Wax Poetic is amorphous, literally and figuratively. Both its personnel and its music are ever-changing, unaffected by the boundaries that define most bands. Wax Poetic is not even really a band, though; it is a project. The brainchild of saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin, it is an ever-evolving jam session bringing jazz and world musicians together with DJ grooves and hip hop beats.
Wax Poetic savors trip-hop traditions and translates them into a language that's transnational, transcultural, and transhistorical. Starting in a New York club as a jam session experiment between permutations of horn players, singers, rappers and DJs, Wax Poetic is lead by Turkish/Swedish saxophonist Ilhan Erashin. What they've developed on their first studio album is part Portishead, part Charlie Parker, and part Erykah Badu; where it locates you is deliciously hard to pinpoint - one moment in a '40s jazz club, the next a foreign city, the next a itchy, futuristic dream . It's these melodic and stylistic tensions bordering simultaneously on the facile and the convoluted, the old skool and the new school that their musical poetry waxes, and wanes. —Courtesy Calabash Music
