Boratmania, or something not entirely dissimilar

With Borat sweeping the USA and Canada it strikes me that a great many people know exactly nothing about Kazakhstan or Central Asia in general other than what is in this movie. I’m not exactly sure what is in the movie, but I can make a few guesses. Does Borat talk about how Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia are in the middle of a tugging war between the USA and Russia over influence over oil fields, pipelines and their strategic importance in relation to the Middle East (and China)? Did he talk about the culture or music (other than having extremely good prostitutes according to the one trailer that I saw) or the fact that much of it was nearly wiped out by the Soviet Union, not to mention language? Anyway, I could go on but I’m not really interesting in talking at length about a movie I have little interest in seeing. Rather I wanted to point out some interesting stuff that the library has relating to Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia.

There is a wonderful range of Central Asian music available at the library.
There is a great series co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways and the Aga Khan Trust For Culture called Music of Central Asia. The library has the first three volumes.
Vol 1: Tengir-Too: Mountain Music from Kyrgyzstan
Vol 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks
Vol 3: Homayun Sakhi: The Art of the Afghan Rubab
Wonderful liner notes plus a CD and a DVD. The DVDs are unfortunately each quite short, around 30 minutes each, but still well worth watching and the CDs are all wonderful. On the DVD for Vol 3 Homayun Sakhi describes his neighbourhood in Kabul that he left behind to go to Pakistan and later the US. “I have a lot of memories of Kucheh Kharbat, the musicians quarter in Kabul, where 400-500 musicians lived. Young and old alike played instruments. We were all playing music or making instruments. Every night we would go to someone’s house and play music. It was as if our street had been blessed and people made pilgrimages there. At night wherever you looked you would hear something nice. From one place you’d hear a Rubab; from another, a tabla. When things got bad in Afghanistan our street was completely destroyed. The whole area where musicians lived was decimated, and their instruments were buried under the earth”.
Music and art is often one of the first casualties of war as it is of religious fundamentalism. I feel like any media coverage of the war in Afghanistan (any of the wars) portrays Afghans as backwards and in need of Americans (and Canadians and Europeans) to sort out the mess that they’ve made of their dust-bowl country. There is never any talk about how US funding for Osama bin Laden and the mujihadin lead to the rise of the Taliban or that so many of the problems in Afghanistan have to do with cold war rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Or that despite the ravages of war and civil war, and the Taliban, Afghanistan has still retained a lot of its culture. Now all of Central Asia is in a similar position.
The Islamic music of Central Asia is very much influenced by Sufism, the mystical path in Islam, and is as far away from fundamentalist Shiism or Wahhabism as you can get. Here are some cds that the library has:
Songs from the Steppes: Kazakh music
Ochilbek Matchonov - Music from Central Asia: Uzbekistan on the Silk Road.
The music of Uzbekistan (this is a wonderful collection recorded in 1970 by one of the worlds greatest song collectors Deben Bhattacharya)
Inside Afghanistan (another collection of Deben Bhattacharya’s recordings)
The secret museum of mankind Central Asia: ethnic music classics 1925-48 (This is a wonderful series in general on Yazoo, a label which re-releases music originally released on 78s, much of it Blues)
Central Asia in Forest Hills N.Y.: music of the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam
Khomus: Jew's harp music of Turkic peoples in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia
Afghan Ensemble – Songs from Afghanistan

This is just a small sampling of what the library has and is based largely on my personal taste. I didn’t include anything from Tuva (for example the excellent Huun-Huur-Tu, who recently played a show here in Calgary) or Siberia (check out the excellent series Siberie on Buda Musique. The library has Vol 1-4, 8,9).

I wanted to mention two books
Fabled Cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva by Vadim Evgenevich
Gippenreiter is a wonderful coffee table sized books with lots of info about the aforementioned cities and Central Asia in general.

The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) by Theodore Craig Levin is part travel books, part ethnomusicology but one hundred per cent interesting and readable. It also has a very good cd that it comes with.
For analysis about what’s happening in Central Asia that is more informed than this blog please try World War Four Report. Also the raio show Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (download episodes here) often covers Central Asia and generally plays excellent music from all over the world, including Kazakhstan and its neighbors.