Sunday, March 12
Big Central Asia Music News
Big, BIG news from the Central Asian music front, courtesy of Rock Paper Scissors: a concert series in the USA and (drum roll) the first three volumes of a new 10-volume series on Central Asian music coming out on Smithsonian-Folkways. I'm digging around the net to learn more about this new series, and I'll post more information once I find it. Until then, here are the first two paragraphs from the Rock Paper Scissors article announcing both of these things:
The March 2006 USA tour of Music and Voices of Central Asia
features an epic reciter who channels the voice of a warrior in a thousand-year-old Kyrgyz poem thirty times longer than the Iliad (often recited from memory for eight hours or more); a komuz virtuoso whose instrumental acrobatics make Jimi Hendrix look like a lightweight; an ensemble that has resurrected the Sufi-inspired court music of Samarkand and Bukhara; and the most celebrated Afghan rubâb player of his generation, who fled his country after the Soviet invasion, developed a new musical style while living in exile in Peshawar, Pakistan, and now makes his home in Fremont, California.The tour—presented and curated by the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia—features three groups of performers: Tengir-Too, from Kyrgyzstan, The Academy of Shashmaqâm, from Tajikistan, and Homayun Sakhi and Taryalai Hashimi, from Afghanistan (via California). All of these performers are featured on Music of Central Asia, volumes 1-3, to be released by Smithsonian Folkways in March 2006. The innovative series, which will eventually comprise 10 volumes, includes a DVD as a part of each release with a documentary film on the featured musicians as well as interactive instrument glossaries and maps.
