Yalcin Hasancebi

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I was born in Istanbul. This city will forever be the love of my life, wherever I live. But my childhood is strongly linked with Germany - I went to Germany with my family at the age of 3 and returned to Turkey at 18 with the knowledge of German and fascinated with the guitar. I discovered classical guitar at the age of 11, and since then, my life was never the same.

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Driven by the wish for professionalizing in jazz, in 2018 I successfully graduated with honors from the Jazz Masters Program offered by the Bahcesehir University, Faculty of Sound Technology, Istanbul, Turkey. My master thesis that I wrote under the supervision of my dear professor and mentor Alper Maral was about the influence of Miles Davis’s electric years on jazz-rock: “The Influence of the Projects of Miles Davis’s Electric Years on Jazz-Rock and the Elements Implemented by his Sidemen after 1968” (in Turkish, summary on p. 5 in English). 

While working on the thesis, I got fascinated by jazz-rock. Indeed, over the last four decades, no musical innovation in jazz has been more important that its fusion with rock. The emergence of this genre drove a wedge deep into jazz audiences, dividing them into those that wanted to cling to the acoustic tradition and those who saw the jazz tradition as one of change. My research focus was the innovations offered by Miles Davis, one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz, who abandoned conventional jazz practices in the late 60s to experiment with avant-garde improvisation, rock music, and electric instruments, using elaborate, electronic postproduction techniques. Not only did Miles Davis discover and nurture a generation of musicians at the forefront of jazz, but he also took jazz improvisation and technical innovations to even more challenging levels. In the various aspects of his music, Davis introduced elements previously considered anomalous to jazz. I was looking into those elements in my work. At present, I am working on expanding my research and turning it into the book. 

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As a musician and composer in 2018, I with a group of talented Turkish musicians recorded my first jazz album “For a New Life” with Garaj Müzik, one of the major label companies in Istanbul.

Apart from my music career I love teaching guitar to adults and children and am doing it for over 18 years. 

Currently, I live in Switzerland and am developing my academic and performing jazz musician and jazz composer career.