HUMAN COCOON | THE GUARDIAN - REVIEW
Beyza Yazgan: Human Cocoon Review - from Middle Eastern classical to American minimalism
- Contemporary album of the month -
The Turkish-born, New York-based pianist’s new album uses the influence of Satie and Glass to respond to the earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria
by: John Lewis | July, 2024
Born in Busan, Turkey, trained in Warsaw and, since 2016, based in New York City, Beyza Yazgan is a pianist whose compositions seem to have absorbed many very different worlds – Middle Eastern classical music, Chopin’s Romanticism, French impressionism, American minimalism and jazz. She started writing this album in 2023, apparently in response to the devastating earthquakes on the border of Syria and Turkey: Human Cocoon was, she says, a way of dealing with “the cacophony of unresolved emotions and existential questions”.
Erik Satie is clearly an influence on pieces such as Old Things and Memories and Güzel Güzel (there’s even an explicit tribute to Satie’s Gymnopédies in the shape of a jerky waltz called Gnomepedes (in Satie’s garden)), but there are other reference points. Pasaj features a glistening take on Philip Glass-style minimalism; The Immortal Machine evokes the exciting motorik chaos of Conlon Nancarrow; while some of her more exploratory solos, like All Gone (02.2023, Türkiye) and Cool Burning, recall Keith Jarrett’s improvisations on The Köln Concert.
Yazgan’s previous album, 2021’s To Anatolia, featured radical rearrangements of mid-20th-century classical pieces by the pioneering composers known as “the Turkish five”, and many of the melodies throughout Human Cocoon borrow from the maqam scales used in Turkish traditional music, like the slightly dissonant flattened fifths on the spooky, Bach-like opening track, Question.
Most affecting of all is Haiku Tune, where Yazgan hums a simple major-key melody over a series of achingly slow piano chords and single notes. Even at her most artless and unaffected, she can wrench emotion out of simplicity.
