Various artists
One day in April 2019 I was having dinner during the Bakhshi International Arts Festival in Termez, Uzbekistan, an extraordinary, lavishly spectacular event gathering performers of epic ballads from across Central Asia and the world beyond. From a nearby table I heard exquisite singing that so moved me that I was impelled to go over and speak to the singer (with a friend at my table acting as interpreter). It turned out she was Nafisa Tulybaeva, a Bashkir from Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan. I arranged to meet her later so that I could video her. So well past midnight she sang for me, and hearing her - we were on a hotel landing - brought another Bashkir musician, Ilgam Baybuldin, from his hotel room in his slippers, and he accompanied her on kurai, the Bashkir end-blown flute. The pentatonic, wide-ranging shape of the melody, and Nafisa’s singing, evoked in my mind an image of Scottish Gaelic singing of perhaps the 18th century or earlier (though of course there’s no actual connection). A month or so later I received, by pure chance, an email from one of the organisers of the Russian World Music Awards (who knew nothing of my revelation in Uzbekistan) asking if any of those of us who’d been on the Awards jury wanted to be invited, that November, to a music festival called Musafir in Ufa, Bashkortostan. I jumped to accept, of course. Bashkortostan, in the southern Urals, is a republic of the Russian Federation, so after the usual tortuous process of getting a Russian visa I arrived at the Musafir festival, a well-organised, very enjoyable and interesting event with excellent performers and bands from Bashkortostan and beyond. I met up again with Nafisa (who it turned out is the deputy director of Bashkortostan’s Centre for Folk Art), and during a delegate round-table with Bashkortostan’s Minister of Culture I mentioned that I’d like to come back to record her and perhaps other traditional music. The Minister, Amina Chafikova, a noted concert pianist, offered help and went a step further, suggesting I might like to go and meet singers and musicians in the villages. Would I ever! I began to make plans, but the Covid pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intervened. However, the good news is that Anton Apostol’s remarkable and ever-growing Antonovka Records series of digital albums has added to the 93 released by April 2023, when I interviewed him for the Rootsworld piece on his label, with a further 46 (and increasing even as I write this), and 15 of those were recorded in 2023 in the villages and towns of Bashkortostan! Five of those, part of another, and one from earlier in the Antonovka catalogue, are devoted to specifically Bashkir traditional music, and it's on them I’ll concentrate for this review. The rest of the Bashkortostan releases are of the music of some of the republic’s other populations - Russian, Chuvash, Kryashen and Ukrainian. (While two-thirds of the approximately 1.7 million Bashkirs - a Turkic people - live in Bashkortostan, they’re only about a third of its population of just over 4 million; more than another third are Russian, a quarter Volga Tatars including Kryashens, small percentages of Chuvash and Mari, and even smaller numbers of Udmurts and Ukrainians.) Bashkir songs have strong, wide-ranging melodies, and there are many fine singers. 28-year-old opera singer Aigul Akhmetshina is from the village of Kirgiz-Miyaki in Bashkortostan. She has recently become deservedly internationally famous, particularly for her title role in Bizet’s Carmen at London’s Royal Opera House, New York’s Met and elsewhere. and she enthused about her musical heritage in a BBC Radio 4 interview I chanced to hear the other day. “Bashkir folk singing demands exactly the same things you need for classical singing - strong breath, a full range, flexibility.” Her singing began as a small child with the folk songs of her village, and she still sings them in practice and public, including one on her 2024 debut album Aigul. The kurai flute is traditionally made from the stem of the tall umbelliferous plant Pleurospermum uralense, for which the Bashkir name is kurai or quray. Indeed, during that late night session on the Termez hotel landing, to show how they’re made Ilgam Baybuldin swiftly cut and demonstrated one such, though he mainly uses the longer-lasting wooden version. The sound is evocatively breathy, as a result of the player’s embouchure which is with the mouth partly open and the lip of the tube resting against the upper teeth, the air-stream being directed by the tongue (unlike the pursed-lips blowing technique of Balkan kaval or Arabic ney, but closer to that of Persian ney). It has four holes on the front, one on the back. Sometimes a distinctive Bashkir fingering technique is used in which the lower hand turns palm-upward so that its thumb can cover the bottom front hole.
A good place to start with these Antonovka Bashkir releases is Әlşәy: Bashkir Music. It features six individual singers, four female and two male, accompanied, tracking the vocal’s melodic line, by two individual kurai players, or on one male vocal track self-accompanied on button accordion. There are also kurai and accordion instrumental solos. The singers and players are from villages in the Alsheevsky district, recorded on July 21st 2023 in the House of Culture in the district’s administrative centre, Raevsky. The album is a good introduction to the sounds, beautiful shapes and skill of Bashkir folk singing and playing.
Dәwlәkәn: Bashkir Music comprises female and male singers and instrumentalists from the Davlekanovsky district, recorded in the House of Culture at Davlekanovo on July 22nd, 2023, the day after the Әlşәy recordings. Quite a few of the vocals are solo unaccompanied, and the melody and melismatic grace-noting of Rashida Minikai’s fine singing of what translates as “Gaia the Wanderer” in particular puts one very much in mind of Irish sean-nós, and Roman Rogiv’s fiddle solo performance of “Zulkhiza” could almost be an Irish slow air. He and kurai player Rafis Abdrakhimov duet adventurously on two tracks, and Abdrakhimov closes the album with two kurai solos in which he uses the technique of adding a vocal drone to give the kurai sound a growly, grainy aspect, as for example do players of some Balkan flutes and whistles.
Accompaniments to the singing, when present, are on kurai, fiddle or button-accordion. The latter, though, is here used in a chordal way, and while well played it formalises the song melodies and constrains their beautiful freedom and subtlety, as does the unison ensemble singing with accordion that’s on two tracks here and on some of the other releases.
Sibay Kanton: Bashkir Music is named after its second track, whose title refers to the old canton system of regional government. The singers and musicians on the album come from Baymaksy district, in which is the town of Sibay. The recordings were made on July 26th 2023 in the House of Culture of Baymak. The first five tracks are from three male singers and kurai players from the villages of Buranbaevo and Verkhneyaikbaevo, solo or with voice and kurai, who have fine soaring voices and use both the straight and the vocal-drone-modified kurai sound.
The rest of the album is a trio of two women singers and a male kurai player, from Baymak and the village of Nizhneidrisovo. The women sing solo and together, and play lively kubyz (Bashkir Jew’s-harp) between their vocals and with the kurai. In the instrumental track “Sounds of nature and animals” they use the kubyz to make sounds of horses trotting, galloping and snorting or whinnying. A kurai solo workout, “Karasakal March,” follows, making extensive use of the simultaneous-vocalising technique. The closing track, “Lullaby,” is a vocal duet including burbling vocal sounds.
Baymaq: Bashkir Music is another with singers and musicians from Baymaksy district, recorded on the same day and at the same House of Culture as Sibay Kanton. It features two ensembles. Komartky (meaning ‘culture’) is an eleven-member female vocal ensemble plus male button accordion and kurai players. On the first three tracks they all sing and play together, in slow and uptempo songs. The following four are of individual singers from the ensemble, with or without accompaniment. The final four tracks of the album are from members of the Mirfaiza Ensemble. It consists of nine women including one who here plays a solo on dombyra, the three-stringed, fretted longish-necked lute with a teardrop-shaped body known, with slight variations, across much of Central Asia. (A more round-bodied form, known as domra, is found in westerly parts of the Russian Federation). The two vocal solos are by a singer with a very high voice and considerable vibrato. The whole-ensemble track includes kurai and accordion (perhaps the same musicians as play with the Komartky Ensemble).
The first four tracks of Әbyәlil: Bashkir Music feature the Minyesh ensemble, a women’s choir from Abzelilovsky district, recorded in the House of Culture of Askurovo on July 27th, 2023. They sing in energetic unison accompanied by button accordion, kurai and qyl-qobyz (the gutty-toned Central Asian vertical two-string fiddle, in which the bridge rests on skin but the rest of the sound-box above it is open). Solo, duo and trio vocal and instrumental tracks by members of the ensemble follow. There also five tracks of rather careful, inexperienced solos on the violin-like ‘improved’ version of the qyl-qobyz by five young students of the Minyesh Ensemble’s qyl-qobyz player, Minnigul Sultanbaeva. Despite the students’ playing inaccuracies, though, they’re fine, slow-air type melodies.
Sak-Suk: Music of Bashkir People, Russia is an earlier release on Antonovka, made in collaboration with Nikita Sevastyanov’s Kto-to Records who did the recording on September 10th 2020 in the village of Abdulmambetovo (Kypsak) in Burzyansky district. The Bandcamp note tells us: “It was done during the filming of Krai, a short movie directed by Eduard Zakirov. Sak-Suk is a story of two brothers who were cursed by their mother and turned into birds. Since then they were unable to meet and were calling each other at night by the cry ‘sak, suk’.”
The first three tracks are by a women's village ensemble from Kypsak, singing, as do the vocal groups on all these albums, in unison. Their second song, “On the banks of the Uzyan,” is accompanied by the buzzing of massed kubyz (Jew’s-harps); their third, “Oh my nightingale,” has dombyra and a kubyz playing along with the largely solo vocal melody line. Three tracks from a female village ensemble from Kildigulovo follow, regular in melody without melisma; one is unaccompanied, the second is with dombyra and kubyz, and the third unaccompanied and less up-tempo. Salima Garifullina leads the title song solo, then joined by other singers. For her second and third items, in the much more impressive wider-ranging melismatIc style, she’s accompanied by kurai player Khaidar Nadershin. The final five tracks are kurai solos by Nadershin, including some notably fine soaring, pieces in that wider-ranging lyrical style plus a version of the “Sak-Suk” melody. He gets a splendidly thick, breathy tone out of the instrument, often enhanced and enriched by using the blowing-with-vocalising technique.
Handuğas: Bashkir, Russian and Chuvash Songs From Bashkortostan features songs, all unaccompanied, by womens’ ensembles or solo. Six are of Bashkirs recorded on July 21st 2023, (the same day as the first album I’ve described), in their village of Kipchak-Askorovo in Alshkeevsky district. Two of the songs, sung by the seven-member Akhirattar (‘buddies’) ensemble, were originally made by Fariza Gazizova, and her now elderly daughter sings four solo songs. From the same district, recorded that same day but in Raevsky, are two songs from the eight-member Chuvash ensemble Pilesh from Kayrakly village, and two solos sung by Russian Valentina Ruch of Raevsky.
It’s clear from all these albums just how much rich, distinctive traditional music there still is in Bashkortostan’s villages. When things become more possible again, as one hopes, I’d still very much like to follow up on the Minister of Culture’s suggestion! Whatever, that first chance hearing of Nafisa Tulybaeva, and then videoing her and Ilgam Baybuldin, that night in the hotel in Uzbekistan is still a cherished, moving moment for me, and an unexpected opening of a window on a great musical tradition that Antonovka’s recordings will help bring to the wider world.
The Bandcamp pages for these albums have track titles and other useful information in English including performers’ names, instrumentation, and the recording locations and dates. If possible, though, something telling what each song is about, and perhaps also explaining the types of song and melody, would be a very helpful and enlightening addition.
Further reading and listening:
Various Artists: Lost in Tajikistan
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