Customer Reviews

Music of Central Asia Vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are already familiar with Central Asian music, you will fall in love with this! If you are not familiar, this is maybe the best place to start-you will also fall in love with this!

I have several hundred recordings from this region, and this 3 part series instantly ranks in the top 5.

Not only the music in the CD, but the bonus DVD goes a long way to fill in a much needed gap in documenting the beauty of the world`s traditional music that will gradually slip away in this artificial world we now find ourselves living in.

Be sure to get the other 2 in the series also. Homayun Sakhi`s rubab playing is utterly stunning (Vol.3)!

This may be the most important series of world music CDs ever. The Music of Central Asia initiative was set up by the Aga Khan and the Smithsonian Insitution to document the surviving folk music traditions of that rich part of the world, and to present it to the global community with enough background to get the most out of it. Each volume in the series comes with a substantial booklet, as well as a DVD with a short documentary film.

Volume 2 of the series features music by the Academy of Maqam, a Dushanbe-based ensemble dedicated to the classical tradition of Uzbeks and Tajiks. This tradition, called shashmaqam, consists of six types of suites where great Persian poetry is combined with powerful modal melodies. The instruments we hear here are the dutar, a two-string long-necked fretted lute; the sato, a long-necked bowed lute; the tanbur, a long-necked plucked lute with one string and a number of sympathetic strings; and the doira, a frame drum with jingles. Five vocalists, two men and three women, sing verse from the Persian mystical love poet Hafiz and folk song.

The suite we hear on this disc is called Maqam-i rast, and its construction is immensely elegant. A brief solo on the sato serves to tune the singers. We then enter into "Sarakhbor-i Rast", a Hafiz setting, where successive couplets are sung in a continuously developing melody builds toward a climax on the second to last couplet, and then returns down to the start point on the last. There then follow several short songs called taronas, typically folk song, which serve as moments of relaxation between the spiritual ectasy of the classical poems, and as melodic and rhythmic transitions. Another type of transitional movement is the suporish, which serves to quickly move between one meter and another. I especially like how, in the very last movement of the suite, the climax couplet from the first poem returns, and will be unmistakable even if you don't speak a word of Persian.

The booklet contains a presentation of the musical instruments, a description of each movement of the suite, and a general introduction to maqam. Students of Persian will be happy to find the text of the songs given in both transliterated Persian and English translated. The documentary on the DVD is concerned mainly with the efforts of Abduvali Abdurashidov, the founder of the Academy, to transmit shashmaqam to the next generation. We hear his thoughts of what shashmaqam means to him personally, and see bits of suites other than the Maqam-i rast presented on the CD.

If you are interested in indigenous musical traditions, the Persian language, Central Asian culture or are just a simple music fan on the lookout for something cool, I cannot recommend this disc and the whole Music of Central Asia series enough.

The title of the CD is misleading, The Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. I bought the CD to hear shashmaqam with Uzbek poetic texts/ songs. Yet not even one text/song was Uzbek. As the booklet in the CD states, many of the songs sung are from the poetic texts of Hafiz. I was quite surprised that such a work produced with names like the Smithsonian and the Aga Khan Trust and not one Uzbek song. If one goes to Uzbekistan today, there are incredible classical shashmaqam performers from the historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara to the heartland of Uzbek traditions, the Ferghana Valley. Overall, the other works are great and I applaud the effort and good work.

And not being a ethno-musicologist, if that's the appropriate monicker, this fails to transcend regionalist boundaries, for me. The recording is good and the presentation first rate. The music remains pleasantly repetitive and the voices, nothing overly remarkable, given the quality of voices I have heard and remarked upon in these reviews over the years.

I trusted the reviews on this page without hearing the work. Big mistake in the world music arena. I think often the positive reviews are from historical, local people, or intellectual fans. I was looking for inspiration more than authenticity and this doesn't do it. Listen before you buy and watch out for that second CD -mine was just a 'ringer'.