The 19th Istanbul Jazz Festival will host a world premiere! A familiar face for the Istanbulite jazz-lovers, internationally acclaimed musician Marcus Miller will visit Istanbul for a very special project on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).

The world premiere of Marcus Miller's "The Istanbul Project", commissioned by the Istanbul Jazz Festival, will be held with the participation of esteemed musicians from Turkey on Thursday, 5 July at Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre at 21.00.

The Istanbul Project was launched at a press meeting on Monday, 28 May in Istanbul with the participation of Marcus Miller and the musicians from Turkey who will take place in the project. At the press meeting, the initial ideas on how the project would be formed were presented. Marcus Miller stated that he had listened to the recordings of approximately 100 musicians from Turkey and had chosen his collaborators among them for "The Istanbul Project". Miller also said "I am very excited to work with these incredible musicians. With each musician you can hear the history...That was something that touched me... It is very important to me to do this project here in Istanbul... In Istanbul, I think the first time I played you was 1990s... It was amazing...We began to play, the audiences were very quite... We did not know how this music was being received. At the end of the show, it was amazing to realise 'yes, we have communicated'...Since that time, this is one of my favourite places in the world to play".

In "The Istanbul Project", Marcus Miller will be accompanied by one of the leading clarinet virtuoso Hüsnü Şenlendirici, master percussionists Burhan Öcal and Okay Temiz, Turkey's prominent jazz trumpeter İmer Demirer, and guitar virtuoso Bilal Karaman. Other members of the team are Louis Cato (drums) and Alex Han (saxophone), and Federico Gonzalez Peña (keyboards).

The 19th Istanbul Jazz Festival, organised by IKSV under the sponsorship of Garanti Bank, will be held between 3-19 July. Bringing together esteemed musicians from Turkey with world stars, this series of world premieres will continue in the following editions of the festival.

For festival line up and further information, please visit: caz.iksv.org/en