Born on March 23, 1913, in Istanbul, Abidin was the fifth child of Mehmed Rasih Bey, President of the Supreme Audit Council (Divan-ı Ali-i Muhâsebât), and Saffet Hanım, a woman devoted to music and literature. The same year he was born, his family relocated to Geneva and later to France, so he spent his early childhood in Europe. The family returned to Istanbul in 1925, where Abidin enrolled at Robert College. However, following the deaths of first his father and then his mother, his growing passion for art overtook his formal studies, and he left school. With the encouragement of his older brother, the poet Arif Dino, he began cultivating his talents in painting, caricature, and writing.

His first drawings appeared in the newspaper Yarın, and his first written pieces in the magazine Artist, both in the early 1930s. In these years he also designed the cover art for Nâzım Hikmet’s books Sesini Kaybeden Şehir (1931) and Bir Ölü Evi (1932), establishing himself as a painter while still remarkably young. An illustrated interview about founder of the Turkish republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, published in the newspaper Halkın Dostu, even won him Atatürk’s own admiration.

In 1933, Dino joined fellow artists to co-found the D Group. Their aim was to modernize Turkish art by connecting it with contemporary international currents, and to build a genuine public audience for art in a young republic where such awareness was still developing. They regularly organized joint exhibitions, held roughly annually through the 1930s and 40s, which became key events for introducing Turkish audiences to modern art. The following year, at Atatürk’s request, he traveled to Russia to study cinema. Later in the 1930s, Dino journeyed to London and Paris, where he struck up friendships with some of the era’s leading artistic figures, among them Gertrude Stein, Tristan Tzara, and Pablo Picasso. He returned to Turkey in 1938 and, alongside fellow artists, founded a second collective, the Liman (Yeniler/Newcomers) Group. Throughout this period, his writings and drawings, published across various magazines, engaged with an emerging concept of reality in art.

In the 1940s he joined the Turkish Communist Party (TKP), and his political activities led to internal exile, first in Çorum, then in Adana. When his exile ended in 1950, he returned to Istanbul. But the political climate had grown harsher. TKP members faced mounting investigations and persecution, and Dino, active in the party’s international work, found himself under increasing threat. When the travel ban against him was finally lifted in 1952, Abidin and Güzin Dino relocated to Paris.

Dino generously lent his art to his writer friends. The most influential novels, short stories, and poetry collections of his time, including works by Nâzım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal, Melih Cevdet Anday, Sait Faik, and Gülten Akın, were accompanied by his drawings. For many readers, Dino's illustrations became inseparable from the texts themselves, so much so that these books feel almost unrecognizable without his cover art.

His visual language extended beyond literature into music as well. Through his longstanding friendship with Nesuhi Ertegün, co-founder of Atlantic Records, Dino designed cover art for some of the label's most celebrated jazz releases in the 1960s, among them the Modern Jazz Quartet's Third Stream Music (1960), Herbie Mann's At the Village Gate (1961) and its follow-ups, and John Coltrane and Don Cherry's The Avant-Garde (1966). He signed most of these covers simply "Abidine." In the 1970s, he returned to the medium closer to home, designing album covers for Turkish folk musician Ruhi Su and singer-songwriter Zülfü Livaneli.

In 1987, The King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, was invited to Burkina Faso by Marxist revolutionary and fellow Pan Africanist Thomas Sankara, a longtime fan of Fela’s music and a jazz musician himself.

Dubbed "Africa's Che Guevara", Thomas Sankara was a Marxist revolutionary who became president in 1983 after a people's uprising. He declared the objectives of the “democratic and popular revolution” to be primarily concerned with the tasks of eradicating corruption, fighting environmental degradation, empowering women, and increasing access to education and healthcare, with the larger goal of worldwide anti-imperialist liberation.

During his presidency, Sankara implemented programs that dramatically reduced infant mortality, raised literacy rates and school attendance, and increased the number of women holding government posts. On the environmental front, 10 million trees were planted in the first year of his presidency alone, part of a broader effort to combat desertification. On the first anniversary of the revolution, he renamed the country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. It roughly means “land of upright people” in Mossi and Dyula.

Sankara was also an accomplished jazz guitarist who founded several bands, and one of the few heads of state to compose his own country’s national anthem. He saw music as central to his vision of an independent, proud Burkina Faso.

Fela Kuti, on the other hand, stood for justice for the people of Nigeria. He enlightened the masses of the corrupt practice of the political elites and their leaders. He wanted the government to provide better governance and equal opportunities for the people, to provide basic social amenities for every citizen, even though it meant being victimised, beaten and thrown into prison for trying to expose the various establishments and individuals.

Fela Kuti was invited to Burkina Faso a couple of times and he was even writing a song for his friend Sankara before his assassination. One of the occasions on which they met was the Panafrican Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1987. Later, to accommodate the new but sad development, Fela changed the song a bit and came up with a track called Underground System which was released in 1992.

Louis Armstrong’s 1929 recording of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” is an early critique of racial alienation in a segregated society. While often portrayed as apolitical, Armstrong’s success in breaking racial barriers—performing in previously segregated venues and appearing in mainstream films—carried significant symbolic weight.

Billie Holiday’s 1939 rendition of “Strange Fruit,” written by poet, teacher, and activist Abel Meeropol, also marked a turning point. Her emotionally charged performances transformed the song into a ritual of defiance: service would stop, lights would dim, a single spotlight would fall on Holiday’s face—and there would be no encore.

This spirit of resistance only continued to grow stronger after the war. In 1960, bassist and composer Charles Mingus stood on the passenger seat of a convertible speeding through Newport, Rhode Island, shouting, “Come to my festival!” This was a protest.

Mingus challenged what he saw as the failings of the jazz scene, specifically the one created by the Newport Jazz Festival. Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Jo Jones, and other Black musicians had several grievances with the main festival and George Wein. In response to Wein’s lowball offer of $700 for his band, Mingus refused to appear for anything less than $5,000 after learning that Benny Goodman was being paid $7,500. When Wein refused, Mingus and Max Roach undertook to organize a counterevent in Newport, the Newport Rebel Festival (source)

Max Roach performing at the Newport Rebels Festival in 1960. Photographed by William Claxton.

Similarly, in 1970, multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk spearheaded the Jazz and People’s Movement, which staged coordinated sonic protests during live tapings of major network talk shows. Armed with police whistles and small instruments, participants disrupted broadcasts to protest the systematic erasure of “Black creative genius” from American television and cultural memory.

The Jazz and People’s Movement issued a list of demands to major television networks, warning of further disruptions and boycotts if they were ignored. Central to their proposal was the establishment of a “board of jazz musicians” to oversee the production of three to four jazz specials per season—programs intended not only to place the music within its historical context but also to introduce emerging talent to the wider public. In addition, the movement demanded the regular inclusion of Black musicians on weekly talk shows, variety programs, and other broadcasts, not only as performers, but as featured interviewees, on equal footing with their white peers (source).

Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Vibration Society, backstage at Keystone Korner, San Francisco, 1973. Gatefold image from the Bright Moments LP. Photograph by Jim Marshall, courtesy Jim Marshall Estate.

These stories are remnants of an archive of dreams, sounds, and forms of life—an unfinished counterculture that continues to haunt us. They preserve not only the memory of what was once possible, but also the traces of what was actively suppressed. Counterculture, in this sense, is not simply history but a hauntological resource: a reminder that the future could have unfolded otherwise, and still might.

Today, however, this counterculture is often reduced to “iconic images” and “classic songs,” its revolutionary potential neutralized and repackaged as heritage. With the disappearance of a genuinely oppositional cultural sphere, we circle in a loop of nostalgia, where radical gestures of the past are aestheticized rather than politicized. Only through continual re-narration can these suppressed possibilities remain alive. Without such active and collective preservation and re-narration, these struggles risk fading into oblivion. In this climate, preserving jazz as a living, contested practice is no longer merely curatorial—it is explicitly political.

Preserving jazz means sustaining a record of diversity in creativity, resilience, and political expression. Jazz carries many stories of struggle and resistance that have influenced cultures worldwide, and losing it would mean losing an essential part of our shared cultural memory. If jazz is forgotten, we risk erasing the voices that used it to demand freedom and equality. It is important to preserve jazz because it means preserving a language of hope and defiance that still speaks to our world today.

The Jazz Estate, a digital archive, began as a personal project. It was an attempt to ease myself into the world of jazz. I already loved the sound, but I wanted to understand the stories behind the music. I started an Instagram page to post about its history, hoping that tracing its roots would help me make sense of all the song titles and references. Over time, The Jazz Estate grew into a global community of over a million across social media platforms.

Our digital archive extends this legacy of resistance into different forms of cultural preservation, using design, storytelling, and community organizing to ensure that jazz remains an active speech of solidarity. We also run a webstore, where my partner Ozan and I launched the Jazz Against Apartheid fundraiser merch collection in solidarity with Palestinians who are being brutally murdered by the Israeli settler-colonial entity. Since November 2022, we have raised over $40,000 for the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance (MECA).

About the author

Orkan Aydın is a theatermaker based in Germany. His work gives equal weight to sound, object, and text, creating poetic spectacles shaped by contemplation and the metaphysics of the everyday. In 2018, he founded The Jazz Estate, a project dedicated to expanding public access to jazz history through curated archival materials, historically grounded storytelling, and community-led cultural work.