Saadet Türköz is an international treasure. Born to Kazakh and Turkish parents in Istanbul in 1961, she has developed a style that comfortably blends Central Asian traditional music with free jazz. A very pleasant listen.
This release honors the memory of Chinese Kazakh composer Daulet Halek who passed away in 2008.
From the release’s Bandcamp site:
“Producer’s Note:
This album has its genesis in a precious reel-to-reel tape recording which we discovered in a radio station. It is unfortunate that the tape itself does not contain information on the date of recording, which we roughly speculate to be around the late-1980s to the early-1990s.
The recording in this album has two parts. The first is Daulet Halek’s interpretation of folk tunes from other ethnic minority groups, including the Tatars, the Mongols, the Sibe, and the Kyrgyz. The second part documents Daulet’s performance of works of the great Kazakh composer Kurmangazy Sagyrbaev.
Thanks to Mamer’s tremendous help, this historical recording is now published by Old Heaven Books. We are honoured to be able to give this deeply buried gem a new life.
This album is also an invaluable addition to Old Heaven Book’s “archival recording” series, a project we are seriously committed to. The series has generated two albums so far: Guo Yongzhang Zhuizi Selections (2019) and Nikhil Banerjee in California, 1967 (2020). This record will, to our delight, bring the graceful performance of Daulet Halek’s dombra, as well as the unique charm of Kazakh folk music, to a wider audience.
Lastly, we cannot help but mention that this is also a record with sublime audio quality. We sincerely hope you feel it and enjoy it as we do.
(Tu Fei)”
Yet another amazing collection has been released by Antonovka Records, now based in Moldova. This collection features a Chinese Muslim ethnic group called the Dungan who live in the passes between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and surprisingly, they don’t write in Chinese, but in Cyrillic!
From Antonovka’s Bandcamp site:
“Most of the members of the ensemble Yunchi (“Happiness”) live in two Dungan villages in the Chuy region of Kyrgyzstan – Aleksandrovka and Milyanfan. Aleksandrovka is located in the Moskva district to the west of Bishkek. The village was named after the Emperor Alexander II of Russia, during whose reign the Dungans came here. The name Milyanfan means a place where rice grows in Dungan language. Milyanfan is located in the Ysyk-Ata district northeast of Bishkek, not far from the Kazakhstan border.”
Today’s selection, as we end the Harrowing of Hell and prepare for Pascha this evening, is from Raushan Orazbaeva, a dombra player from Kazakhstan. This is pure music from the Central Asian steppes, mournful, solitary and strikingly beautiful.
The legendary Shenzhen-based Old Heaven Books released a powerful album from the Chinese-Kazakh band IZ Band. This is listed as folk music, yet the music is brutal, sounding like early 1980s post-punk or Industrial rock. Think of, maybe, a Kazakh Killing Joke or a Central Asian early-period Current 93.