Sanem Kalfa – If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The new album by the vocalist Sanem Kalfa offers an eclectic and quietly captivating selection of textures and forms which altogether mark another stride forward for the artist. Firmly ensconced in the Dutch jazz scene, she appeared with the Kaja Draksler Acropolis Quartet and as part of the Horizon Trio with George Dumitriu and Steven Kamperman before Nehir in 2014 marked her debut as a leader. More recently, in early 2022 she was invited by the iconic and decidedly chic Bimhuis – the black box perched over the IJ waterfront in Amsterdam which serves as the Dutch capital’s premier destination for jazz music – to inaugurate its Reflex series, with the singer composing an assortment of songs which she performed on stage accompanied by such colleagues as the drummer Sun Mi-Hong and pianist Marta Warelis.

Kalfa’s new project is a solo record as she accompanies her voice on cello, electronics and ukulele. The long title If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? suggests both the solitary nature of her undertaking and some of the restive, rustling and probing qualities of her work. Its nine tracks comprise wholly original compositions and several settings of texts by the Turkish poet, translator and graphic designer Sait Maden plus a couple of loose covers or interpretations. These close out the album which arrives on Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s label Sonic Transmissions Records now as brusque summer takes the ground from verdant spring.

The strength and dexterity of Kalfa’s voice is hardly in question. At the outset of her career in 2010 she won the Montreux Jazz Festival’s voice competition, an award presented that year by Quincy Jones. Yet on If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? she features for the first time at length her instrumental prowess on the cello, from the coarse bows and rubs of the album opener ‘We are the same plant’ to the bassy plucks of the first Sait Maden setting on ‘Ev İçi‘. As if to settle or juxtapose some of this rubberiness and angularity, on the sweetly plaintive ‘How Love’ and ‘Yük’ she instead accompanies her more lilting tones through a spare and softly-plucked ukulele.

The singer hails from the city of Trabzon in northeast Turkey, the country’s second-largest port out onto the Black Sea. A centre of Turkish folk music, for more than a century Trabzon or Trebizond possessed a significant and storied Armenian community, which was decimated by the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian genocide which was carried out during World War I. On the album’s standout track ‘Adanayi Vogpe / Adana Adana Ağıdı / Lament of Adana’ – an anonymous lament for the Armenians killed in the southern Adana massacre of 1909 – Kalfa brings all of these connections to bear, variously summoning aspects of Turkish folk music and its counterparts across the Middle East and the Caucasus as her spartan voice quavers with grief. On the other hand ‘Ev İçi‘ strikes a similar note but proves more plummy and buoyant, her vocals over the low drones and impish pizzicato of the cello at times even suggesting the poignant ghazals and whorling qawwali of Arooj Aftab or the looping syllables of Jewish niggunim.

By stark contrast the splintering experimental patter of ‘Rollercoaster’ sounds like a cross between Einar Örn who jabbered away relentlessly at the head of the Sugarcubes and the fond but somehow audacious and strident harmonies of the Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg album Accept When. The brief penultimate track ‘Loneliness Is Time Spent’ finds Kalfa cooing to a composition by the acclaimed trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire while the closer ‘Seher Yeli’ – a cover of an early song by the celebrated Turkish folk singer Güler Duman, with lyrics by Aşık Sıtkı Baba and music by Nesimi Çimen – layers her tender vocals into something as brisk and piquantly windswept as the morning breeze.

From stark laments then which flirt with plainsong and sound like cloistered hymnals, solitary and vestigial to swirling rhapsodies and experimental polyphonies or from the pungency and elasticity of bowed or plucked cello to dulcet strings and spectral electronics, this album by Sanem Kalfa offers a little bit of everything while still producing a strong cumulative effect. Pungent and flourishing, as one tall tree Kalfa seems to have cultivated her own forest, answering her title’s well-worn philosophical riddle with a trenchant and resounding ‘yes’.