Aşkın Usta: The Bassoonist Rewriting What a Solo Voice Can Be.
- Editorial Board
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
A force from Turkey turning one of classical music’s rarest instruments into something cinematic, human, danceful and deeply alive.
Aşkın Usta is not the type of musician who arrives with noise. He arrives with tone.
With breath. With a command of the bassoon that feels closer to storytelling than performance.
Turkey has produced its share of boundary, bending instrumentalists, but Usta stands out because he brings a modern, almost vocal sensitivity to an instrument that most of the world still misunderstands. The bassoon is usually treated as color, as texture, as the witty aside buried inside orchestral scores. Usta refuses that role. On his recordings, the bassoon is the narrator, full of weight, sorrow, wit, and imagination, shaped through phrasing that feels intimate even across streaming services.
His lines move like a character entering a room: deliberate, aware, and never rushed. There is restraint in his playing, but never timidity. Every swell feels earned. Every decrescendo feels like breath leaving the body.
What makes Usta compelling is his balance between classical discipline and contemporary sensibility. He understands tradition, yet he plays with the emotional clarity of someone raised in a global era of crossover, film scores, dance tracks and personal expression.
His tone is warm without collapsing into softness, expressive without drifting into theatricality. It is rare to hear a bassoonist craft this much narrative tension inside a single melodic arc.
In a musical world overwhelming itself with spectacle and surface, Aşkın Usta’s work reminds you what musicianship sounds like when it is rooted in craft, patience, and truth. No shortcuts. No gimmicks. Just an artist elevating an instrument that has waited too long for a voice like his.
That same instinct for genre fusion is exactly what shapes his latest release, “Divini Love,” a dance-rock single revitalized through the Güler Yavaş Remix. The track carries an unexpected lineage: it echoes the spirit of Rondò Veneziano, the Italian orchestral-rock 70's ensemble whose hybrid sound quietly influenced artists like Daft Punk decades later.
Usta taps into that forgotten lineage, strings, rhythm, elegance, pulse, and a bassoon brings it forward into 2025, where orchestral dance music is finding its resurgence.
“Divini Love” feels like the return of a genre the world did not realize it missed.
Aşkın Usta is not simply a bassoon player. He is a storyteller whose instrument happens to be carved from wood and breath.
Don't Forge To Follow Aşkın Usta On Instagram And Listen To DIVINI LOVE on all streaming plaforms