Customer Reviews

Secret Museum of Mankind: Central Asia

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Make no mistake, the pieces on this disk are no dusty museum curiosities. There are some lively masterpieces and virtuoso performances in this collection, representing a broad range of non-Western musical traditions. Since stumbling across the Central Asia disk, I have purchased the entire series, and Central Asia remains my favorite. As a musician, studying this music has helped me to become aware of some of the limitations of my own Western musical background. I've never written a music review on Amazon before, but I feel this series is very special and deserves a wide audience. So go buy it!

This is an excellent cd of vintage music from the Central Asian countries of Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, The Caucasus region, Tadjikistan and Azerbaijan, etc. These recordings capture a timeless beauty and essence of the classical and folk musical styles of the Central Asian peoples. The Tajik pieces are impressive, and those tracks #20 and #22 are true classics. The Azeri pieces are great and fans of Mongolian hoomei, or throat singing will be familiar with the Mongolian tracks on this cd. This is a great cd and it is one of the bset collections in the Secret Museum of Mankind series. All of the selections are classics from a bygone era. This cd, I must give a five star rating to just because this muisc is so good. It would be nice if Yazoo would release a further volume of this vintage Central Asian music classics. This kind of music has never sounded better.

Not only the dissatisfaction of the proletariat class was burgeoning in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century. A recording industry was flourishing, one that was competing with western European companies for an "ethnic music" market. By drawing on the musicality of its neighboring central Asian minorities, this Russian industry was provided with the fuel to take off.

This superb CD is a compilation of 26 of these early recordings. Many of the ensembles heard on this release utilize highly developed vocal techniques, small bodied long necked lutes, reed pipes, and compact drums. The reason for this similarity in instrumentation is due to the fact that many central Asian cultures were nomadic, and thus required their belongings to be portable.

Because these recordings are old you may hear an occasional skip and crackle of the needle. These extrinsic characteristics do not take away from the beauty of the music. If anything, the minor pops and hisses serve to remind us of the historical import of these recordings.

The Secret Museum of Mankind series is a wonderful collection of music and musicians from around the world and across time. The notes give a lot of insight about this stage of "world" music. The music is beautiful and amazing. If you have ecclectic musical tastes - you will be very happy with any of the CD's from this series.
This CD has sounds of the middle east, the far east and Yiddish. Quite different and enjoyable.

This is a beautiful compilation, and I wish I had found out about it earlier. On the technical side, the remastering is superb, and the clarity of the recordings could not be better. The liner notes are not much, but each track is identified with performers' names and territory of origin (with the exception of one track whose provenance is cited merely as "Turkestan" ... interesting, since none of the recordings date to before the 1920s, by which time Soviet administrative ethnogenesis of what had been Russian Turkestan was well underway). There are no recordings attributed to Buryatia, Tyva or Altay, nor to any area not under direct Soviet control (e.g. eastern Armenia, Iran, China, Tibet--though there is one recording from Xinjiang). So the geographic coverage is not as broad as the Smithsonian Folkways Silk Road compilation. But to my naive ear, this is a better compilation. To me it captures the encounter between performance genres that had developed to meet the needs of live performance on the one hand and the brittle technical limitations of the 78 recording, and the result is artless, spontaneous and piercing. The Smithsonian Silk Road tracks generally date from the 1960s on, and while the performances there are more polished, better engaged with radio and LP recording, it feels less direct.