Meet Cosku Turhan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cosku Turhan.

Hi Cosku, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born and raised in Ankara, Turkey. As a kid fascinated with sounds and images, I loved drawing, legos and playing piano. After I saw Lion King, I fell in love with the imagery on screen as much as the music that accompanied it. Going as far back to my childhood, I loved making music as much as I enjoyed painting and creating things. After performing regularly in bands around Ankara and Istanbul and as a result, falling in love with jazz, I was certain I was going to study music. I applied and got accepted to Berklee School of Music, but my parents insisted I try visual arts which led to me studying graphic design. After realizing how much I loved the video art class, I decided to study animation and film which got me into USC Animation and Film school. That’s what initiated my 15 years old animation career where I worked on award-winning movies like Spiderverse, Alice In Wonderland, Blade Runner and wait for it “Lion King” as a visual effects supervisor. While I was focusing on film as a career, I kept playing piano and composing and producing to keep the musician in me fed and avoiding going insane. This painful suppression of that side of me resulted in an accumulation of hundreds of compositions and ideas over the years. After having a kid and going through a creative outlet drought, six years ago I decided to revitalize my musician side and record these compositions. Luckily I have really great musician friends and was able to record these tunes with some of the best jazz musicians in the industry. Being able to inject my Turkish music influence to jazz and modern music has been a passion of me forever. I hope to be able to bring something new and different to the listeners,

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not smooth at all. Since animation took so much of my time and energy, not being able to devote the time needed to practice and perfect the art of performing jazz has always been a pain point in my life. I don’t want to sound too spoiled realizing that I’m lucky to have a film career, but not being able to live through a music career is definitely something that will always stick with me. That being said, I have learnt to make peace with where I am right now with my technique and abilities and am concentrating on composition and combining visual art with music. Any musician will tell you that the biggest obstacle facing a musician is not being able to connect to an audience. There is so much music being added to streaming platforms everyday making it really really difficult to get ahead and be heard. The good old saying “if you build it, they’ll come” doesn’t really apply to music unfortunately because it requires a lot of effort, time, shameful self-promotion and money to promote it. If only LA had better venues to be able to perform art-music and reach a devoted audience.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Since I work on movies where a lot of people get involved to create the final work, I’ll like to talk about my music which is where I’m free to express myself creatively. What I compose and perform is a combination of jazz, modern music and Turkish traditional music with a bit of electronics in it. I guess I’m mostly proud of doing the music that I would love to listen to. I’ve also been dabbling in producing and mixing since I was 13 so I mixed and produced my last album. If I can make people feel “something” (doesn’t need to be joy) while listening I have accomplished everything.

Any big plans?
If I find the funding and the time, I would love to do performances where I can combine my visual effects knowledge with the music; something like improvised interactive visuals that convey what’s going on sonically through projections. It’s been done a lot in EDM and live concerts but I’ve never seen it performed together with jazz. Thank you so much for having me and supporting art!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.coskuturhan.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coskuturhan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7cToqivcV_O008NoZwTc7w
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3F3qO4nV4lbXTsm7AuDRGC