarette hanging from her lips. Plump and almond-eyed, with a shock of curly hair oiled into dark waves, Roza quickly made a name for herself in Athens, but she owed her musical essence to the cities of the Turkish coast, to Istanbul and especially Smyrna, the homeland of the musical genre known as rebetiko.

The Greek word rebetiko has no clear derivation, but even at the start of Roza’s career, anyone in her audience would have known what it meant. It was the torch song of the urban gangster, the lyrical reminiscence of a down-and-out hustler, the soundtrack of a world in which people overspent in poverty and sometimes killed the person they loved the most. It was an Aegean version of the blues, sung in both Greek and Turkish, with hashish dens standing in for American juke joints and the Mediterranean coast taking the place of the Mississippi Delta. Rebetiko had been brought to Greece by the people displaced in the great emptying of Smyrna in 1922. Roza had never experienced this world directly; she was an Istanbullu, after all, and was probably only a teenager when she left the Ottoman capital. But she was on the leading edge of westward migration out of the faltering empire. In both Salonica and Athens, she was surrounded by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews who had left everything behind in cities that were now part of a new and foreign republic.

Roza’s genius lay not in the quality of her voice. She had the odd habit of speaking in falsetto and singing in a solid alto. Her voice sounds so much like a clarinet, slightly nasal and pinched, that it is easy to forget that the instrument appears in only a few of her recordings. Unlike classically trained singers, her sense of pitch is often approximate, even in an Eastern musical tradition that prizes microtones and unusual modes. But she was unrivaled in her ability to reflect the experience of immigrants still totaling up the lives and fortunes they had lost. It is not too much to say that she had become, by 1930 or so, the truest voice of the Greek diaspora, and as she toured the world—even returning for a string of concerts in Istanbul after the Second World War—her fame only grew. By the time of her death in 1980, she had lived not only through the real birth of rebetiko as a concert genre—rather than something to be heard only in dives and meyhanes—but also through its second life in the folk revival of the 1960s. She could make people wish they could fly across the sea, leaving behind everything new and settling back into a half-forgotten past. “My soul, that’s enough now,” she sang, “leave my body / don’t make me suffer / give up your hope.”

Rebetiko sounds improvised and loose, but it actually owes a great deal to the musical scales and structure of Ottoman classical music. It is intentionally impure, a product of multiethnic cities and mixed urban neighborhoods. The vocal slides and bravura wailing repeat many of the scales and tonalities that would have been familiar to performers and composers who staged command performances for the sultan and other dignitaries in ages past. Musical styles never stay inside their proper lines; they jump over into new and unexpected venues.

The instrument that became the vehicle for these creative transgressions was also the mainstay of the small band that typically backed Roza Eskenazi. It is an eleven-string, fretless instrument called an oud, or ud in Turkish. Its closest equivalent is the Western lute. The lute is an eccentricity, a bulbous-backed and short-necked oddity today found mainly in ensembles specializing in Renaissance court music or Shakespearean love ballads. But the oud has a vibrant and widespread, at times even fanatical, following all the way from Morocco to Iran. Children take classes in it. Old men pick it up as a retirement project. Pop stars compete for deals with renowned players who might sit in on a recording session. It is in no sense a folk instrument, nor is it just a curiosity of “world music,” a catchall and essentially meaningless category. Its sound is something that hundreds of millions of people across the Muslim world and beyond find instantly familiar.

Among professional as well as amateur oud players, there is no more recognizable name than that of Hrant Kenkulian, or Udi Hrant, as he was generally known. (“Udi” was an honorific title that indicated his position as a master of the instrument.) Blind from birth, Hrant grew up in Istanbul in an Armenian family who had managed to negotiate the multiple transitions from empire to occupation to republic. The massacres and starvation that had emptied parts of Anatolia of its Armenians had been less marked in Istanbul, and the dwindling of the urban community was much like the loss of Greeks—a slow draining of difference, neighborhood by neighborhood, rather than wholesale eradication. The Armenian patriarch, one of several leaders of Armenian Apostolic Christians, remained in place in the neighborhood of Kumkapı, along the Sea of Marmara, and elders within Armenians’ other religious communities sought ways of shielding their flocks by demonstrating loyalty to the state. In 1933, when the Austrian writer Franz Werfel published his famous Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel depicting the Armenian genocide, Armenian Catholics in Istanbul responded by burning the author in effigy, an attempt to win favor with the Turkish government. Even within a political system that put a premium on Turkishness, living as an Armenian was still possible, especially if one avoided politics, spoke only Turkish in public, and embraced silence as a way of dealing with the past.

Little is known about Hrant’s early life, but he emerged in the 1920s as one of the city’s most popular oud players, with a surprising set of innovations that expanded the limits of the instrument. He could play double-stops, or two strings at the same time, in the style of a violinist. He could pluck the strings with both his left and his right hands, and, like a guitarist, use both sides of the plectrum, sounding a note on the upstroke as well as the downstroke of his right hand. This might seem like scant reason for renown, but few people had thought of playing the oud in this way, and it was no accident that Hrant developed these techniques at a time when jazz guitarists and violinists, with their free-form styles, could be heard all along the Grande Rue.

Jazz depends on improvisation, which is why it has been described as not just a musical form but an ethical system. It demands that a player really listen to his comrades, with the bravery to step forward when he has something to say and the self-possession to know when he has said enough. It requires virtuosity but also humility. All this was a revelation to musicians such as Hrant, since they had come from a sonic world that by and large kept these virtues separate. A renowned singer might be applauded for his vocal agility or the memorization of a long musical sequence, such as the famed hafizes who managed to commit the entire Qur’an to melodic memory. In Turkish classical music, however, ensembles typically played in unison, with multiple instruments carrying the same melodic line and everyone playing all the time.

But Hrant was able to gather the best of these traditions and merge them with the sounds and techniques that would have swirled around him in interwar Istanbul. He was a master of indigenous improvisation, the spiraling and nearly out-of-control music called a taksim. Improvisations are musical one-offs, made up on the spot and by nature fleeting and daring. A good taksim can never be repeated note for note, because even an accomplished instrumentalist would be hard-pressed to re-create exactly the same bend of a string or precisely the same plectrum stroke. A bad one, though, can wreck a career. It is a species of instrumental music that always threatens to fall flat.

That is why listening to Hrant was both thrilling and nail-biting. He ran up the oud’s neck and back down it. He plunked on the lower strings to give himself a steady bass line while laying down a cascade of high notes above. He had rivals among the city’s oud players, but no one developed quite the international following that Hrant enjoyed. He toured abroad and, after the Second World War, recorded some of his work in live sessions in New York. Like Roza Eskenazi, he was a multilingual artist, easily moving between Turkish and Armenian and composing his own songs in both languages. He still appeared regularly in Pera nightclubs until his death in the late 1970s.

There was nothing unusual about a world in which a Greek-speaking Jew became the voice of the Greek diaspora or a blind Armenian could revolutionize the playing of an instrument that Turks, Arabs, and Persians all think of as their own. People always somehow manage to lead messier lives than nationalists would like. Artistic genius depends on that fact. What was truly new in this era, however, was not just the emergence of widely known artists but rather the appearance of a very specific type of one: a Muslim woman, her hair and face uncovered, performing before a paying and mixed-gender audience.

Muslim women were studying in theater schools in Istanbul already at the end of the First World War, but a city ordinance in 1921 prevented them from appearing on stage. It was not until eight years later that the first female actress, Afife Jale, took part in a stage play, and even then it was only as a stand-in for an Armenian actress who had fled the country. After that point, however, Turkish Muslim women took to the stage and began to create their own versions of musical styles, from classical to cabaret, which had previously been the purview of minority artists or foreign touring companies. Local singers competed to be the first to indigenize an international musical style, to make a borrowed object into a rooted and Turkish one. The first to do it for the tango was Seyyan.

Like many female performers of the day, she was known only by her given name, with perhaps the title “Hanım,” or Madam, suffixed to it. With her flapper bob and kohl-lined eyes, Seyyan was among the earliest singers to reject classical styles in favor of her own interpretation of Western forms. The Turkish Republic was obsessed with trumpeting its modernity by seeking the help of leading practitioners in a variety of fields, especially music. The composer Paul Hindemith arrived in 1935 to set up the first national conservatory; the next year, Béla Bartók was invited to collect Anatolian folk songs and render them into symphonic form, much as he had done in his native Hungary. But while classically trained and an accomplished concert performer herself, Seyyan Hanım developed an interest in tango, which had made its way to Istanbul following the same path that had brought the foxtrot and the shimmy to dance halls over the previous decade. In 1932, she began to debut a tune by Istanbul composer Necip Celal and lyricist Necdet Rütü that was quickly labeled the first of its genre, a truly original and certifiably Turkish tango.

The song had an over-the-top title—“The Past Is a Wound in My Heart”—and the words were pure melodrama:

I, too, suffered from love.

My life was destroyed because of this love.

I knew that the price of this love

Was my youth slipping away. . . .

Finally I fell and drowned

In the green sea of her eyes. . . .

My heart became a ruined land.

But in Seyyan’s hands, the song became something more: a simple and heartrending recollection of loss and regret. She ended each of the lines with an upward lilt of her warbly falsetto, hanging there like an outstretched hand, before sliding down to the repeated chorus: “The past is a wound in my heart / My fate is darker than my hair / The thing that makes me cry from time to time / Is this sad memory.” A piano provided the backing chords and rhythm, while a violin repeated her vocal line, a nod to the classical tradition of multiple players plodding through a melody in unison.

It was derivative, of course, a style that owed more to Buenos Aires than to Istanbul, but the melody and lyrics were an immediate sensation. “The Past,” as it was known, became her signature tune. In a fleeting song, barely three minutes long, she managed to crystallize a set of familiar feelings—that you carried your past with you, that you could change your home without changing your condition, that some journeys never really come to an end. And since “The Past” was also at base a dance tune, Seyyan had pulled off the remarkable feat of helping an audience hear the past while also seeing it enacted before them, a man and woman intertwined, rooted in place for a moment and then propelling themselves somewhere new, a memory floating on the dance floor.

Roza, Hrant, and Seyyan were part of a vibrant and fast-moving world of popular artists in interwar Istanbul and in its urban diaspora. Given changing tastes, demographics, and politics, their fame was sometimes eclipsed by that of other performers. Connoisseurs differed on the ranking of Turkey’s greats. The real queen of the stage was perhaps Safiye Ayla, a Muslim who is usually acknowledged as the first female singer to perform for President Mustafa Kemal. Steeped in both Ottoman classical music and Anatolian folk idioms, she helped create a taste for wistful laments about village love and long caravans, with an essential sweetness and modernity to her voice that is unmatched in Turkish music. The sisters Lale and Nerkis, Muslim immigrants from Salonica, helped revive Ottoman classical music and fuse it with Western-style operatic forms. Yorgos Bacanos, a Greek oud player born near Istanbul, rivaled Hrant as a player and probably surpassed him in technical proficiency on the instrument. Each of these artists is well known to the cognoscenti of Middle Eastern music. They are genuine obsessions to a relatively small band of aficionados, who keep their memory alive, update their Wikipedia entries, and one-up each other in Internet chat rooms. Their tunes can still silence a boisterous bar crowd in Istanbul today. But the fact that their music survived at all is an accident of history and a unique product of Istanbul’s age of jazz and exile.

Many of these artists were among the core group of musicians to appear on a record label known in Turkish as Sahibinin Sesi, the literal translation of one of the oldest and most storied labels in recording history—HMV, or His Master’s Voice. HMV was marketed by the Gramophone Company, the British firm that was one of the first businesses to offer recorded music on flat records, which had gradually replaced cylinder recordings at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its trademark image—a black and white terrier, head cocked in front of the sound cone of a phonograph—is still among the world’s most effective and long-lasting corporate symbols. In the early 1930s, after a string of mergers and splits in the recording industry, the company joined with a rival, Columbia Gramophone, to form the British giant EMI. Under a variety of names, the company would continue to be a powerhouse of global popular music up to the present.

HMV had been recording in Istanbul since the late Ottoman period, part of the label’s strategy of scooping up popular artists from around the world. Local singers and instrumentalists were recorded on wax cylinders, which were then translated into 78s that could be played on a variety of different gramophone brands. By the late 1920s, HMV executives realized that, with the growing music scene in Istanbul, a new generation of artists was arising whose fame could easily reach beyond local cafés and cabarets. The result was a recording boom. The company’s local affiliate was headed by Aram and Vahram Gesarian, Armenian brothers who signed up virtually all of the major talent of the day.

None of this would have existed, however, had it not been for the experience of migration. The movement of Muslims to Istanbul from Salonica and other Greek and Balkan cities brought a penchant for European musical styles and a long tradition of urban folk singing. The arrival of Muslims from Anatolia brought memories of village life and the folk songs of the countryside. The departure of Greeks from Istanbul and Smyrna made rebetiko a genuinely transnational musical form, a style of singing fused with a sense of longing that was itself the product of the Hellenic invasion and the Turkish war of independence. HMV stepped in to record Roza Eskenazi and Seyyan Hanım precisely because there were now people inside and outside Istanbul—exiles, refugees, and migrants—who thought of the work of these artists as the background music of their own lives. They were willing to pay for the chance to hear it all again in the comfort of their living rooms.

The sounds of Istanbul cabarets, nightclubs, and dive bars now had an international influence that previous generations could never have imagined. As more people listened to the recorded music, more also tried to play it, which is why Istanbul also experienced an upsurge in pirated sheet music around the same time that HMV started releasing its new disks. Even instrument manufacturers found an increasing interest in their creations, given that the oud and other regional instruments were being grouped together with pianos and violins in the HMV recordings. Music was not just a profession but also increasingly a hobby, with amateur instrumentalists and record collectors specializing in Istanbul’s unique amalgam of classical music, jazz, tango, and other styles. In the case of one family of instrument-makers, the heightened interest in these artistic products helped create Istanbul’s first truly global musical brand.

The Zildjians were a family of Armenians whose roots in the city went back centuries. Over time they had developed what can only be called a microniche market. Since the early seventeenth century, they had been the principal supplier of cymbals to Ottoman military bands. (The surname was simply an Armenianized version of the Turkish word for cymbal-maker.) As prominent Armenians, the family was a potential target during the rolling violence of the First World War, and, unlike Udi Hrant’s family, whose poverty probably allowed them to avoid deportation, the Zildjians chose to flee rather than wait for the police to knock on the door.

Some members of the Zildjian clan moved to Romania; others went to the United States. During the Allied occupation, it was reasonably safe to return, and by the early 1920s, their business was again in full swing, employing about half a dozen skilled workmen in Istanbul and producing three thousand pairs of cymbals a year. Since Ottoman bands were in decline, the business now focused on the export market, and the Zildjian name rather quickly acquired a stellar reputation among cymbal-fanciers. “The [manufacturing] process is a secret one,” noted a diplomatic report on the Turkish music industry, “which is said to impart a peculiar resonant quality.” Later in the decade, the family patriarch, Aram Zildjian, decided to move the entire business from Istanbul to Massachusetts, where some members of the family had already settled before the war. There the firm re-created the process of transforming a brass alloy into a cymbal that rang with a clear tone and adequate volume.

The quality of the Zildjian cymbal made an almost immediate impact in the United States. The company began transforming its manufacturing style to meet the needs of jazz orchestras and small ensembles, with cymbals that were lighter and more resonant, to give a muffled stinger slap or a hi-hat shuffle. No longer just a flashy addendum to the beat, saved up and finally spent as a loud crash at the end of an orchestral crescendo or martial fanfare, cymbals became an essential punctuation mark in every phrase of a tune. It was the one piece of equipment that jazz ensembles borrowed whole cloth from military bands and perhaps the only one besides a string bass that it is nearly impossible to imagine a rhythm section without. Over time, the immigrant cymbal-makers acquired a reputation unmatched in the world of percussionists. The Zildjian name, curling over a shiny cymbal in faux-Oriental script, is still one of the most respected brands in the business.

The Zildjians were a direct link between the musical traditions of the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul’s emerging jazz era, as well as ambassadors of a cultural scene that was becoming increasingly international. The hushed slap of a closed hi-hat or the zing of a ride cymbal would have been deeply familiar to two other Istanbul migrants, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegün. The Ertegün brothers were too young to have experienced some of the great nightspots such as Maxim or the Grand Cercle Moscovite. Both were born in Istanbul in the tumultuous era of war and revolution—in 1917 and 1923, respectively—but they spent most of their lives outside the city. Their father, Münir, was a diplomat in the service of the sultan, but, like many in his profession and social class in the early 1920s, he had to make a difficult choice about whether to continue supporting the flailing Mehmed VI or throw in his lot with Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists. He chose the latter and was rewarded with two premier diplomatic posts, first in London and then, by 1935, in Washington, DC, where he served as the Turkish Republic’s first accredited ambassador.

His two sons had developed a penchant for jazz while living in Europe, and they jumped eagerly into Washington’s raucous music scene, pioneered by the city’s foremost performer, Duke Ellington. They spent their weekend evenings along U Street, DC’s version of Harlem, and took occasional trips to New York, with its reefer-filled clubs and late-night music sessions. They became avid collectors of obscure 78s, featuring black dance bands from the South or jazz singers who might have cut only one twin-sided disk in their careers. As sons of a diplomat, they had the social standing and resources to indulge their passions, and even though they were far from Istanbul, they were uniquely representative of the world that the political and cultural changes in the city had produced: a new generation of well-traveled and confident Turkish Muslims who were putting ever more distance between themselves and the old empire. At their age, Münir had worn a fez and a frock coat. His sons wore shoulder pads and saddle shoes.

Within a few years, the brothers had decided to turn their musical tastes into a business. With financial support from a family friend, in 1947 they launched their own recording label, which they called Atlantic Records. The rest, of course, is music history. The label would become one of the principal vehicles for everything from Motown to rock, from Ray Charles to the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Led Zeppelin. Ahmet in particular was numbered among the greatest impresarios of the recording world, ever present above the mixing table with his trademark goatee and thick-rimmed glasses.

The Ertegüns were products of a moment when Istanbullus were becoming worldly, experimental, and modern in ways that would have shocked their grandparents. The Ottomans had been obsessed with catching up to the rest of Europe, but Istanbullus were now reworking global art forms to reflect their unique circumstances. They bent art to fit their own experience of kaleidoscopic cultures and reveled in the possibilities of self-invention. They were not just envying Western culture. Like Hrant and Seyyan, they were also making it. “[A] younger generation that knew not Thomas, Sultan of Jazz,” wrote the New York Times about Frederick Bruce Thomas, the American-Russian-Turkish barkeep and clubland impresario, “is dancing steps it never recognized as anything but Turkish republican.” All of that was possible only because plenty of people like the Ertegüns and Zildjians were of Istanbul but, for reasons prosaic or tragic, no longer in it.