After 22 hours of riding in an ADO bus from Mérida, I have made it to beautiful Oaxaca. This is my second time visiting the state’s capital. I spent about three months last year in this paradise-like looking place. I have realized that after my two
As an excellent example of what I am talking about are the next couple of shows I will be playing at Teocintle. Last year I had discovered the work of Germán and Ivan. They were doing some authentic Oaxacanian food with a visual presentation of author cuisine. They were sharing space among other artisans at a cooperative called Corazón Étnico. While I was gone, it looks like the co-op, for the most part, fell apart, but Germán and a couple of his friends did not give up and continued the adventure of Teocintle. Now they have their own restaurant a couple of blocks from their previous location. The two shows, I will be playing at Teocintle will hopefully help to promote the newly operating restaurant. I am really excited because we have complete freedom to do what we want. It’s a bit more challenging than playing at an established club in terms of infrastructure and drawing people, but at the same time, it’s so refreshing to put our own show together. Authentic cuisine meeting authentic original music could be the perfect combination to enjoy two week-end nights in Oaxaca.
The Proof of “Everything happens for a reason”
So far, this Mexican tour has been all about collaborating with smaller and independent structures. I feel like those structures are helping me to reach a new audience, and by playing and promoting shows, I also feel like I am helping these structures and other creative people involved in the process to get their work exposure to people who are following Black Sea Storm on social media and who are showing up to my live performances. It feels to me the six month period I lived in Mexico last year was actually a building block for making this tour
La Jícara Show
Four days after making it to Oaxaca I got to play my first show in town. La Jícara is a fantastic structure and appeared to me before playing the show as a great place to perform. A large dining area surrounded by libraries and stores selling hand made local products. When I arrived at the venue for soundcheck a couple of hours before showtime, a good number of tables were already taken by customers. As Violeta, the person in charge of the booking at the venue was setting up the P.A, and I was getting my cables out of my gig-bag, two street musicians entered the room and performed a song. This is the first time I witness musicians hijacking other musician’s soundcheck slot to perform their music live and generate instant cash. I wasn’t playing, and they only performed one song, collected some money from the tables and left. Since the whole operation took about four minutes or so, it was no big deal for me.
As we were getting closer to showtime, the venue started to fill up seriously. I couldn’t tell if people were here to dine or enjoy the show. Probably both. Pretty quickly, all the tables were taken. Around 8:00 PM Violeta gave me the go, to start the show. There was a high level of restaurant noise. As I took the mic to introduce myself, the room went silent for a brief while. After I was done talking people applauded. It felt nice to be welcomed. As I started to play the noise level went up again. I could see that half of the house was there to dine, and there were the other half of the people watching the show with full attention. Some of them were sitting, and others were standing up against the dining room’s walls. Although half of the people did not seem to care about me playing, each time I would finish a song people would stop talking, and the entire room would give a round of applause for Black Sea Storm.
Involuntary Juvenile Sabotage
I was thrilled with the turnout, but I have to admit that my songs with the quiet arpeggiated parts were challenging to play with the level of the ambient noise. As I started to play my fourth song on the setlist “Boşalan Dünyam” I began to hear an out of key and out of time high pitched sound over my music. I thought it would stop on its own, but it didn’t. It was a horrible sound to my ears, and it was utterly destroying what I was aiming to accomplish with my guitar and my voice. After a couple of dozens of seconds, I realized that there was the cutest little girl in the front row with a toy whistle in her mouth. She was trying to play along with me. Her mom seemed to be entirely into my performance since she was watching me play with full attention. So there was no intentional disrespect in any shape or form, but the consequences of the child blowing into her whistle were damaging my performance. I just looked at the mom and then looked at her child, trying to express my sonic discomfort without being rude or give her a rock star attitude. After a couple of iterations of me looking in the eyes of the mom and looking at her child. The mom understood the situation and suggested to her child to stop being a part of Black Sea Storm for the night.
Short after the little girly quitting the band and me motivationally losing a bit of steam due to the whistling incident. I decided to go through the remaining portion of the set trying to impose myself against the noise and the indifference of half of the crowd. The strumming parts functioned better than the quiet arpeggiated parts. I think I was able to represent myself to the best of my abilities in the current situation. I had mixed feelings. In a way it was great to play in front of a relatively large amount of people ( I am guessing near a hundred people showed up that night), on the other hand, to play background music to people dining was a new experience for me. I am not sure how much I enjoy this with my current acoustic setup.
Building Rock n’ Roll Muscle Live
What I love about this tour so far is that I have been confronted to challenges in ways I have never been challenged before. Being alone and playing an acoustic guitar and singing is a whole different experience than playing electric bass in a rock band. This setup has its own set of challenges, but I feel like trying to overcome them is making me stronger as a musician show after show.
Luis the Turkish Speaking Mexican
At the end of the show, while I was still on stage, a young man was waving at me. Since I am not wearing contacts anymore, I thought he was maybe someone I knew. As I got closer to the dude waving, I realized that he was a complete stranger. He suddenly started to talk to me with an impressive level of Turkish. My first thought was that maybe he was from Azerbaijan or from some another Turkish Republic in central Asia. I soon realized that he was a full blood Mexican from Oaxaca. This was an imposing situation to be in. The man introduced himself as Luis. He told me that when he heard that there was a Turkish Rock act performing in town, he decided to come to enjoy the show. Luis also told me that he had stayed a year in Türkiye as an exchange student, and prior to visiting my native country, he had spent eight entire months learning Turkish on his own in Oaxaca. So here we have the proof that Turkish can be learned and spoken at a fluent level in about 20 months if one puts in the effort.
Çağrı Yılmaz
Before playing my first El Teatrito Show in Mérida, I had met with the owners Ricardo and Amanda on a separate night to book Black Sea Storm. As they found out that I was from Türkiye they mentioned the name of a puppeteer from my home country named Çağrı Yılmaz. As it turns out, Çağrı is also touring Mexico and other parts of Mesoamerica with her puppet show. Besides, she puts together workshops teaching people how to build puppets by hand. Çağrı happened to perform at El
Right after I played the first El
I would love to meet Çağrı in person at one point somewhere in Latin America and attend one of her shows. Who knows maybe she and I will be able to put together a 100% Turkish bill for an entire night somewhere in this part of the World.