Ilhan Ersahin

Ilhan Ersahin is a Swedish–Turkish musician and bar owner, raised in and based in New York City since 1990. As a musician, Ersahin has performed and recorded with various musicians as well as his own projects/bands, Wax Poetic, Love Trio, Our Theory, I Led Three Lives, Wonderland and Istanbul Sessions.

Most of those bands formed or sparked because of Nublu, the club he opened on Avenue C in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2002. The club was then on the cusp of intensive gentrification. It became a hub for musicians and DJs. Being a club in Manhattan, the music of Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil also became part of the Nublu mix, and the club became well known for its Wednesday night Forro in the Dark Brazilian sessions. Key to the scene was the creator of Conduction, Butch Morris, long a downtown fixture. Ersahin became part of different Morris projects in the late 90s. When Nublu began, they devised a new project that would apply Morris's Conduction methods to the Nublu sensibility. The result was a new direction for Morris; within the context of The Nublu Orchestra he began incorporating more beats and electronica into his sound. The ensemble became a big part of the club's identity.

Ersahin's family were not musicians, but Stockholm is a long-established jazz and music center and his elder brother and sisters brought home records that exposed him to the music of his generation, from rock to jazz to bossa nova and world music. When he was 14, Ersahin bought a reggae compilation album featuring the work of pioneering Jamaican DJ/toaster, U-Roy. The thrill of the sound confirmed his direction as a musician. This early passion led to Ersahin eventually recording with U Roy, on the Love Trio in Dub album. Throughout his teens, Ersahin expanded his musical horizons, turning on to the more marginal sounds of punk, hiphop, reggae and dub. As Ersahin began to teach himself to play saxophone in his teens, he knew that in order to accomplish his dreams, he had to move to the United States.

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