Improvisational pianist to play at Waldron Center

Alumnus Hakan Ali Toker will perform at the John Waldron Arts Center Friday night, but he has no idea what he is going to play. Known for his one-of-a-kind combination of diverse musical styles, the Turkish-born pianist is a master of improvisation. Toker plans to take requests from the audience Friday and transform familiar pieces into something entirely unique.\n"He's really fun to watch," said Bloomington Area Arts Council Performance Director Kaira Hogle. "It's all on the fly, which is very challenging."\nToker said he started "messing around" with a two-octave keyboard when he was 8 years old and never stopped. \n"I always loved the toys with which you could build your own things," he said. "My very first instinct about how to treat a keyboard was to mess around with it. Later on I realized I could actually play some songs on it."\nEventually his parents got him piano lessons and he was accepted into a music conservatory. Through his musical instruction, he had to learn how to play structured pieces, but Toker said he always rebelled and wanted to play his own thing.\n"I never stopped improvising. I hated to practice. I loved the piano, but I could not stand sitting in the room and playing the same song over and over again," Toker said. "I got bored, and I started messing with it. I started 'Turkifying' it and doing things that would make Beethoven scream." \nBy the age of 17, Toker was playing and collaborating with ensembles and orchestras around the world. He was the youngest artist to perform in the International Instanbul Music Festival and the first Turk to participate in the Lvov Festival of Virtuosi, where he introduced contemporary Turkish piano music to the Ukrainian public.\n"Middle Eastern music has interesting meters that aren't very common in the West," Toker said.\nToker came to IU in 1997 to study piano and composition. Since his graduation in 2000, Toker has made Bloomington his home and played in concerts and festivals throughout the Midwest. This year, Toker received an Individual Artist Project grant from the Indiana Arts Commission to play a series of concert dates throughout the state. His concert Friday is one of the first engagements of his Indiana concert series, which will include performances in Lafayette, Muncie and Evansville.\nAlumna Dena El Saffar, who plays improvisational Middle Eastern music with Toker in the Bloomington-based band Salaam, said Toker's concerts are always exciting because they are so unpredictable and unique.\n"When he starts to play, you never know what he's going to do," El Saffar said.\nEl Saffar described a concert at Auer Hall in which Toker encouraged his audience to leave their cell phones on and let their children make noise to add to the improvisational atmosphere of the concert.\n"He's always been blowing people's minds with the stuff he does," El Saffar said.\nToker recently released a CD of music he completely made up while in the recording studio. \n"I just sit down and play, and whatever happens, happens," Toker said of what he does to prepare for recording sessions. \nThe CD, titled "Transformations," will be sold at his concert and is also available at www.tulumba.com. Most of the tracks are Toker's renditions of pre-existing songs. For example, Toker's first track, "All Because of Elise," is based on the music of Beethoven.\n"The elements of music — the melody, the rhythm — they all individually can be stretched, changed and messed with," Toker said. "I'm really composing on the spot."\nToker's style of improvisation is one classical musicians sometimes followed when entertaining. Many classical musicians used to warp pre-existing melodies and improvise to create new compositions.\nToker said he encourages students of music to improvise in their leisure time.\n"I think it's really healthy for any student to do this," he said. "The more you do it, the more fun you start having."\nToker said he doesn't write down the compositions he creates when he is improvising and that he hopes to make a career out of performances like the one he is doing Friday at the John Waldron Arts Center.\n"I don't want to be a composer and have no time to practice, and I don't want to be a pianist who has no time to write. Instead of revising and perfecting a given piece, I want to perfect the process," Toker said. "I'm trying to make a discipline out of what began as slacking off."\n-- Contact arts editor Jenica Schultz at jwschult@indiana.edu.