As an integral part of daily social life, music-making and entertainment are often overlooked, footnoted, or bracketed off in cultural histories. For the Ottoman empire and Turkey, ethnomusicologists and music historians have provided rich studies of a range of musical genres; however, in the case of Smyrna/Izmir, an academic focus on Greek rebetiko and a scholarly glance at European musical forms have overshadowed engagement with pervasive Ottoman music in the port. In fact, the rapid recovery of Turkish art music and gazino culture after the Izmir fire (1922) arguably grew out of the longtime presence of Ottoman musicians there. Drawing upon Ottoman and republican news media, contemporaneous musical publications and memoirs, this paper will engage with Ottoman music and musicians in a specific period in the life of Smyrna/Izmir – the years of World War I – investigating music in the context of wartime economic and political conditions. How can we understand the rich, continuous and varied musical activity pervading the city at a time when Smyrna/Izmir was enduring an unprecedented economic crisis involving inflation, food shortages, production decline, and unemployment? In what ways did wartime conditions, migrations, and commercial developments interact productively with music, musicians, and entertainment in this period? Arising from a late 19th century milieu led by Jewish musical luminaries, Mevlevi musicians and sheiks, and non-professional music-makers, Ottoman musical life was undergoing commercialization and democratization through new forms of musical publication, performance, and education in the lead-up to the war. Fragile, older, informal patterns of music-making coexisted with robust, newer, commercial enterprises, such as nightclubs and cinemas. The latter not only attracted audiences through the distractions of musical entertainment, moving pictures, and war propaganda, but also staged benefits for a variety of civic projects in the port, including education and the arts. This paper seeks to unravel the interplay among earlier forms of informal networking, rising entertainment venues, philanthropic support, and wartime desires to understand the social economy of music and entertainment in this period. In the end we witness not only the well-funded musical and theatrical arts of European high culture, recognized in scholarship, but also a burgeoning Ottoman music scene of local, touring, and amateur musicians fulfilling the demands of Ottoman subjects to learn, enjoy, and perform music in an empire at war.