Two Voices, Many Tones : World music: Throat singing draws Kongar-ol Ondar of Tuva and California bluesman Paul Pena to each other--and to Santa Ana.

One of the happy consequences of a quixotic quest by the late Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman and Los Angeles resident Ralph Leighton--to visit the tiny central Asian nation of Tuva--was the West’s discovery of Tuvan throat singers.

Throat singers, each of whom can produce up to three tones simultaneously, have since visited Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana twice, and one of the more celebrated practitioners, Kongar-ol Ondar, is back again on Sunday. And it looks like Tuva, once part of the Soviet Union, has made some discoveries of its own.

“Now we’ve got the Genghis blues,” said Leighton, in San Francisco last weekend for three “Tuva Meets the Blues” shows. “But that’s the point of this adventure. . . . If you pick out anything and keep pursuing it, it leads you to places you never imagined possible.”

Tuva, bordered by Mongolia and Siberia, was pretty improbable to begin with. But Leighton and the late Feynman, whose 12-year saga to get there is recounted in Leighton’s book, “Tuva or Bust!,” weren’t, as it turns out, the only ones on that journey.

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Years before Leighton ultimately arrived in Tuva in 1988--Feynman died just days before the Soviet government approved their request to visit--a blind blues musician named Paul Pena was tuning his shortwave radio in San Francisco when he came across some very strange sounds.

“I was always into shortwave, and I was looking for a language lesson on Radio Korea,” Pena recalled. “It was Dec. 29, 1984, and Radio Moscow was doing a show on ethnic music. I first thought my radio was busted--you get a lot of whistling.

“But it was a melody. I got about 20 or 30 seconds, taped it and logged it. Then this lady came on and said, ‘Did you hear that guy singing two notes at a time?’ ”

It took Pena seven years to find anything more. He was in a record store one day when he heard those same strange sounds; the store was playing an ethnomusicology cassette titled “Tuva: Voices From the Center of Asia.”

Pena taught himself to throat sing solely by listening to that tape.

“I drove my friends away with these noises,” Pena said, “but I eventually stumbled on [to the technique]. There are many approaches to isolating vocal harmonics, where you adjust volumes of various tones in order to bring one out--make one light brighter by dimming the others. But the day I got my first kargyraa note out, I still hadn’t found a teacher. I walk into the bathroom, sit on the throne, and out it came.

“That sounds comical, but it’s also serious,” he said. “The use of the diaphragm, that constricted pressure you use for throat-singing, is the same as for a bowel movement. . . . Take it any way you want; I got there, and out it came.”

There are three styles of Tuvan throat singing: kargyraa , a low, rasping style emphasizing the fundamental tone; sygyt , a higher whistling style, and khoomei , used both to describe throat singing in general, but also the style that employs three tones at once--a fundamental bass note, a melody on top and an octave or a 12th above the fundamental, used in a percussive, rhythmic way.

Pena’s musical roots go back to the Portuguese islands of Cape Verde. His pre-Tuva repertory includes tender Creole ballads (“That’s Portuguese Creole, not French,” he noted) as well as “gutbucket scratchy blues” a la T-Bone Walker, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, all of whom he’s worked with, and, more important, Howlin’ Wolf, whose records he studied.

“So now I’m at a blues club in North Beach, and I throw in a little throat singing,” Pena continued. “I get off the stage, and a guy tells me the guys I sing like are coming to town. I said, ‘No! Tuvans?’ I never dreamed I would ever meet these people. There was one tape in the city, and I’d just bought it.

“I went over to the Asian Art Museum, where they were playing, and I was so jacked that I was going to actually see them” that apparently he began to throat sing. “All of a sudden I realized there was nobody talking around me any more. Everybody was listening.”

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Leighton described the scene at the museum that day as “pandemonium . . . the lines were out the door, 5,000 people over normal attendance.”

Said Pena: “After the performance, I walked up [to Ondar] and did this kargyraa that was on the tape but that they hadn’t done. I was told later he looked like somebody had pole-axed him. They weren’t ready to have some American crank back their own stuff at them.

“But with my little Russian and his little English, we understood each other--and there was instant affinity between us.”

The relationship blossomed. Ondar dubbed Pena “cher shimjer,” Tuvan for “ground moving” or “earthquake.” The name stuck, in both languages, and he has since been known as Paul (Earthquake) Pena.

He traveled to Santa Ana the next time the Tuvans were there, and in April, 1994, Pena and Ondar recorded together. A month later, the pair appeared unannounced during a Monday-night blues jam at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. Said Leighton: “The people went nuts.”

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What happened next requires some background: In Tuva, an international throat-singing symposium and contest is held every three years. The first was in 1992, and Ondar was named No. 1 in sygyt style. The second took place two months ago.

“One day in the studio,” Pena said, “Ondar put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘It is necessary that you appear in Kyzyl in 1995.’ I thought that was a nice thing to say, kind of ceremonial, and if I could find a bank a blind guy could rob, I’d probably take a shot at it.”

But Ondar was serious. So was Leighton, who raised the money to send him.

With more than 100 people competing at the symposium--”the best of the best,” Leighton said--Pena won top prize in two divisions. He was awarded a toshpulur, or Tuvan banjo, for first place in the kargyraa category, and a Tuvan costume for being named crowd favorite.

“For me, it was winning just to be able to go,” Pena said. “I’ve been in mothballs for a long time. I lost my wife of 23 years four years ago, and it’s been pick-it-up and patch-it-together from that.”

It was a shamanic therapist with a dijeridoo --a musical instrument used by Australian aborigines that can be likened to an instrumental version of throat-singing--that started Pena on the road to spiritual and emotional recovery--and to Tuva.

Pena and Ondar will soon be heard on the first track (“The Ballad of Cher Shimjer”) of a three-CD world-music sampler called “Planet Soup” (Ellipsis Arts) slated for September release. Pena’s instructional cassette--no one’s contesting that he’s the only teacher of throat-singing in North America--has made its way to students in seven countries.

“It snowballed,” Pena said. “I haven’t had time to stop and figure it all out yet. One thing I know, it’s not a closed book by any means.”

* Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar and blues singer Paul (Earthquake) Pena perform “Tuva Meets the Blues” on Sunday in the courtyard of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. 7 p.m. $15. Museum members, $10. (714) 567-3680.