Varied cultures, common chords

One of Ulzhan Baibussynova’s earliest memories is of hearing a traditional bard sing an ancient Kazakh epic: “I was 7 years old and my oldest sister was getting married,” she says, speaking through a translator from a stop on her current U.S. tour. “So we had a jyrau staying in the house, and I remember climbing up on his knees and falling asleep in his lap.

“I really didn’t understand the words he was singing. But I fell in love with the music and the tradition, and from the age of 8 I began to sing myself.”

Baibussynova appears Friday at UCLA’s Royce Hall as part of a program, “Spiritual Sounds of Central Asia: Nomads, Mystics and Troubadours,” featuring 15 artists from three countries. She and another Kazakh woman are joined by the Badakhshan Ensemble of singers, instrumentalists and dancers from Tajikistan and the Islamic religious singers Alim and Fargana Qasimov from Azerbaijan.

Most Americans, if they have heard of these countries at all, know them from news of war and social upheaval. All three were part of the Soviet Union, and and Badakhshan straddles the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, with Afghans regularly coming across the Panj River to Khorog, where the ensemble is based, to do their Saturday marketing. Tajikistan has also had close connections with Iran, with which it shares a common language, while the Kazakhs and Azerbaijanis speak Turkic languages and since the breakup of the USSR have built ties with Turkey. And all are also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Group, in the growing economic orbit of China.

But this is a huge area -- Kazakhstan is larger than Western Europe -- and the cultures it has spawned are extremely varied. Theodore Levin, the Dartmouth ethnomusicology professor who curated this tour and has produced impressive CD/DVD sets featuring each group for the Smithsonian Folkways label, which can be sampled at www.folkways.si.edu/projects_initiatives/ central_asian.html.

Levin explains that the musicians come from very different traditions: The Qasimovs are classical singers, in a formal, urban court style. The Badakhshan Ensemble is like a village folk group. And the two jyraus represented a tradition of musical historians and educators who have preserved nomadic traditions for centuries.

“To be a jyrau is a literary skill even more than a musical one,” Levin says. “It’s a skill of thinking on your feet, of improvising verse. . . . We present them with supertitles, so the audience can follow their lyrics.”

Message gets through

Baibussynova says that the language barrier is not important. On a record one cannot see her striking face and elegant costumes, but her high, sharp singing and the intricate figures she plays on the dombra, a long-necked lute, still command instant attention.

“There is something that is communicated just through the quality of the voice,” she says. “You can’t listen to this music and think that the words are about some kind of light, frivolous topic. These epics are not just about historical events, they have a moral force, they are a way of teaching.”

Though traditionally almost all jyraus were men, Baibussynova says her parents encouraged her to follow this career. “I’m descended from a long line of jyraus on both sides of my family,” she says. “But this had been lost for several generations. So when they understood I had the talent, they invited jyraus to the house, and they also sent me out into the countryside so that I could assimilate both the rural lifestyle and this tradition.”

The theme of women taking up previously male styles is common to all three acts. Alim Qasimov, the most famous singer of Azerbaijani mughams, breaks with tradition by performing duets with his daughter, Fargana, while the Badakhshan Ensemble is led by a charismatic female vocalist and dancer, Soheba Davlatshoeva.

Davlatshoeva, 37, formed her group in the early 1990s with fellow students at the Art Institute in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe. They found a mentor in Jonboz Dushanbiev, an older musician and instrument maker who plays ghijak, a sort of three-string fiddle formed by attaching a carved wooden neck to an empty tin can. On the DVD, they are a striking team, the young woman in her flowing, embroidered village costume, the old man weaving around her, his fiddle held in front of him as they dance to its hypnotic rhythms.

Davlatshoeva says that at first her partners doubted that a folk-music group could have any success. “I had to be very persuasive to convince them that this was the right path,” she says. “Because after the breakup of the Soviet Union it was a very difficult time for this music. A lot of pop music began to come in from the West and also from Russia, and people were listening to really everything else.

“I told the musicians that pop music is fine, but it is just for the moment, it doesn’t last,” she says. “I persuaded them that people were tired of always being bombarded with show music and would be interested in something more contemplative. And when we started to perform, they saw for themselves that it was true.”

Qasimov echoes this theme: “Of course, the whole world is interested in modern things,” he says. “And that has pushed folk music into the background. When I was a child, we would listen to the ashiqs -- the folk singers -- and we’d cry. But today most people aren’t listening to these things, and they are not used to reacting to music in that way.”

Finding his place

At 50, Qasimov remembers a time when traditional music was virtually all there was. “The people who had short-wave radios could hear other things,” he says. “They listened to jazz from Moscow or to Iranian music. But in my house our radio receiver could get only Azerbaijani music.”

He began singing along with the radio, then as he grew older turned to the mugham, a classical form closely related to the Arabic makham and more distantly to the Indian raga -- all styles that involve improvisation within specific modes and compositional structures.

“I wanted to be a professional,” he says. “So I realized I had to go into the mugham, that it was the deepest genre. And after I began, my heart opened to it, and I discovered that this was the world in which I belonged.”

He spent his first years performing at weddings and festivals, as mughams had done for centuries, but gradually these jobs disappeared. “Now all they play at the wedding houses is a kind of musical kasha,” he laments. “It’s a mixture of pop and rock, amplified to a kind of acoustical insanity.”

At the same time, though, a new audience was appearing. “These things always go in cycles,” Qasimov says. “They seem to be dying out, and then people are afraid of losing them and there’s a renaissance of interest. So I developed a concert audience, people who listen to this music in a way that you can’t listen at a wedding -- and not only here. All over the world.”

Baibussynova agrees. “Our music has experienced so many social changes,” she says. “Revolution, the Second World War, the Soviet period, the downfall of the Soviet Union -- and through all of these periods it has survived. This music can’t be destroyed, because it’s part of us. There may be a generation when the gene is recessive, but it’s always there, and it will always come back.”

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Spiritual Sounds of Central Asia: Nomads, Mystics and Troubadours

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Price: $24 to $46

Contact: (310) 825-2101