Mouthmusic

Notes From the Ground

2012-01-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm here! I'm alive! Longer posts hopefully to follow. However, for now, all I can manage are a few photos and a series of quick impressions of my first four days:

The cold is bearable. It takes me 10 minutes to prepare to go outside, and it's always a struggle to decide how many layers to remove once you're inside. I've also caught myself beginning to describe food primarily in terms of its temperature. As in, "This soup is so warm! I love it!" However, so far, it hasn't been so cold that I haven't wanted to go out and explore. (One Russian guard captured what seems to be the prevailing local sentiment on the cold snap I arrived with: "Winter ought to be winter.")

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Spurred on by my chilly ears, I went and bought the warmest hat I could find today. It was a good adventure: I went to a fur expo at a fairground north of the city. In preparation, I learned all the fur vocabulary I could find. If you were wondering, in rough ascending order by price, furs come from rabbits, raccoons, beavers, sables, mink, martens, foxes, and wolves. I ended up with a leather hat with big puffs of raccoon fur around the edges. Either because I'm a shrewd bargainer or because they were so surprised to see a foreigner there, I got it for about 70% off. (My bubby would be proud).

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I've forgotten a lot of geographical knowledge since I last spent significant time in Moscow five years ago. At this point, I need a map to get anywhere. However, there are lots of places that spark strong sensory memories-- I suddenly recall where something is in the grocery store or on the embassy compound, and I remember eating specific dinners in specific restaurants.

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I'd forgotten how much I get a perverse sense of pleasure from trying to talk about things I don't know the words for. Today, I bought honey (there are so many kinds!) and a big bottle of mead from a little shop. To do so, I had to have a conversation that started with me saying "I've never had Russian honey before. What would you recommend for a first taste?" and which involved many, many unfamiliar words (describing various qualities of honey and the process of producing it.)

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You can't truly grasp what an insane variety of shampoos we have available to us until you shop in a foreign language. I spent 10-15 minutes in the supermarket figuring out the words for 'oily hair', 'long hair', 'thin hair', 'dandruff', 'volumizing', 'shine' etc etc etc.

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My place is bare and it's strange to be living alone. I need to force myself not to just spread my things out over the entire surface of the apartment-- after all, who would care? As a side note, it looks like my household goods shipments may be hung up in visa / customs red tape for a good long while, so my apartment is likely to remain bare.

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I've had jet lag about as bad as I ever have here, but everyone's been understanding of the fact that I'm not fully functional yet. I impressed my work sponsor to no end by the mere fact that I stayed awake until the end of my first day here. Resetting my sleep schedule is incredibly hard, though, since it's pitch black when I am supposed to be getting up. The sun doesn't rise until past 10AM, when my colleagues have already been hard at work on the visa line for a solid two hours. Last night was the first night I didn't wake up at 3AM, and I still ended up taking a two hour midday nap.

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I'm still in the process of finding friends. So far I know most of the people in my section at work, a few people from my social sponsor's office, and one Russian-American friend I knew from back in DC. On Saturday, she took me to a cool art exhibition at an artists' retreat about 30km outside of town. It was a lot of fun-- I plowed through a few conversations in Russian, ate delicious plov cooked over an open fire, and enjoyed the art. I'm still hoping to find places to play music. There's an embassy band, which I might join, and I've emailed a couple of local bluegrass musicians, so we'll see how that turns out.

How to spend a month without a job?

2011-08-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm in the enviable position of having a full month without any firm commitments. Today is August 12. On September 12, I'll report to the State Department to start training to be a diplomat. I hope to spend the time between now and then as well as possible. I have three things in mind-- and you can help with each.

1) Play lots of music. Unfortunately, both of my bands are missing members due to people moving away. I'll practice a lot on my own, but would like to play with people too-- in part because it's fun, in part to try to put together a new band lineup for the fall. If you know any awesome musicians (bluegrass or otherwise) who might like to play with me, put us in touch!

2) Read books. Yesterday, I finished reading my first novel in months and months. I want to keep that going-- to expand my reading list beyond what can be contained in Google Reader. Send me recommendations for what I should be reading!

3) Take on challenges. My friend Amanda has started a project where she solicits challenges from friends and completes them. Potential challenges are very broadly defined as things that are hard but fun to do. So far, for example, she and her partner in awesomeness have walked from DC to Baltimore, written and performed a 10 minute play in iambic pentameter, and more. They are currently writing a young adult novel, staging a mass wild west style showdown (rock-paper-scissors style) in a public park, and more. There are plenty of potential challenges ripe for the taking on the website, but I'd like to hear what you think I should do. Send me ideas for challenges, ideally ones that can be accomplished in a month! Bonus points if you want to collaborate to tackle a challenge with me.

Besides these things, I'll be fixing bikes, swing dancing, and catching up with friends. Be in touch, especially if you have mornings free and would like to schedule things early in the day. So far, the hardest part of unemployment seems to be getting out of bed at a reasonable hour.

Escalator etiquette

2009-06-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

It turns out that the seemingly worldwide convention 'stand on the right, walk on the left' is familiar to only about 60% of the residents of Budapest. I'm curious about how this happened, and what it says about Hungarian culture. I've taken for granted that in DC, Moscow, and every other city I've been in with escalators, people will contritely get out of your way if they forget and park themselves on the left hand side. Here, it doesn't happen. If you don't get to the escalator as one of the first 10 or so people, there's a very good chance that someone will have, given a choice between standing on the right and left, decided to buck the general trend and block the left hand side. And it's rare that they get the hint and scoot over when you come climbing up the escalator behind them.

One hypothesis would be that it's a symptom of a culture that's more accepting of waiting and less accepting of hurrying. There are plenty of places where this is the case. People in much of Europe wait for walk signs to turn green, even if there's not a car in sight. But Budapest is not one of those places. It's definitely a get-across-as-fast-as-possible kind of city.

This should have been an opportunity to learn the Hungarian for 'excuse me', but I've somehow forgotten to ask anyone.

In Budapest, in the home stretch!

2009-06-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've dug myself into a serious blogging hole again. And as in the past, I think the only thing to be done is to make a brief reckoning of the things I have to catch up on, then skip ahead to the present. So, here are all the things I hope to write about soon:

-- Some mop up posts from *way* back in UK and France. A couple funny moments from London, trying to help Bellatrix and the Boxettes win an online talent competition. A trip to Brighton to visit Layth, who's got an amazing beatbox practice regimen and results to match. My Saturday at the Beatbox Academy, and a followup conversation with academy instructor Jes Sadler. My magical first day in Paris. An extended interview with L.O.S. in Angers and brief highlights from my visit to Ezra's trailer
-- More thoughts from Århus, including the incredible Cosmos show, jamming with VoxNorth people (differences between a cappella jams and beatbox jams), a vocal jazz workshop with Jesper Holm, and incredulity at Denmark's level of English education.
-- A few more posts from the European backpacking adventure. Why the Deutsche Bahn is wonderful. Review of mako!mako concert in Brno. Prague Hip Hop Subway Series. A gypsy music concert in Prague (Deladap)!A look at beatbox in experimental avant garde music in Poland (TikTak).
-- The Beatbox World Championships in Berlin! Reconnecting with friends met all over Europe. Highlights and a summary of the competition results. Online bickering over the judging.
-- Arrival in Hungary. First Roma music show (Romano Drom) and problems with the language barrier. A brief history of 'authentic' gypsy music and the divisions among Roma in Hungary. Athe Sam festival-- a week of concerts every night.

And here's what I'm up to now:

I arrived in Budapest ten days ago and have settled into a very nice little flat in the IInd district, Buda side. Budapest was originally two separate cities-- Pest in the east, Buda in the west, divided by the Duna (Danube) river. They were joined by bridge 900 years ago or so, but somehow still retain slightly different characters. Pest is busier, with more nightlife and a more regular gridded street plan. Buda has more green spaces and a huge castle up on a hill.

I'm really enjoying having my own place to live, something I literally haven't had all year. It's not ideal for pursuing full immersion in Roma culture, but after the amount I've been traveling in the past couple months, a stable home base was too attractive to pass up. I've been struggling to overcome what is probably the hardest language situation I've been in all year. I can't really decipher any Hungarian, and I don't have an English-speaking host to explain everything to me. This often results in comedy. Today I made pasta sauce, which turned out quite nicely. The spice packet I'd bought in the supermarket, however, only had preparation instructions in Magyar. I tried typing them into Google translate, but got very odd results. A sample sentence: "Defecation of the dough after the 50 ml of water is to be set aside to prepare the pesto."

Project wise, I've spent every night over the past week at a festival of Roma music held at a big club in the center of Pest. It's one immediate revelation about this music that, even though it's a folk music and even though Roma people face pretty serious discrimination in Hungary (rising to violence in isolated cases), their music is at the cutting edge of hip. The club was packed over the weekend and pretty well populated even in the middle of the week. I struggled with the reality of being shoulder to shoulder with the musicians I wanted to learn from and not being able to speak with them at all. Roma as a group are very poorly served by the education system, and those who work as traditional musicians are even less likely than most to speak English or another foreign language. For the record, while I've met a couple of people here who speak a little Russian, the most useful language to speak if visiting Hungary, apart of course from Magyar, is probably German. English is a close second.

I did manage to meet a group of English-speaking Roma people-- they're students in the Roma Versitas program. The program supports Roma enrolled in university, seeking to increase the numbers of Roma in skilled professions. They had a 'living library' at the festival where passersby could browse a catalog of subjects relating to Roma culture and then have a student sit down with them and explain a chosen subject. I made friends with a couple of the Roma Versitas students, which will be a great help during my remaining time in Budapest. My new friends are, it must be said, mostly either from mixed Magyar/Roma families or from Roma families that have embraced an urban lifestyle, without much contact with other Roma. Only 1% of Roma end up getting college degrees, so you would expect that 1% to be from non-traditional backgrounds. However, any hope I entertained of meeting an English-speaking Roma person who had close contact with relatives in a traditional Roma community in rural Eastern Hungary now seems far-fetched.

Health-wise, I had a new episode of (what's pretty much confirmed as) staph take over both legs and creep up my stomach. It was pretty debilitating, and I went to the doctor here after just a few days of trying to tend to the boils myself. He gave me a prescription for amoxicillin, though also took blood and a pus sample. The whole encounter cost $266, but the antibiotic has knocked the boils right out, so at least that's better.

More soon! I'm a little engrossed with what's happening in Iran right now, so am spending more time than I should refreshing various blogs to look for updates. However, I'll also find time to update my own (much less important) blog.

American beatbox / Euro beatbox: Kid Lucky interview

2009-05-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

(written two weeks ago, during my first stop in Prague. I'm now finishing up my second stop, and am headed to Berlin for the World Championships this weekend.)

I arrived in Prague, got money out of an ATM (one crisp 1000 crown note), apologetically bought a 35 crown sandwich and got change, bought a ticket for the subway, and was at my 9PM appointment at a hole-in-the-wall hiphop club by 9:20. The guy I was meeting with, an American beatboxer named Kid Lucky, showed up around 10 with a smiling Czech girl on his arm.

Kid Lucky spent a long time developing a beatbox scene in New York, and is now doing workshops and concerts in Europe, basing his European life out of Prague. I'd heard a lot about the perceived differences between American beatboxing and Euro beatboxing, and so I really wanted to hear Kid Lucky's perspective on the question. Once he showed up, he did not disappoint. I pulled out my notebook and tried to catch the best quotes, wishing I could record (it was a bit too loud in the club for that).

Kid Lucky starts from the position that beatbox and hiphop are inseparable. Beatbox may have spread throughout the world along with hiphop culture, but it is still (or should still be) tightly connected to its roots, the beatboxers who created the art form in the early 1980s. He thinks that's what gets lost a lot of the time in Europe. "You have to know history, so you don't think you're so great," he explained. "What [European beatboxers] are doing isn't new."

That took us into a discussion of terminology. His problem is not with musicians who want to use similar techniques to beatbox to create new forms of music. It's more a question of those people appropriating the name 'beatbox' to describe what they do. If you're not based in hiphop, Kid Lucky insisted, "Stop calling it beatbox. Beatbox is within the realm of hiphop."

Many beatboxers in Europe, Kid Lucky continued, would better be termed 'vocal percussionists'. The real pioneers of beatbox, he explained, rattling off a list of the godfathers of the art, had more going for them than just drum sounds. "Every beatboxer was an emcee. Every single one of them."

Lucky's own style derives from this view of beatbox. He coined the term 'beatrhyming' to describe what he does. It combines freestyle rap with vocal scratching-- taking words and mashing them up like a DJ would do with a record on a turntable-- and just brief moments of vocal percussion. It lets him, without any loop pedals or backing tracks, create solo performances that carry clear messages along with a beat. "The whole thing about beatbox is doing it all," Kid Lucky says. "You are a one man hip hop show." He says he created the style mostly to use in battles with other beatboxers, to bring something to the table that no one else was doing.

Beatboxers today, most of whom can't put together their own lyrics, suffer from what Lucky calls 'Kenny Muhammad syndrome'. Muhammad is a top beatboxer who emerged in the late 1990s, and whose most famous routines are frequently copied by novice beatboxers. Kid Lucky has a bit of a grudge against Muhammad, whom he blames for creating the notion that a beatboxer could do nothing but drums and sound effects. He also has little respect for many of the big names in European beatbox (it's worth noting that he excepted the French), whom he sees as derivative acts at best, copycats at worst. He took a dig at the UK scene, saying, ""All those cats are biters. Every single one of them. And now there's this new crop that's biting off of them!"

I felt compelled to rise to defend Europe, pointing out what I saw as a much stronger community of beatboxers, all helping each other get better and learn new things. He responded that the top beatboxers in the US are still a close bunch, but they just show a sense of community in different ways. "We're not all online all the time, but we'll phone each other, and if you have a gig somewhere you can come crash at my place."

The major difference, he said, is that the European community looks inwards first and foremost. Beatboxers seek to win the approval of other beatboxers, which leads to them developing routines that can be fully appreciated only by other beatboxers, who know how hard it is to do the things they do. Conversely, in the US, beatboxers aim to make it big with a wider audience. "You're trying to prove yourself to other beatboxers," Kid Lucky says. "We're trying to make money."

Kid Lucky told me that the future of solo beatbox is in words-- in creating routines that offer new, original lyrics that carry a message. There's nowhere left to go in increased technicality, he suggested, and the logical place to go is back to the roots of the artform. Whether this becomes accepted among the broader community of beatboxers, he says, "depends on who wins the PR war." He's doing his part, spreading the gospel of hiphop to would-be beatboxers across Europe, and serving as a kind of hiphop guru here in Prague. I'll write more about my experience with his Hip Hop Subway Series, which is putting on regular, mobile ciphers (jam sessions) in the Prague metro. The most recent one, this past Sunday, drew a crowd of around 80 people.

Hitting the wall

2009-05-26T05:13:00.000-07:00

(written a week ago in Poland-- now in Prague and feeling much more put together)

I've found my limit when it comes to travel. I'm in my eighth country in less than a month, and for most of that time I've been living according to other people's schedules. I wake up when my hosts wake up, go to sleep when they go to sleep, follow them to their rehearsals and hang out with their friends. It's exactly what I wanted to do, and this month has worked out as well as I could have hoped. However, all of a sudden, I realized that I'm physically and mentally exhausted.

I like to think that I'm pretty good at the nomadic, couchsurfing life. I can eat anything, sleep anywhere, can talk to all sorts of different people, and quickly learn my survival vocabulary in each new language. However, it's a useful lesson to learn that I do need the comforts of one's own home, friends, and routine every once in a while.

The last straw came on Saturday in Krakow. I was there to see a show by Polish hip-hop collective Planet Luc and to meet with Zgas, the beatboxer from the group. We'd been phoning each other for a bit, and I knew the name of the club where the show was. However, a lot was still unsettled when I got to Krakow. Zgas had said I could probably stay in the hotel where the band was staying, and that he'd send me directions to the club and the name of the hotel. He did neither, and I ended up having to find the club on my own. Around 8:30PM, I decided that I should also just find myself a hotel room, since I was having no luck contacting Zgas. I'd bought a map of the city and walked to a couple of different places marked on the map before settling on a student hostel that gave me a single room for a bit more than I really wanted to pay.

Finally, after the show (which I think I only partially appreciated, not speaking any Polish), I met Zgas and we talked for a bit about his background with beatbox and the growth of beatbox in Poland as a whole. He asked if I wanted to come back to his hometown of Wroclaw and see another one of his groups perform the next day. I was up for it, but was a little wary about the fact that Zgas was still taking the same casual approach to logistics. "I'll call you later tonight and let you know if there's a space in the car for you. If not, you can take a train-- I'll call you and tell you where the show is. We can figure out where you can stay once you get there."

I went back to my hotel, discovered that there was no internet, and realized that I'd had enough. In the morning, I woke up and relished the feeling of having the room to myself and not having to get out of bed if I wasn't ready to. I decided that I really didn't want to go repeat the experience in another city-- arriving with no idea of where I would stay, who I could communicate with, or where the show I was there to see was taking place. I hopped on a train and came back to Warsaw. Over the past couple of days, I've been visiting a couple of friends I met in Tuva last summer. Last night, we had a nice little dinner party and looked at a ton of pictures from our Tuvan adventures. I played igil for the first time in five months or so, and I feel much better now. I have a week or so before the beatbox championships in Berlin, and after that I plan to go to Budapest and stay more or less put for my last month.

Oh! And yes, I bought a plane ticket back to the states. I will be on American soil again on July 5th. Eeee!!!

Happy coincidences

2009-05-18T03:01:00.001-07:00

I'm in Warsaw right now, seeing how Polish beatbox stacks up against the rest of Europe. Last night, I was over at a friend's place (I have 4 Polish friends, all of whom I met in Tuva last summer), left late and missed the last subway train back to the place I'm staying. I only realized this after waiting for about 15 minutes. The other two people waiting for the same train helpfully translated an announcement that came over the PA in Polish, apparently saying there wasn't going to be another train. As it turned out, not only did one of them speak English well, the other was a beatboxer and knew my host here. They helped me find a night bus home.

I'm going to enter this episode as evidence in my ongoing debate with various beatboxers about the costs & benefits of practicing in public. Some beatboxers feel it's an imposition on the people around you and won't practice anywhere except in the privacy of their own acoustically isolated bunkers. Others beatbox anywhere and everywhere they go. I'm more in the latter school, though I try to keep it quiet when there are other people around. So last night, when I was the only person in the subway station, I was practicing when these two guys walked in. Beatbox connection established!

A cappella overload

2009-05-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

I´m in Aarhus, Denmark, which is, at the moment, the center of the a cappella universe. It´s hosting the Aarhus Vocal Music Festival. Today was the first full day, and I´m wiped out, but somehow still on a crazy singing high.

All I can manage right now are highlights:

-- My morning was a back-to-basics vocal percussion workshop with Andrea Figallo. It was the complete opposite of every bit of beatbox teaching I´ve had. He didn´t really worry much about sounds, but spent the whole time talking about breaking down rhythmic patterns, maintaining a pulse / using your breath properly, and generally thinking about the small details that separate good vocal percussionists from the crowd. I went in thinking I knew some things about VP, and it turned into a really humbling experience.

-- The night´s concert was absolutely incredible. Apes & Babes from Norway sang a really crazy set ranging from Norwegian folk songs to tango to Prodigy, tied together somehow with an approach that stretched their voices in really fantastic ways. Then the Real Group came on and showed what perfect pop/jazz a cappella sounds like.

-- After the show, at the late night session, I got to talk to a couple of the members of the Real Group, spoke to Cosmos (from Latvia, headlining tomorrow´s concert) in Russian, and did a little live looping beatbox improv on stage with my Couchsurfing host Kristoffer. I had to not think about who was in the audience and just do whatever came to mind, and it actually turned out OK! I need to get a KAOSS pad.

Now, will sleep for a few hours and do it all again tomorrow! Eeee!

Les Daltoniens- beatbox theater

2009-04-24T02:50:00.000-07:00

I spent parts of four days visiting Roxorloops, one of my early beatbox idols, in Liedekerke, Belgium. If you had to categorize, Roxorloops is the epitome of 'European-style' beatbox. He doesn't really have ties to a hip-hop scene, nor does he make much of an effort to look hiphop. His beatboxing focuses on incredibly precise sounds that don't sound like anything that could possibly come from a human throat. Roxor explained that his aim is to push the limits as far from organic 'boom-chicka-pah' beatbox as he possibly can. As for his progress towards this goal, I'll just say that he's probably the only beatboxer I've ever seen who can make my jaw drop with how realistic he sounds without the aid of a microphone.

He's a full-time professional beatboxer, though he reaches that coveted status by splitting his time between several different projects. He does solo shows (I saw him perform at a frighteningly lavish birthday party), provides vocal drums for an a cappella group and a band, and is part of a three-man beatbox theatre ensemble called Les Daltoniens. I spent a couple of days helping the Daltoniens build the set for their current show and watching a performance.

The idea behind Les Daltoniens is to use beatbox to fill in the rhythms and music inherent in everyday life. Each actor's character has a rhythmic beatbox motif, and they add vocal sound effects (dogs, curtains opening and closing, sirens, etc.) to create a full soundscape. There is very little spoken dialogue, but physical acting, a full set, and the beatbox sounds fill in exactly what is going on.

The show has a clear plot, featuring three characters-- a noise-averse, crotchety old man, a musically inclined homeless man, and a friendly postman. The homeless man finds a temporary home in a pile of construction equipment left next to the old man's house. The postman walks by and gives him a coat to keep his feet warm, and eventually comes to befriend him, based around a common interest in music. They quickly run afoul of the old man with their beatboxing ways, and he comes up with various ways to drive them away.

The plot resolves itself in magical fashion with the aid of an invisible, supernaturally gifted fly. It's been sprayed nearly to death after buzzing around the old man's flowers, and the postman nurses it back to health. It's then that they discover that the fly has the incredible ability to turn people into breakdancers by flying into their mouths. Eventually, this happens to the angry old man, he realizes that he enjoys dancing & beatboxing, and the three of them live happily ever after.

The story itself is fairly formulaic, but the way sounds are used to tell it is pure brilliance. When the homeless man is tidying up his new living quarters, the sound effect of him brushing off some dirty street barriers meshes right into his beatbox motif. The same magic happens with the 'sounds' of the old man's security systems, the postman's letter deliveries, the fly (and a can of insect repellent), and even a session of graffiti tagging (aided by a computer projector screen).

It's a show that brings a sense of wonder and imagination to the sounds of urban life, and the kids in the audience lapped it up. They participated in the drama of the plot, shouting from their seats to tell the old man who had painted his wall. They also asked tons of questions afterwards, apparently including, "Was there a real dog in the house?"

I'm really excited to see beatbox used in this way. Beatbox often feels like magic when people hear it for the first time, and harnessing this magic to highlight the beauty of the mundane is a noble goal.

Beatbox as art

2009-03-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

One of my goals in traveling and studying beatbox is to find people who are creating art with beatbox, creating music that actually has substance and carries a message. Beatbox music encompasses an incredibly diverse set of styles, and I'm interested in the styles that are exploring furthest away from the basics of hiphop rhythms.

Last night, I saw exactly what this exploration could look like. I went to a show at London's Southbank Centre that featured collaborations between beatboxer Shlomo and several Indian musicians, some from the kathak tradition and some from a sort of contemporary Tamil-pop fusion angle.

There's no video up on the internet yet, but you can hear an example of some of the collaborative stuff that Shlomo and Gauri Sharma Tripathi were putting together on Shlomo's site. I enjoyed the Shlomo-Gauri collaborative stuff a lot, especially since it reminded me of what I had been experimenting with in Chennai, replacing the syllables of konnakol vocal percussion patterns with beatbox sounds.

The centerpiece of the evening, however, was a massive, 15 minute long, all-vocal kathak-beatbox piece that incorporated a 35 person choir. I watched it being rehearsed for much of the afternoon, and was floored by the sheer ambition and scale of the piece. It was worlds away from a normal beatbox routine, worlds away from a normal choir piece, and worlds away from a normal kathak performance. The piece started with the choir dispersed in small groups throughout the hall. One group started with a simple, repeated 'ta' and other groups slowly joined in with other syllabic patterns to build a surround-sound rhythmic tapestry of voices.

The piece really crossed the line from musical experimentation into serious art, which was a powerful thing to witness. One of the two most memorable parts of the piece saw the 35 young British girls, nearly all of Indian heritage, all dressed in colorful Indian robes, break away from the Kathak rhythms and join Shlomo and Bellatrix in a staged beatbox battle, complete with hiphop attitude. Watching the girls giggle and strut as they tried to seem as hiphop as possible for this part of the piece, I couldn't help but think of the whole thing as a staged version of the experience of Indian communities throughout the west.

Indian parents move from Mumbai to London, and raise their kids to speak Hindi and appreciate the cultural traditions of their parents (in Mumbai girls learn kathak, in Chennai it would be bharatanatyam). But their kids are also fully British, and listen to R&B and hiphop music, which excited them in ways that kathak doesn't. You end up with this group of kids that move fluently between the two worlds, a cultural group that is something completely new.

This lesson was driven home in the last element of the piece. Gauri's 7 year old daughter Isha walked confidently out from backstage, clutching a wireless microphone as long as her forearm. She was dressed in a white hooded sweatshirt and took her place right in the middle of the stage, between Shlomo and Bellatrix, and between the two halves of the kathak choir. The choir finished its last pattern and Isha took over, confidently reciting a couple lines of poetry in Hindi that flowed right into a couple bars of her beatboxing. It was the perfect ending.

The concert itself ended in similar style, with Susheela Raman wailing out a cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, accompanied by guitar, tabla, sarod, cajon, two beatboxers, and kathak rhythms. It was a rollicking, improvised jam (two of the musicians had to be pulled out of the audience and sent backstage to unpack their instruments for it) that went on for at least 10 minutes, and left the audience still wanting more.

All in all, the evening was incredible to witness. Not everything was polished, and you could see the performers feeling out the music as they went along. However, it was completely fresh. As an audience, we were taken along with musicians who said to us, "We don't know if this will work, but let's give it a shot." The fact that it worked so well in so many places was icing on the cake.

Mbira music

2009-03-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

I've learned not to worry too much during the Watson-- things will inevitably come together in ways you didn't plan. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't help that process along. Meeting a ton of people, and constantly mentioning your project (even past the point that it starts to sound stale to your own ears) lets you run a better chance of being in the right place at the right time.

This happened in a big way in Durban-- I'd spent weeks trying to speak with Patricia Opondo, the director and founder of the African Music & Dance program at the University of Kwazulu Natal. It turned out that I couldn't reach her because she'd gone to Kenya for the January holiday (and Obama's inauguration). I only managed to arrange to meet her after I'd been in the country for 3 weeks.

It was worth it, however. Although she didn't have any new contacts for me on the traditional isicathamiya or amahubo music I thought I was interested in, she ended up turning me in a completely different direction. While we were talking, I mentioned something about how I'd heard that Zimbabwean mbira music featured a kind of yodeling and meaningless vocable syllables that accompanied the instrument. We talked about it a little, and Patricia offered to introduce me to a Zimbabwean mbira player who was a graduate student in the African Music program.

That's how I met Perminus Matiure. The first day, he talked to me a little about mbira music, played some, and agreed to teach me the basics of how the music was structured and how vocal improvisation fit into it. We started the next day and I ended up taking daily lessons for two weeks. The mbira is a wonderfully mesmerizing instrument, and it was easy to lose myself in practicing it.

As for the actual question of how improvised vocal parts fit into mbira music, it turned out to be quite an interesting one. Mbira music, like lots of music of southern Africa, is cyclical in nature and is participatory-- there are professional mbira players, but everyone at a ceremony where mbira music is being played will join in singing, dancing & clapping. The goal is to create a sufficiently complex, dense musical texture that it fills up every part of your consciousness and allows for contact with the spirit world. The mbira I learned, called mbira dzavadzimu ('mbira of the ancestors'), is a sacred instrument used primarily at religious spirit possession ceremonies.

Thus, one aspect of vocal parts is to fill spaces, to plug holes in the patterns being played on the mbira. However, there's also a second ideal in vocal performance-- singers pick out and sing parts that they hear in the mbira (voice imitating instrument!). Mbira parts are cyclical and interlock different patterns of notes in the two left hand manuals of keys and the one right hand manual. When all three manuals are being played (and especially when two or more mbiras are playing together), it forms quite a rich texture of sound, and you can find your brain picking out various melodic lines in the music, even lines that cross between the right and left hand parts, or that use the overtones of left hand keys (which can be quite strong). Simply put, you listen for these parts and sing them.

The yodel technique that's common in Shona singing seems to be a way to capture the interplay between a high, right hand mbira note combined with a lower note.

This is one post that seems incredibly bare without audio, so I'm embedding a clip of an ensemble of Shona mbira musicians. This isn't one I recorded myself, since I never got to Zimbabwe to hear mbira music in its proper context, but all of my recordings are of just one or two people (me and Perminus, or me and Laina, the woman who taught me another couple songs while I was in Grahamstown). I think you'll get a much better sense of how ensemble mbira playing, accompanied by hosho rattles and singing, works from this clip.

Coming attractions

2009-02-17T23:03:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving Durban today, driving south into the Eastern Cape (which means I'm leaving Zulu culture behind and will now be encountering Xhosa culture). My plan is to go spend some time with a traditional music ensemble in a tiny village called Ngqoko. It's about 680km away, so I'll split the drive in two with a stopover at a pretty beachfront town along the coast.

I may not have internet for a little bit, but I'll try to keep writing and catch up with some of the things I've done recently. Hopefully, I'll post, at the very least:

-- A description of the Zimbabwean mbira music I've been learning from a grad student at the university here in Durban.
-- Pieces from my interview with Krump Kid aka Drumkit, the top beatboxer in Durban and an all-around cool guy.
-- An account of my visits to various isicathamiya rehearsals, including a group composed nearly entirely of blind singers.

Isicathamiya 'til dawn

2009-02-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

After a month of trying to study Zulu vocal music and the isicathamiya style, I finally made it to an isicathamiya competition this Saturday. I took Laura, a Fulbright scholar from the US, along for the show. Isicathamiya competitions as a rule are all-night affairs, and so we arrived at around 10:15pm, ready for a long night. From the moment we walked in the doors of the YMCA hall where the competition took place, we were, against our will, instant celebrities as the only non-Zulus in the room. We were given front row seats, cups of tea, and periodic visits to update us on what was going on.

Around 2AM, we were flagging and Cynthia, the venue secretary suggested that she talk a friend into driving us back to the backpackers. We were torn between staying until the actual competition and getting some sleep. Ultimately, the friend (not keen to head out on the roads at 2 in the morning anyhow) convinced us to stay. We dragged a few plastic chairs into a corner and improvised chair beds that allowed us at least a couple of hours of uncomfortable napping. The steady rhythms of the singing turned out to be wonderfully soothing, and at our level of exhaustion, pleasantly soporific.

I woke up right on time at 4:30 and we moved back into our front row seats to watch the competition. The groups had somehow managed to spruce themselves up to look even fresher than they had at the beginning of the evening (spotless white gloves helped). They drew numbers to determine the competition order, then took their turns singing to the judge, a large imposing man in a bright white suit and matching white porkpie hat.

The competition follows its own bizarre logic. Cynthia gave us a scoresheet so we could see how the judge would be scoring the performances. I was stunned by what was listed on the sheet. The most important criterion, at 30% of the total, was 'Evening Suit'-- the perfectly matched uniform that inevitably featured identical pocket handkerchiefs and white gloves for all of a group's members. Other categories included 'confidence', 'charisma', and 'modeling'. I'm pretty sure the English translations didn't adequately capture the Zulu terms they were supposed to, but they could only have been *so* off.

Notably missing from the scoresheet was anything to do with the quality of the singing. I tried to ask everyone I could about what seemed like a glaring omission, but never really got a straight answer. As it happened, the group both Laura and I thought was clearly the best musically ended up in 4th place out of 6. The group that won, we both found just OK.

The best explanation I could come up with is that isicathamiya is partly about singing, but is much more about conveying a moral message. The men who sing isicathamiya describe the struggles of the Zulu people and act as teachers of what proper behavior is. We were told several times that we shouldn't worry about our safety, even though we were in one of Durban's dodgier areas. Men who sing isicathamiya, we learned, are clean and trustworthy. So, while good singing lends their message greater credibility, a disciplined walk and appropriately sharp suits do the same thing (and are seemingly valued higher). Once they've taken care of credibility, the most important thing is the message they're singing about. I tried to make friends with a couple of people at the competition who spoke decent English, and was able to at least get the gist of some of the songs being performed. Before the competition, in the more laidback part of the evening, groups were singing songs bragging about their skill, challenging other groups to come test them, and in one case a (apparently) hilarious song about a man complaining his wife mistreated him. But during the competition, we heard songs about pretty heavy themes: the HIV/AIDS epidemic, street kids, Jacob Zuma's legal woes, and one about the exiles who returned home to South Africa in 1994.

This is actually pretty close to how music functions in a traditional, Zulu context. There are, of course, completely silly songs that people sing all the time. But music and dance has a significant social and religious role, and is used to preserve and pass along clan identity, social norms, and respect for one's heritage. Singing well and knowing lots of traditional songs is a good path towards status and respect in Zulu culture. And, while isicathamiya is relatively new on the scene, it carries forward all the values of the ceremonial & traditional music of the Zulus.

The Witches of Ezinqoleni

2009-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

I spent a wonderful six days in the rural community of Ezinqoleni, 90 minutes drive from Durban. I was visiting Vusi Zulu (pictured, at left), the leader of Uhlelo Olusha, a top isicathamiya group in Durban. When he's not in the city, he lives in a small house on a heavily potholed dirt road in this little community. Various family members are just across the street, and there's always some cousin or another popping in to say hello. Even without visitors, there were 6 of us in the three room house: Vusi, his wife (called maPhewa or just Mams), two kids (Abongile and Skhanyiso), a cousin, and me. Vusi and I slept on a mattress on the floor, while the women and kids slept on the bed.

Singing is part of the glue that holds traditional Zulu culture together, and everyone can and does sing. Vusi is a talented composer and a great choir leader (with the proper high voice to fit the bill), so when he's in town, his house is the site of regular gospel choir rehearsals. Most of the guys within a several kilometer radius show up around 6:30 and sing for a good hour or more. I got a crash course in Zulu gospel music, isicathamiya, and the traditional ceremonial songs that people could remember. I also learned a whole lot about what life in a poor rural South African village is like-- the richness of Zulu culture that is still very much alive, and the awfulness of government services, which are improving slowly if at all. I'll try to relate a few of the more memorable scenes.

---
Partway through Thursday evening's gospel choir rehearsal, Zama (Vusi's wife's half-sister) came and pulled Vusi out of the room. A few minutes later, he came back and beckoned me out. Mams' grandmother was very ill. They were afraid that an aunt, long suspected of witchcraft, had done her in. The only possible way out was if we went immediately to fetch the traditional healer or sangoma (pictured, at right) to go lift the curse. It was 9pm and dark, but we hit the road. "When I was growing up, I didn't believe there were such things as witches," Vusi told me along the way. "But here there really are. You are lucky to live in the US where you don't have to worry about such things."

We waited nervously on a dark road for the sangoma to collect her medicines and walk up to the road. Then, with me doing my best not to kill us all on the potholed, rutted roads, we set off for the patient's house. We arrived to find a silent room-- twenty relatives seated pensively around the perimeter with a mattress on the floor that supported a pile of blankets. The grandmother's head could just be seen, poking out of one end of the pile.

The sangoma set to work-- she had the witch tell her side of the story. Some of the family later grumbled that she had left out certain incriminating details, like how she'd sent one boy on an errand to the store in order to be alone with the grandmother. Having heard what she needed to, the healer took an array of powders and liquids out of her bag. With the occasional shout, she mixed this with that, took a pinch of the other and poured something down the patient's throat. She then called for a basin of water and started giving her patient a bath. At that point, Vusi and I were called out of the room. Somehow, our hosts had found out we'd come without eating dinner, and we were given a plate of baloney sandwiches ('polony' in Zulu) and a bottle of Fanta. After eating, I lay down for a quick nap-- it was already past the time we'd normally be asleep, and I could feel myself drifting, something I didn't want to be doing on the drive home.

By the time I woke up from my nap, the healing was over and had been pronounced a success. I drove her home and Vusi and I went home and collapsed into bed-- Mams stayed behind with Skhanyiso to look after her grandmother.

---
The next day was supposed to be devoted to a fishing expedition with the rock-solid bass from Vusi's choir. The weather intervened, however, and I awoke to the familiar rattle of rain against the tin roof. It wouldn't have mattered, though, as Vusi suddenly remembered that it was his brother's day in court. He has been in jail for a month, accused of beating and robbing a man in his home. Vusi was going to be a witness for the defense-- his brother had stayed in his house that night and wasn't anywhere near the scene of the crime. I drove the winding, potholed dirt road into town, hurrying as much as was safe, since the court was supposed to start at 8:30AM. We got there around a quarter to 10, and waited half an hour before the court started hearing any cases. Vusi's brother was number 9 on the docket. 1-8 were an assorted mix of people posting bail, people requesting legal aid attorneys, but no actual cases resolved. The Indian judge heard testimony and communicated with the defendants through an interpreter, who also translated proceedings into Zulu for the assembled audience.

After all the wait, our case was a bust-- in his last appearance, the judge had directed Vusi's brother to request a public defender to represent him. He had done so, but still hadn't been assigned a lawyer. The judge summarily delayed his bail hearing until March 13, and dismissed him. It was over within two minutes, and we dejectedly filed out of the courtroom. I was shocked and more than a little angry. What kind of government could arrest someone, hold him for 3 months without even a chance to post bail, and try him through an interpreter in his own country?

School of Rock

2009-01-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

I am at Inkamana Abbey to work with Brother Clement Sithole, one of the few remaining teachers of Zulu musical bow music alive. His life is dedicated to a group of 20 odd children he has taken in over the years and turned into an ensemble of Zulu music and dance. It is a project I greatly admire, as the children are living a childhood I think I would have loved-- they spend a majority of the hours when they are not in school on their own, teaching themselves guitar, keyboards, bass, and creating musical numbers complete with choreographed dance routines. They have a large repertoire of traditional Zulu songs and ceremonial dances, though seem drawn more towards western-influenced popular music (their preferred genre, maskandi, blurs the lines between traditional and popular).

The whole situation is not without its flaws. As one of the teachers at the mission school pointed out, what Clement has done is technically illegal. He's unofficially adopted all these children, with no government paperwork involved. For the most part, they come from single parent households, where their mothers can't afford to feed and clothe them. Some of them have lost their mothers to HIV/AIDS. There is a child welfare system in South Africa, but Clement will have nothing to do with it. He is afraid the government would impose its own rules on his little group of kids. In part, this is probably completely accurate. Apparently, some years ago, government inspectors made the abbey tear down a decrepit old abandoned building where Clement had been housing his children. At present, some of the kids live with a pair of women (one of whom was the first mother to come to Clement asking him to take her child) in a tin-roof shack in a nearby township. Another group live in a basement on the abbey grounds.

It is really frustrating for me because I recognize that with a clever caretaker these kids could have good living facilities, money to support their schooling, and help with their music. They are adorable children, mature and well-behaved, and every one of them has grown up singing and dancing. Even the youngest can sing harmony without even thinking about it, and there are some real stars among them. Michael, who is entering eleventh grade, is the creative force behind their pop music compositions, and he composes and arranges everything from the melodies and words to the keyboard and bass parts. The leader of the traditional Zulu call and response songs is Qiniso, a brilliantly precocious girl of 11, who has a great singing voice, dances effortlessly, and has the confidence and stage presence to tie it all together. If these kids could get proper music lessons, they could be absolute stars.

The problem is that Clement is not a clever caretaker. He is forgetful and will consistently do things like fail to register a kid for school until the day schools open. Then he'll walk into town and be surprised when the schools are full. It's part of his nature, oblivious to how things work or how people expect him to act. He often asks me to help him find the number of someone who he has been speaking to on his cellphone, and can't help shouting at his phone in a voice that deafens me when I am sitting nearby. One of the lenses of his glasses fell out a few days ago, and he has not yet managed to put it back it (though I keep telling him this can be easily done with just a small screwdriver or a pocketknife). He has virtually no regular streams of income to support the kids, even though I could see foundations in the US falling over themselves to fund this endeavor.

As it worked out, I paid for my stay by giving some money for one of the older kids to stay in Durban until her university semester begins and drove Clement and one of the others the 350km down to Durban to register for college. I'm glad I could help, but it's one of those things that is heartening and so depressing at once.

A tipping point

2009-01-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

I keep trying to shrink how long it takes to get moving in a new project site, but once again, things start really happening about one week after I hit the ground. For the first few days I was in South Africa, I was pretty despondent. All my contacts were melting away, and I wasn't sure how I was going to spend a whole month in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Then, slowly, things started gathering some momentum. Today was a real tipping point.

I drove down to Durban this morning from Pietermaritzburg. I had hopes of meeting Brother Clement, a Benedictine missionary who is my main contact for indigenous vocal music and Zulu mouth bow. I spent last week trying to pin down exactly when he was coming down to Durban, and our last conversation left me pretty confident he would be there today. I also wanted to pay an actual physical visit to the music department of the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In a week of calling, I hadn't gotten anyone to pick up a phone once.

There was another shaky lead I had-- the leader of an isicathamiya group who lives in Port Shepstone (about 2 hours down the coast from Durban) had told me he might be coming up to Durban sometime this week. I said if he did, I would go back to Port Shepstone and spend some time with him there. However, I had no reason to think this would actually happen soon.

Up until 3PM, I still had nothing to go on. I was sitting in my new backpackers' hostel, still waiting for a call from Brother Clement. I'd texted him around noon, with no reply. Finally, I risked being rude and called him again. Success! He says he's at the university, and I should meet him there. I navigate the labyrinth of little curly streets around the university campus and let him know I've made it. He says he'll come meet me at the main gate. Half an hour later, as I'm getting nervous and discouraged, he shows up. We talk for a while, and I make plans to return to his mission in Vryheid tomorrow.

On my way home, I get a text. The isicathamiya leader from Port Shepstone is in Durban! I make it home (after missing my turn twice and swearing out loud at Durban's crazy roads) and give him a call. He wants to know if I want to go to Port Shepstone tomorrow. I tell him I'm headed in the other direction, but ask if I can come meet him tonight. He gives me directions. In theory, the place he's staying should be about 15km outside the city. It turns out to be in one of those crazy areas that were zoned African under apartheid and thus have decrepit, poorly marked roads. It takes me the better part of an hour and several phone calls to finally find him. It's worth it, as he is a wonderfully knowledgable and well-spoken source of information on isicathamiya and Zulu music in general. It turns out he has studied with, competed against, or is personal friends with most of the other people I've contacted. It looks like I've reached the right circle of people.

I draw up new plans. I'll head to Vryheid for 4-5 days, come back to Durban at the end of the week, and head to Port Shepstone at the beginning of next week. Vusi, my new Port Shepstone friend, says there will be a pair of big parties at the end of the month-- lots of cows being slaughtered and lots of singing and dancing. I shouldn't miss them. Of course, that will conflict with one of the few things already on my calendar, a Zulu wedding up in the Pietermaritzburg wedding at which one of my isicathamiya contacts will be performing traditional music. But it's a good problem to have. In the scheduling department, I've gone from rags to riches overnight.

First World / Third World

2009-01-18T01:34:00.000-08:00

A book I'm reading says that South Africa contains at once a first world and a third world. It turns out that looking for traditional African vocal music is a good way to see exactly what that means. As it turned out, my academic contacts have thus far not been especially helpful because they are still on holiday. The school year starts in another week, so this should change soon, but thus far, I've had no luck finding the music professor in Durban I want to speak with.

I figured that in the meantime I would contact performing groups directly. However, it quickly became clear that this would be more difficult than I thought. None of the groups have websites. There are no performances advertised in the papers or around the city. None of the local CD shops sell their music-- it's all American pop with a small section of local artists, but very little traditional music. The people who worked at the CD shops had no idea where to find traditional music, but took my number just in case. I tried calling the local culture ministry, the tourism office, and the music school attached to the big art gallery in town.

My experience at the tourism office was especially telling. It's located in one of the big shopping malls that make South Africa feel like suburban America. The people in the office told me there was nothing they knew of in Pietermaritzburg as far as traditional music was concerned, and tried to interest me in a performance of the Pietermaritzburg Philharmonic. Ironically, I found out later that while that very mall was under construction, the bricklayers and construction workers had formed an isicathamiya group, though it's no longer active.

I eventually struck gold in one office of the Department of Culture. They had an old database of local performing artists that included a section on isicathamiya groups. Some of the contact numbers still worked, and led me to my first solid contacts.

Basically, this is music that is sung primarily by working class blacks, often in the rural areas where people live in mud huts and have goats and chickens running around. Its exposure in the world of South Africa's shopping malls is minimal.

Rickshaw economics

2009-01-18T01:33:00.000-08:00

One time in Chennai, when I had a rickshaw driver with good English, I struck up a conversation about how his job works. Here's what I found (when I left India $1 was equal to about 48 rupees):

He pays the owner of his rickshaw 220 rupees per day for the use of the rickshaw. He is also responsible for minor repairs-- things that cost 50 or 60 rupees to fix. If something major goes wrong, he'll return the rickshaw to the owner, who will take care of repairs.

He also pays for his own gas, and normally uses 5-6 liters per day at around 50 rupees per liter. So, in total, it costs him around 500 rupees a day to operate the rickshaw.

He aims to make around 800 rupees a day in fares. My normal ~3.5 km trip from home to my lesson generally cost 50 rupees in a rickshaw and took 10-15 minutes in traffic. Subtracting the operatic cost normally leaves him with take home pay of around 300 rupees. He works 7 days a week, since he has to pay for every day he has the rickshaw, even if he is not working.

So, if he reaches his goal of 300 rupees profit 30 days a month, his monthly income will be 9,000 rupees. In dollars, that's an annual wage of around $2,250. And that's why call center workers who can make 30,000 rupees a month consider themselves well-off.

Contact!

2009-01-16T03:43:00.000-08:00

An eventful day. Multiple people on my isicathamiya list had said I should try to meet with them today. (To cover the basics-- isicathamiya is a style of Zulu a cappella singing that features elements of call-and-response, and powerful, full-throated harmony). As arranged, I called the first at 2:30. He told me to come over to his workplace and see him. His workplace turned out to be the Maximum B corrections center just outside the city. I drove out there and met my first real-life isicathamiya singer. He gave me a couple numbers for people to talk to-- the music director of his group, and the chairman of the area isicathamiya association, which coordinates competitions.

I called both numbers immediately and had success with the music director. He asked where I was and we ended up meeting in a parking lot and chatting for a little bit before he had to run off to a soccer game. His group, the Pietermaritzburg Naughty Boys, practices at a hostel in town, which will be easy to get to. He also knows the people in Durban I should be in contact with and will be able to give me good contacts.

Buoyed by my success, I decided to head out of town to sit in on the rehearsal of the Black Scorpions, a group from a rural community in Elandskop (about 45 minutes drive from the city). I had rough directions, and ended up asking the way several times, though I only made one actual wrong turn. When I asked directions from one nice group of ladies, they asked for a lift down the road, which I was happy to provide. Unfortunately, it looks like one of them managed to swipe my cellphone while she was in the car-- I shouldn't have had it sitting out, but I wasn't expecting anyone else to be in the passenger seat.

Finally, I found the store I had been directed to. The store manager directed a trio of young boys to show me the way to the house of the guy I was looking for. It ended up being a 10 minute walk down the road, after which we went back and drove the car there. All the roads here were unpaved and most houses were round mud huts with straw roofs. Chickens and cows in abundance. Also, though I'm stared at a little in the city, here I was more or less an alien. I don't think they'd had anyone who wasn't African in the village in quite a while.

The rehearsal started soon after I got there, and I just sat back and soaked in the music. It was pretty good isicathamiya-- incredibly powerful singing, with crisply coordinated attacks and cutoffs. There was a little of the vocal percussion techniques I'm trying to find, and some nice multi-part sections where the alto and tenor were doing something completely different from the rest of the group.

I didn't stay long to chat because it was already dark and I wasn't relishing the prospect of driving all the way home at night. I did learn a couple of interesting things, however-- the team learns all its music by ear and, what's more, the director teaches only the words and melody. All the parts are created by the singers themselves, working in their appropriate ranges. They complained that they don't have money for properly matching uniforms and said that this is what the judges always comment on in competition. Apparently, while they all wear black suits with black shirts and white ties, there is some variance in the style of each singer's suit, which they say is no good.

Also, found a store called Fruit and Veg Citi, which lives up to its name. It also has a good bulk nuts & snack mix section and will fill your bottles with fresh juice or milk. Highlight: 3 mangoes for 10 rand (~$1). They formed the basis for fruit smoothies for me and Chenge's family this morning.

Christmas Day cricket

2008-12-25T06:12:00.000-08:00

I was at my teacher's house about 45 minutes early today, and planned to sit and read until it was time for my lesson. Three boys were out on the street playing cricket with a tennis ball and a wooden board for a wicket. I found a shady spot on the curb where I could sit, read, and watch their game. However, the next ball got hit right above my head. I jumped, but couldn't reach it-- it went over the fence into my teacher's courtyard.

The boys and I went to look for the ball, and one of them finally found it. "Are you going to come?" he asked. "Come play?" I was surprised, but secretly had been wanting to join in, even though they were about a dozen years younger than me. They put me at bat-- the first time I'd swung a cricket bat. I knew to hold it down by my feet, not up like a baseball bat. When the ball came, though, my baseball swing took over. I hit the first four balls solidly, bouncing a couple off a house on the other side of the road, and all of a sudden Arvin, one of the boys, was wondering why I didn't start an American cricket team. I gave him his answer, as the next ball bounced in front of me and spun off to the left. I swung and missed, Arvin pounced on the ball and threw it at the wicket, and I was out (bowled? I'm really fuzzy on the rules).

They tried making me bowl, too, but I wasn't too successful. I couldn't get the ball to bounce and still stay in the vicinity of the wicket. I think I also failed their quiz on Indian cricketers as well-- the kid threw me a bone at the end by asking if I knew Barack Obama.

---

The rest of my day: 9:30 lecture on the history and evolution of the vina, $0.75 lunch, vocal improvisation lesson, Q&A session with Ranjani & Gayatri (part of an ongoing 'coffee with Carnatic celebrities' series), about half of a concert, a light dinner (fried banana & coconut chutney), then home.

What's going on

2008-12-24T11:16:00.000-08:00

We're in the most hectic part of Chennai's music season. In the mornings, lectures from performers and musicologists (sometimes in English, sometimes in Tamil) start at 8:00 AM. If I make it to a lecture, I'll see a mid-morning concert or bike home for lunch. In the afternoon, I might have a lesson or take a nap. The big artists normally perform at 4:30 or 6:00, so I head out again for my main concert-going experience. These concerts last upwards of three hours. There seems to be a healthy sense of competition between the top-name artists. If one singer performs a piece that moves through a dizzying procession of 10+ ragas, others will feel compelled to introduce similar pieces.

My music lessons are more or less done, especially since my teachers and I are both busy with things we want to see. My Tamil lessons wrapped up yesterday. I can read slowly and say simple sentences, but am by no means conversational.

I have lots of half-completed blog entries and lists of things I want to write about, so I will try to catch up before I leave India. That's happening January 8th.

This election

2008-11-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

I had dinner with a British friend last night, who was confused about why American presidential candidates go on Saturday Night Live and make jokes at their own expense. "I want the person running my country to be *serious*," she objected. Apparently, if you believe her, people in the UK don't care about Gordon Brown's pastor, his friends, his wife's friends, or anything except Labour's policy agenda. It can't possibly be that perfect, but our system is pretty ridiculous.

Electoral politics in the US is a television show. Pure and simple. And if you don't believe me, go to thisfuckingelection.com and see how many of the tropes of this election cycle you remember like they were yesterday. Minor characters popped in and out of the plot, inside jokes and cultural references were created. The Office gave us 'that's what she said', Campaign '08 gave us Secret Muslins, flag pins, Real Americans, and so much more.

But, like the best of television, this show can really make you believe in what can seem like an alternate reality. Watching Heroes, you almost believe that there might be people who can fly and walk through walls. Watching the election unfold, you can almost believe that politics is actually going to change, that we will stop talking past each other and at least be able to have a civil, respectful debate about important questions of policy. At the very least, we will have a President who believes in this kind of politics and is trying his hardest to convince even those farthest away from him politically that common ground exists.

There are plenty of signs to the contrary-- the fear campaign run by the McCain-Palin ticket, the vitriol hurled by the fringes of both sides on the internet. But there are lots of people out there who have put an incredible amount of effort over the past two years into electing Barack Obama. And if we can keep this spirit alive for the actual tenure of an Obama administration, a lot of the promise is self-fulfilling. We've already proved we can organize, get to know our neighbors, inspire millions to donate money and time towards a worthy cause. If that money and time now turns to volunteering in schools, organizing communities against poverty and for energy conservation, imagine the results.

Reality may insist on presenting a different picture next week or next month. But today, I'm nothing but excited and hopeful.

As a coda, today's Hindu, one of the local English-language newspapers, prints an article that compares a woman running to be the first Dalit (member of India's untouchable caste) Prime Minister of India to Obama. Is India ready to take the leap that, the paper implies, America has taken by electing a black President? On the opposite page, an editorial lays it out in plain terms. "...The remarkable thing about the contest itself is that a member of the biggest single minority and the single most downtrodden group in the US is the hot favourite to for the most powerful political office in the world. In a society savagely divided by wealth, by ethnicity, and above all by the hideous legacy of slavery, all the battles for rights, all the oppression and suffering, have culminated in a triumph for the rights enshrined in the Constitution, confirmed by the Supreme Court, and given substance by Presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson... Barack Obama's position as the leading candidate for the presidency is a mighty achievement for the American republic."

When it rains, it pours

2008-10-23T03:18:00.001-07:00

I knew enough not to visit south India in the summer, when it gets hot enough that life slows down and starts to melt. And I knew enough to check on when monsoon season is. What I didn't realize is that it's different in the South. This started becoming apparent as my train approached Chennai, early on a Sunday morning. Rain lashed at the windows, and people up and down the carriage struggled to pull down the glass and keep out the wet.

I stepped out into a deluge and waded over to the prepaid taxi stand to hire a ride. A line of eight or nine people huddled under the narrow awning of the booth, and I squeezed close to them to keep out of the rain. I got my fare ticket, opened my umbrella and ran with a driver to his rickshaw-- where he already had a customer in the backseat. I told him I couldn't possibly fit all my stuff in the rickshaw and hailed another cab.

We set off through unfamiliar streets, splashing through puddles leaving a spray of dirty water in our wake. In an open-sided rickshaw, other cars' spray proved a real hazard. One accelerated past us and sent a wave of water arcing into the cab and into my lap. My driver pulled up beside him at the next stoplight and shouted at him in Tamil. Then he closed the flaps on the side of the cab that keep out water. Strangely, even after this mishap, he felt no qualms about charging me over twice the sticker price for my cab ride. He explained that cabs cost more when its raining.

Since then, we've gotten at least some rain every single day I've been in Chennai. Today was the worst, with rain coming down in sheets all day. Our little street turned into a river, and my music teacher called to cancel our morning lesson, since the roads to his place were also flooded. My poor Tamil tutor wasn't as lucky. He'd arrived before the rain got really heavy and had no luck waiting for it to lighten again. Finally, he girded himself as best he could in his pink raincoat and red helmet and stepped out into the downpour.

The funny thing about all the rain, as I remarked to my roommate, is that it doesn't seem to make the city any cleaner. When the skies clear up, the dirt, and especially the smells, remain. Part of the problem is in a sewer system that is constantly stretched past its limits. Pools of standing water never seem to disappear. I blame the one that hugs the side of our house for the mosquitoes that swarm in through our windows and the odor of sewage that wafts in right behind.

The southern fall monsoon season normally lasts through November. I'll hope for a dry December, and maybe find some rain boots.
-----

Also-- I now have internet at home, and a backlog of things to write about and photos to share. I'll try to fill in the gap as soon as I can. Maybe also audio, now?

A full day

2008-09-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

With only a few days left in Tuva, I'm cramming in as much as I can. Zhenya got back from the taiga last week, and we had a great stretch of 4 days straight with lessons (that's now over, since the orchestra is working again this week). Yesterday, Bady-Dorzhu called while I was still at Zhenya's place, and asked if I wanted to go with him to Khayrakan, a village about 100km or so from Kyzyl. Ayan-ool's parents live there and we had to pick up his mother, son, and wife, her
sister, and a whole trunkload of produce from his parents' garden.

Hearing that Bady was in the doing people favors mode, Zhenya convinced him to drive a carload of stuff out to his relatives' place out in Kaa-Xem, at the outskirts of town. We ran that errand, dropped off Zhenya and his wife, then set off for Khayrakan. On the way, Bady's stereo was blasting music I'd given him the day before-- he is a voracious consumer of new music styles and wanted some jazz and interesting world music from me (in addition to traditional Tuvan music, which is impossible to find in Tuva). Bady is also a ferociously fast driver, so we roared down the two-lane road to the west listening sometimes to Huun-Huur-Tu and Andrei Mongush, sometimes to Chick Corea, sometimes to Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, and sometimes to raucous Hungarian gypsy music.

During the trip there, I attempted to engage Bady in a conversation about Tuvan music-- it's roots and contemporary practice, and where igil styles came from. I didn't have much success, often getting the reply 'Nu, trudno obyasnit' (Well, it's hard to explain...).

I really enjoyed meeting Ayan-ool's parents. In personality, he very much takes after his father, who can sustain a conversation without even trying. They're also both very good about remembering to include me in conversations by speaking in Russian or telling me what people
are saying. We ate a little lunch, drank the obligatory bowl of tea, helped gather the vegetables and load them into the car, and headed back to Kyzyl.

Along the way, Bady got stopped by the police, who took about 15 minutes to give him a 100 ruble ($4) citation for having the front side windows of his car tinted. Apparently, you're only allowed to tint the *back* windows of cars, one of those Russian laws that is enforced when police feel like it.

Bady dropped me off at home, and I decided to go to the banya. Sveta agreed to cut my hair if I went and washed it. But after gathering all my banya things and making the 10 minute walk, it turned out the power was out at the banya and they'd closed up early. To be expected, really. Sean and I had one stretch of time before the symposium where we tried every day for about a week to go to the banya, only to be foiled by technical problems, repairs, lack of hot water, etc.

I came back home and decided to work on the windows. In preparation for winter, one of the chores in a Tuvan home is caulking up all the windows and installing a second window on the inside of the frame to make the equivalent of a double paned window. In our case, we also had
to install new glass in several windows, which were to this point getting by with patchworks of poorly fitting smaller pieces of glass.

Yesterday, we'd tried to cut a large piece of glass down to size for one of the windows. Neither of us had ever cut glass before, and all we had was a little tool for scoring a line on the glass and a knife. We finally figured it out, but not before breaking the pane into two big pieces, which Sveta taped back together. I decided to try to install one of the big pieces of glass in my window. First, I had to pull out all the nails holding the old glass in place, and scrape off all the old caulking. But when I went to lift the new glass into place, it wasn't quite fitting. Trying to finesse it into place, I lost my grip on it and it fell, breaking along the way. I very nearly ended up with a slit wrist, as one of the broken pieces caught me at the very bottom of my right palm and cut a little slice out of it. Another cut through my sock and punched a little hole in my right big toe.

We patched up my wounds and the window. We'll buy a new piece of glass today.

On language learning

2008-09-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

Learning a foreign language seems to me to be a twofold act of faith. You have to believe that you *can* do it, that by moving one stone at a time, learning one word at a time, you will eventually conquer the mountain. And you have to believe that it's *worth* doing, that at the end of the process it will make a difference to know this language, and that there will be people to speak to.

In my unsuccessful effort to learn Tuvan, it's been the first leap of faith that's been the difficult one. All along I knew I was only in Tuva for a short 11 weeks. It's been hard for me to seriously believe that I could learn to speak Tuvan in that time, and thus hard to make myself devote the time and energy it would require to do so.

For nearly all Tuvans, it's the second leap of faith that trips them up. English is taught in schools beginning in the 5th grade. But hardly anyone speaks English. Partly, it's because the quality of instruction seems to be sorely lacking, with teachers who don't have a firm grasp on the language themselves. But partly, it's because the students themselves don't see English as something they will ever need or use. It's like the American high-schooler complaining, "But when am I ever going to need to know the sine of 30 degrees?"

Sean worked a brief stint as a part-time English teacher in a local school here, but says he stopped because he didn't feel he was having a real impact. Teaching kids who live in a place where a foreigner is a rare sight, where few people leave the country or study abroad, where most expect to grow up to be herders, requires first establishing the value of the subject you're teaching.

The growing trickle of foreigners coming to Tuva and the flood of American culture-- almost all the movies on TV are from Hollywood, most of the music played at the 'discoteka' an on the radio is American pop-- will hopefully get more students actually excited about learning English. I'm hopefully contributing by being here, and also by teaching a little English on the side.

Back in the USSR?

2008-09-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

My first student of English is a woman named Ailan-maa Xomushkuevna Kan-ool, a teacher of folk singing at the School of the Arts here in Kyzyl. I give her full name because it's a perfect example of a certain kind of Tuvan name, a memento of Soviet-era control. Ailan-maa's father was named Kar-ool Xomushku. Xomushku is one of the great clan names of Tuva, along with Ondar, Mongush, Tumat, Oorzhak, Saryglar, Khovalyg, and others. Once upon a time, nearly everyone in the country had one of those names, and they could tell you exactly where someone was from and which clan he was a part of.

The Soviets decided this was a bad thing. They wanted everyone loyal to Soviet social structures and not to an ancient clan system. So, when Tuva entered the USSR about 60 years ago and everyone got a Soviet passport, the bureaucrats in the passport offices did a very clever thing. They switched the first and last names of many Tuvans. Sundui Oorzhak would become Oorzhak Sundui. And his children would no longer be Oorzhaks, but would carry the new family name 'Sundui'.

In Ailan-maa's case, the passport office went one step further by accidentally misspelling her father's first name too. So he went from Kar-ool Xomushku to Xomushku Kan-ool. And his daughter carries the distinctive patronymic, 'Xomushkuevna', which is how most people refer to her now.

In a similar move, the Soviets devalued traditional Tuvan culture and pushed them towards the classical tradition of European Russia. In the place of the traditional two-stringed igil, they introduced a strange hybrid instrument. It was bigger, with four metal strings (instead of horsehair), with a wooden face (instead of skin), and f-holes (instead of a single resonator hole). Students studying in Tuva's arts schools had to (and still have to) learn this strange hybrid instrument, neither a true igil nor a western cello.

Many of these relics of the Soviet past still linger in Tuva. It almost seems like the Soviets were successful in convincing many Tuvans that their traditional culture was not a valuable thing. If you walk into a bookstore in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, you will find no books in Tuvan, and certainly no instructional materials for learning Tuvan. The rockstar touring folk ensembles-- Huun Huur Tu, Chirgilchin, Alash, Tyva Kyzy have more people listening to their music outside of Tuva than here at home. In large part, it's because you can't find their CDs for sale. You literally have to find the musicians themselves and ask if they have a copy they can sell you.

Sean is trying to start an NGO that will serve the dual purpose of helping foreigners who come to Tuva get what they need, and help Tuvans learn to value their traditional culture and help them travel and study abroad. As a coda, if any students of Russian want to apply for funding to spend a semester or a summer in Tuva, there's plenty of useful work to be done, and a desperate need for funding and manpower to do it. I’d be more than happy to help with such an application.

Eee!!!

2008-09-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

I just called Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, the leader of Huun-Huur-Tu, and all-around master musician. I fully understand that this is kind of like if I was traveling in New York back in the sixties and phoned John Coltrane asking for saxophone lessons. The degree of access I can have to musicians here is pretty remarkable.

Kaigal-ool is heading out of town for the weekend but says we can probably meet on Monday.

Money troubles

2008-09-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

Ayan-ool needed to borrow some money. "All I've got is zeroes. Zero in my pocket. Zero on my phone." He is one of the best singers in Tuva, and is going to a conference in France to be the living demonstration of Tuvan music accompanying a talk on the subject. They are reimbursing him for his expenses, but he doesn't even have the money to spend and be reimbursed. I agreed to lend him a few hundred dollars until he gets paid back.

It's sometimes difficult to be surrounded by super-talented musicians, but be the only one with some money in the bank. I can understand why some of them end up seeing foreigners as walking ATM machines-- giving a few khoomei lessons can keep a singer solvent for another week. In general, I'm more than happy to be a source of support. I know how much of a difference my rent money makes, how helpful a fairly small loan can be, and I know money I pay for lessons generally goes straight into feeding someone's family.

There's such a disjunct between the skills these musicians have and how they're paid for them. Groups like Chirgilchin and Alash go on international tours because that's where the money is. If Alash can pull in $20 thousand in profit from a month of touring, they can stretch that into groceries and rent for the better part of a year. For five families. Some things are slowly changing here in Tuva, but it’s still a tough place to live and make a living.

Where meat comes from

2008-09-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my room listening to some music, thinking about watching a movie tonight. Sveta pulls back the sheet that serves as my door. "Wren, can you help?" I say "Sure, with what?" She leads me outside and I see with what. Her uncle has brought a goat in from the village to celebrate the arrival of new baby. He needs help slaughtering it.

The Tuvan way of killing livestock requires at least two people. With the animal flipped on its back, one holds the head and front legs steady while the other makes an incision in the chest cavity. He sticks his hand inside the animal and pulls on the big arteries coming out of the heart, severing them. The animal dies very quickly and no blood escapes.

Our animal is a nice brown goat with long straight horns and a little beard. It doesn't seem to have any notion of what's coming and stands, more or less agreeably, while the uncle sharpens his knife. I am deputed to be the head-holder-- a neighbor will hold the front legs. I grab the horns and help to flip the goat onto its back. This it doesn't like, and it starts bellowing and trying to kick out with its hind legs. We have a firm grip on it however, and its bellowing soon sounds like cries of resignation. The uncle makes his cut and his arm disappears up to the elbow into the goat.

From my vantage point, I can feel every movement of the goat and hear every sound it makes. As the uncle does his work, the muffled bellows make way to ragged, mushy breaths. The warm, beating fur under my hands slowly goes slack. I can feel the life drain out of the body. The uncle says "That's it, you can let go." I haven't noticed that he's already out of the goat and turning to wipe off. A last couple involuntary breaths escape from the corpse.

Inside, the butchering is a well-coordinated and orchestrated affair. The uncle cuts off the legs and starts skinning, while Sveta and grandmother prepare what seems like every pan and bucket in the house. The whole hide stays in one piece, pulled away from the muscle underneath. Keeping the carcass on its former skin, the uncle slices open the abdomen and dumps the stomach and entrails into a waiting basin. I think, "That's the basin I wash my clothes in."

The goat seems to have had a good last meal, as its stomach is a sloshing bag of dark green, partly digested grass. Sveta empties the stomach and intestines into buckets to dump outside. Meanwhile, the uncle has moved upwards. The liver, heart, and other organs I can't quite identify go into another pan. The remaining blood is ladled out of the carcass to go into blood sausage. Then he starts on the musculature. Very quickly, what still looked like a skinless goat turns into piles of various cuts of meat. He cuts the ribs into manageable sections and snaps the pelvis with a knife and hammer. The head is severed and put aside, where it watches the whole proceeding with open eyes.

Grandmother and Sveta keep busy and within two hours of the beginning of the affair, we are all sitting in front of plates of boiled meat and blood sausage. The meat still smells a little like the live goat.

It is the closest I have ever been to the death of such a large animal, and I'm glad to have had the experience. As a meat-eater, it makes me feel much less hypocritical about my diet to have participated in the creation of meat. I will say, though that when, yesterday, Sveta and grandma stuck a big stick in the mouth of the severed goat head and grilled it over a fire, I didn’t eat the brains (I think).

Letter from Sept. 7

2008-09-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

I'm very full of food as I write this. Last night, I went out to an Alash concert (at the tourist yurt camp outside of town). I was the official group photographer, since the group has replaced one member and needs publicity photos that show the new lineup. At the concert, the guys decided that they wanted to throw a new baby / going away party for Sean at his house today.
Thus, one of the errands I ran this afternoon was to pick up ingredients for chili. Sean's specialty is Cincinnati chili (with cocoa powder and cinnamon, served over spaghetti). We cooked a big batch of it and grilled 5 kilos of shashlyk. Miraculously, this was enough to feed the horde of people and babies who descended on the house-- we totaled 19 in all. All the Alash guys but one are married with kids, since they all started in their teens. It was a baby convention, and Shonchalai had lots of similarly aged friends to play with. The new Alash member, Nachyn, is also married to a Shonchalai (a badass female throatsinger-- Sean's daughter was named partly in honor of her).

It was a raucous evening, hardly dampened by the fact that the guys couldn't have picked a worse night for grilling. When I got home from the market, they had the grills fired up and it was lightly sprinkling. 15 minutes later, it began raining harder, and within an hour we had a full blown thunderstorm. Sean's yard/driveway got flooded and he had to build a makeshift bridge out of wooden planks to get across to the garden, where the grilling was happening. The grillmasters succeeded in moving one grill to safety, under the roof of the lean-to where the woodpile sits. The meat ended up fine, though the grillers were all soaked. I lent a 'Virginia is for Lovers' t-shirt and my black basketball shorts to Ayan-ool to wear while his clothes dried a little.
All through the evening, Sveta's 5th grade cousin Yumen ran around taking pictures of everything with my camera. We had a fun slideshow after the party ended, which everyone enjoyed a lot. Sveta's 70 year old grandmother (who speaks only Tuvan) had an uncharacteristically joyous evening, which included getting a little tipsy on a glass of wine. Her inhibitions lowered, she unleashed an off-color tirade against Mao, a Japanese friend of Sean's who is now trying to relocate permanently to Tuva. Gramma thinks she is a hussy and that she wants to sleep with me.

I am practicing igil seriously at least 2-3 times a day now, and can see improvement happening. I am really trying to get the most out of my last few weeks here in Tuva, which in my mind means getting as much khoomei and igil instruction as I possibly can. Zhenya is supposed to be back from another stint in the taiga any day and I'll take lessons from him, take a couple from Ayan-ool and Bady-Dorzhu (Alash guys), and maybe get a lesson with Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, the leader of Huun-Huur-Tu. Next week, HHT gets back to Tuva for the first extended period of time since I've been here. Supposedly, they were here for four days while I was off in the taiga.
It's hard to imagine that it's already nearing time to pack up and move on for good. Time that I used to spend trying to learn some Tuvan is now spent trying to brush up on my Chinese.

Taiga trip (8/6-8/14)

2008-09-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

This marks a month since I arrived in Tuva. I'm writing by a campfire, probably farther than I've ever been from civilization. Zhenya, my khoomei teacher, took me (and a trio of middle-aged Belgian women) out to where his relatives live, in the far-western district of Bayruun Khemchik. Getting there require a three hour taxi ride from Kyzyl to Ak-Dovurak, and a three hour ride in a Uazik (Russia's Jeep equivalent). We went far beyond where the roads ended, forded streams, and drove over and around rolling mountainsides. Just when the reemergence of my diarrhea was making the trip increasingly uncomfortable, we made it to the herding camp of Zhenya's relatives.

The camp was comfortably outfitted-- two yurts, a stream, a few pens for animals, and a large herd of assorted livestock (sheep, goats, cows, and a lone pig). I spent our rest day there not eating, save for some boiled rice, and dashing up the hill for the outhouse. On the second day, we woke up early to get packed and saddle horses. Zhenya and his wife, Annaikhak, planned to go further into the taiga, up to a remote waterfall. It was a five hour ride for good horsemen, they said. With four non-Tuvans in tow, it took nine hours. We left the herders around 11:30 and staggered up to the campsite near the falls as the sun was beginning to set. Nevertheless, before dusk, Zhenya and our Tuvan companions (Chayan, Aidimir, Anche, and Aldynai) went up to the falls and caught at least thirty small fish. Over our stay at the falls this was repeated at least two more times. We ate fried fish, grilled fish, salted fish, fish soup, and fish wrapped in newspaper and tossed into the ashes of the fire.

The younger Tuvans taught me a Tuvan version of a game I've played before in the states. Everyone has a word (which can just be numbers or names, or can be random codewords). Then, to a rhythmic pattern, players pass off play to each other ("bre ush" *clap* *clap* "ush iyi" *clap* *clap* "iyi bre" etc.). It's actually really good for learning vocabulary. Unfortunately, most of the time we were playing with fairly unhelpful Tuvan words-- zit, boil, sore, and the like.

Old things from the Ustuu Khuree festival

2008-09-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ustuu Khuree is the name of an old Buddhist temple in the Tuvan city of Chadaana, destroyed by Communists over 50 years ago. For the past ten years, it has also been the name of a world music festival held every summer in Chadaana, which started as part of an effort to rebuild the temple. This year, Ustuu-Khuree was especially significant for a couple of reasons. Not only was it the 10 year anniversary of the festival, but this year, construction began on a new temple, across the street from the ruins of the old Ustuu Khuree.

Somewhere around 250 people came to the festival this year, a mix of Tuvans, Russians, and foreigners like me. We spent four days camping together in the woods by the Chadaana river. Except for the first day, when the opening concert was postponed for unknown reasons, there was a concert every night at the Chadaana stadium, a 5 minute walk down the road. The concerts featured up to 40-odd acts every night and would last until 3 or 4 in the morning. This was due in part to the fact that, operating on 'Tuvan time', concerts scheduled to start at 6PM wouldn't actually begin until past 8:00.

The concerts were great-- astoundingly eclectic mixes of traditional Tuvan music, traditional music from other parts of Russia, rock bands, and fusion projects galore. One of the biggest hands of the first night was for a mash-up of Johnny Cash's 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' with a traditional Tuvan folksong. The crowd favorite was probably the 20+ member 'Dukhovoi Orkestr' (woodwind orchestra), which played upbeat Tuvan songs with marching-band theatrics and choreography (and a sprinkling of Tuvan rap!). I was even more blown away, however, by two other groups-- the first being Ayirkhaan, a trio from the Republic of Sakha in Yakutia that created soundscapes using nothing but their mouths and metal mouthharps (khomus). When they were all going full-throttle, it sounded like electronica music, with unbelievable sounds flying in every direction.

My other favorite group was Xogzhumchu ('musician' in Tuvan), which was a group of stellar traditional Tuvan musicians who spiced up traditional Tuvan songs with non-traditional instrumentation. In addition to the normal Tuvan instruments (mainly igil & doshpuluur), Xogzhumchu had a guitar, electric bass, drumkit and keyboards. I think the real difference for them was that unlike some of the other fusion bands that had foreigners playing foreign instruments and Tuvans playing Tuvan instruments, this was a band of great Tuvan musicians playing their own music, but with a contemporary edge. You had People's Khoomeizhi of the Republic of Tuva (the highest honor bestowed on Tuvan throatsingers) throwing down on electric bass and guitar, and Huun-Huur-Tu's Alexei Saryglar on the drumkit.

Besides the concerts however, Ustuu-Khuree provided endless opportunities to meet people. Groups would congregate around campfires, drink tea and talk (in whatever language was most convenient). I spent most of my time at one fire, where the crowd included a pair of khomus playing girls from Novosibirsk, a singer-songwriter from Kuragino, a film student from Belgium, a Russian-Dutch translator from the Netherlands, and a crazy Tuvan lady.

The third day of the festival, I stumbled upon a violin. It's owner was Sasha, an English language teacher from the small town of Gutara. He had traded someone for the instrument but didn't know how to play it. I gave him some pointers, drank some tea, and played some music with him and his friends. He insisted that I borrow the violin for the rest of the festival, and I eagerly accepted. The next day, it let me participate in a great jam session under a tarp in the rain, with a couple of guitarists, a bass player, a drummer, a guy trying to throatsing, and a crowd of onlookers. At one point during that session I beatboxed for the guy who does the rapping in the Dukhovoi Orkestr, who plays a little guitar but is also probably the best saxophone player in Tuva.

I tried to get regular sleep as much as possible, at least until the last night. That night, thanks to an awards ceremony that lasted over an hour, the concert didn't end until at least 4:00 AM. A Polish volunteer and I were sitting together, trying to stick it out until the end of the show, but we couldn't make it through the last act (a Tibetan ritual that probably ended up lasting 50 minutes at least). We went back to the camp, where it turned out another concert was in progress. Earlier, people had built a little stage with a sound system for small performances and now anyone who wanted to could hop onstage and play a few things. Vladimir Oidupaa, who created his own style of kargyraa (low growly throatsinging) back in the 80s, played for a while, as did Sergei Pugachev, a guitarist from Krasnoyarsk whom I'd been jamming with earlier in the day. My fellow American Enrique (who'd won the 'best foreigner' award for his throatsinging) played American rock & roll, and I hopped onstage with him to sing backup on 'Back in the USSR'.

After the impromptu concert ended, the organizers announced the lighting of a bonfire as part of the closing ceremonies of the festival. This led to our local shaman getting up and delivering a long diatribe about how no one here really respected the shamanic traditions and how we were upsetting all the spirits of the forest and the river and she was going to have to fix everything after we left.

Somewhere about this time, I met a group of Tuvans who studied together in Novosibirsk but lived in Kyzyl. I was tired enough that somehow my Russian came naturally and smoothly, and we had a decent conversation and ate some stew. When they decided to catch a little sleep, I went back to my friend Imre's fire (he's a Finnish transplant in Tuva) and talked some more with him, Marco and the Russians who were sharing the fire. Around 8:30 or so, we decided to play frisbee-- the Russians had brought a disc, crazily enough. We had a game of catch for a while, which left me a little scratched and bruised from tumbles on the dusty, rocky ground. We then started back to pack up. I got my tent back in its bag, stuffed everything in my backpack, washed my face in the river, and found Mergen, the guy who drove me and a couple of other people to the festival. We left around noon and I slept all the way back to Kyzyl.

---
You eaten lunch yet? asks Rafael, an easy-going, bandanna-wearing bard from Kuragino. "No, but I was thinking about going to look for something," I reply. "Come on, then. We'll go together."

We head into town, towards the small cafeteria where festival performers eat for free. We're late for lunch-- it's already past two in the afternoon-- but Rafael smiles and the ladies in the cafeteria decide to feed us anyhow. Rafael is a rare Russian vegetarian, and I tell him I gave up on vegetarianism when I got to his country. "It's not so bad," he says, and asks the cafeteria ladies what they have without meat.

As it happens, the vegetarian option, at least for a late lunch, is sugary buns accompanied by a huge slice of frosted cake. We eat up, drink tea, and talk.

Rafael hasn't always been a bard. Until the age of 40, he painted signs. Advertisements, storefronts, a little government propaganda. But then, after his daughter left for the big city and he and his wife divorced, Rafael had an epiphany, or perhaps what we'd call a mid-life crisis. He quit painting, picked up the guitar and started writing songs. Now, he works just enough to get by, and performs his music as much as he can. "I'll be at Ustuu Khuree every year for the rest of my life," he says.

We decide to bag up the last of our buns and take them back to the camp. On the way back, we see an exhibition of photos of Tuva taken by a European photographer, and the start of the traditional 'khuresh' wrestling competition back at the stadium. It's already raining a little, however, and we stay only a little before heading back to the camp to find cover.

Physical hardships

2008-08-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Posts on happier things like the Ustuu-Khuree music festival and the khoomei symposium will come as soon as I remember to bring my flash drive into the city with me. In the meantime, I figured I'd alert people to the physical risks of traveling in a foreign country.

I'm well on the road to recovery now, but my body is just starting to get used to life in Tuva. I've dealt with three boils on my left leg, which have had me limping for the past few weeks (I'm carefully plucking anything that might be an ingrown hair, and hopefully my current boil will be my last). This past weekend, I also had a hellish trip to Khandagaity in the southwest corner of Tuva. Two days in a row, something I ate violently disagreed with my stomach. The first day, the result was a full day of involuntary trips to the toilet. The second day, I threw up at the wrestling championships and spent the rest of the day and the bus ride home trying to avoid a repeat performance.

Also at the wrestling championship in Khandagaity, I suffered another setback that's in some ways even more painful than the boils or upset stomach. While I sat and tended to my stomach, I lent my camera to our Tuvan host, who wanted to take some pictures of the wrestlers. Without realizing what he was doing, he managed to accidentally hit the combination of keys to erase the entire memory of the camera. I've been lax in loading my pictures onto my computer and lost about 300 pictures from my time in Tuva thus far. Everything from Ustuu-Khuree, the symposium, and our post-symposium barbeque is gone...

But as they say, what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger. Sean remarked this morning that I'll definitely have a great trip around the world if I can deal with this kind of adversity while staying upbeat about it.

Visa registration blues

2008-07-21T01:33:00.000-07:00

If you've never been to Russia, you've never experienced the amazing thing that is the Russian visa system. Before you arrive, you have to get an invitation from the ministry of foreign relations, which must be requested by a contact in Russia (or a website you pay to take care of this step). After you arrive, your host is required to register your presence with the Federal Migration Service within three business days of your arrival. Failure to register can cause you trouble when you try to leave the country, and can make you subject to fines and/or bribes from policemen on the streets. So, it's good to get your visa registered.

That said, here's how to register your visa in Russia:
Option 1: stay in a hotel and have them do it for you.
Option 2: What I did (read on, but be aware the following is extremely long, full of bureaucracy, and absurd)

-- I arrived in Moscow July 1st. The day I got there, my host, Geoff, asked me what I was doing about getting registered. He wasn't sure about how it worked if you were staying in a private apartment. I said I'd check and see what the procedure was.
-- After reading up on registration online, I learned that 'my landlord' was supposed to take my passport to the nearest police station to get it registered. This was a change from recent times, when a traveler would have to take care of registration on their own. It is supposed to be easier.
-- I wasn't sure where to find Geoff's landlord and, in case my 'landlord' was Geoff himself, I really didn't want to make him bother going to the police station to register me.
-- Online forums suggested a workaround for registration issues. Go buy a night's stay in the cheapest hostel you can find, and get them to register you there. Unfortunately, Moscow being the most expensive city in the world, the cheapest hostel I could find was over $20 a night, and at that price they wanted another $30 to handle visa registration. I didn't think it was worth it.
-- I went downstairs and asked the attendant on duty in Geoff's apartment building how to get registered. She said if I was only staying until Saturday, I didn't have to. According to the law, she was wrong. I arrived on Tuesday and, even under the most generous of interpretations, my 3-day grace period would expire on Friday. However, she told me what I wanted to hear, and I decided to just dodge the police for my last day in Moscow. I stayed away from Red Square, Staryy Arbat and other places police congregate in numbers to shake down tourists.

-- I made it onto my train unscathed (I had one close call, as the guy in front of me at the train station got pulled aside by the police and asked to show his documents). Four days later, July 9th, I arrived in Kyzyl. A fresh 3-day registration deadline started.
-- Friday, two days into my stay in Kyzyl, my host Sean and I went down to the FMS office to get me registered. The people there told us he couldn't register me, since only Russian citizens can serve as 'prinimayushaya storona' ('the receiving side'). They suggested Sean's wife Sveta come down to the office and register me. Sean explained that Sveta was 8 1/2 months pregnant and asked about submitting the required documents by mail. This is, in fact, allowed-- any post office can receive registration forms and stamp your passport for you. They gave us 3 blank forms (two copies are required, and they thought we might screw one up) and explained what documents to photocopy and submit. They also told us that, since only working days count towards the 3-day deadline, I had until Monday to complete my registration.
-- That afternoon, I went and photocopied my passport, visa, migration card, and Sveta's passport. Sean suggested getting more extra forms, since he'd found them very easy to screw up. The 2-page form must be completed in pen, and you can't make any corrections. I went back to the FMS office and got six more blank forms.
-- Friday evening, I sat with Sean and filled out the forms. Over the course of an hour and a half, I messed up four of them before producing two acceptable copies. Sveta signed them (two times each).
-- Saturday, I headed to the central post office in downtown Kyzyl to submit the forms. A lady at the post office explained that I couldn't submit the forms myself, as that was the job of my 'prinimayushaya storona'. My explanation that my 'prinimayushaya storona' was a very pregnant woman fell on deaf ears. The postal employee asked when I arrived in Kyzyl, and told me I had to be registered by 6PM that day or face being fined. I told her that was impossible.
-- Sunday, Sveta and I got on a marshrutka (yellow vans that operate as buses in Russian cities) and went back to the central post office. She knew they were only open limited hours on Sundays, so we hurried to get there in plenty of time. There were lots of workers in the post office, but when we tried to go in, they told us to go away. As it happens, it was 'Dyen Pochty' (Post Office Day), and all the post offices were throwing their employees parties in celebration. We went home frustrated.
-- Monday, Sveta and I walked about twenty minutes to another post office. Here, someone finally took my documents and started processing them. However, she decided we'd done everything wrong. We'd filled in Sveta's place of registration instead of her place of birth. We'd only submitted one set of photocopied documents instead of two sets. Sveta couldn't be my 'prinimayushaya storona' anyhow because she was registered in her hometown out in the country and not in her home here in Kyzyl. And, to top it off, we'd used a black gel pen, which was apparently forbidden. She demanded new forms in ballpoint pen.
-- Sveta and I bought two blue ballpoint pens. She decided we should go directly to the FMS office where we could change her place of registration if they said we had to. We got on another marshrutka and headed into the city.
-- We got to the FMS office to find a sign explaining that the office was closed on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month. Foiled again, we decided to walk over to the central post office and try our luck there.
-- At the central post office, another postal employee explained to us that this office was not accepting registration forms. She suggested we go to the Vostok post office (the first one we'd visited).
-- Sveta decided to walk to a third post office on the other side of the city. On the way, she stopped by her OB/GYN office to update them on her pregnancy (she'd had false contractions two days before).
-- We got to the third post office a little before 1PM. They explained they had a lunch break from 1-2PM and were out of blank forms anyhow. I thought I had left our 3 remaining forms at home and Sveta suggested I take a marshrutka back to get them. First, we stopped at a cafe and had lunch.
-- Arriving back home, I discovered that the blank forms were actually in the envelope with the completed forms. Chagrined, I took a marshrutka back to the post office. We made copies of all the documents again, and started filling out the forms. Since we now had very little room for error, we decided to ask this post office which address we needed to fill out for Sveta. The lady at the desk said that, since Sveta was a private citizen and not an organization, no address was required. We filled out the rest of the form (I spoiled our last extra copy along the way).
-- We brought all our documents back to the post office desk and the lady started looking them over. She stopped when she reached the section for Sveta's address and asked why it wasn't there. We explained that we thought it wasn't required (as we had been told not five minutes earlier). She said we had to fill it out with Sveta's place of registration. Puzzled, we did so.
-- Sean had finished work and come to join us by this time (around 3PM). The post office lady was finally satisfied with my documents, though she said we'd photocopied more than we had too and didn't like the was Sveta wrote her 'i's. She had Sveta fill out a packing slip (twice) and address an envelope. Finally, she let me pay around $8 to mail everything off.-- Sean noticed she hadn't actually put a stamp on my migration card yet, and asked if she could. She said it wasn't required, though Sean and I both thought this was wrong-- it's exactly this stamp that the border guards look for when you leave. She decided she'd humor us and finally, at long last, stamped my passport.

So...in Kyzyl alone, it took five trips to the post office, three trips to the FMS office, two rounds of photocopying, and two new ballpoint pens to actually complete my registration. Welcome to Russia!

(PS-- the day after I finally got registered, a car I was in got stopped on the road to Chadaana by police wanting to see everyone's documents. Luckily, I was in the clear, barely)

Update situation

2008-07-21T01:28:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, there are three places to get internet in Kyzyl. The post office's 'biznes tsentr', the internet cafe in the Hotel Kyzyl, and the internet cafe 'Internet Student'. I've been checking my email at least every other day or so, but not for more than half an hour or so. This means I have to write updates on my computer at home, put them on a flash drive and hope to find a computer that has working USB ports. Nevertheless, keep checking back. I hope to continue (or start) updating fairly regularly.

First khoomei lessons

2008-07-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm now taking khoomei lessons with Zhenya Saryglar (who actually taught the last Watson fellow to pass through Tuva as well). He began by undoing what I'd figured out on my own before I got here-- there are different ways of getting overtones in your singing, and the easiest to find is not proper khoomei form.

Monday, in our second lesson, we worked on controlling my still erratic overtones and walking up and down pentatonic scales with them. I'm struggling mightily and am by no means consistent. Sometimes I can get all the way up and down a scale with fairly clear overtones. Sometimes, my fundamental tone fails to produce any distinct overtones at all. And at the end of an hour lesson, my voice is definitely not performing as well as at the beginning. Zhenya says I need to work to get rid of tension in my singing, which will tire you out fast and can lead to injury. He also says practice will improve my throat's stamina and I'll be able to sustain good khoomei sound longer.

Lots more to say, but it's far too late, so I'll abbreviate. Tomorrow, I'm going to Chadaana for the annual Ustuu-Khuree festival. It starts Tuesday night and we'll get back to Kyzyl midday on Saturday. Sean has a friend who's driving a group of Spaniards up to Chadaana and secured me a place in his car. Apparently, they speak no Russian and rudimentary English, so it should be a fun 2-hour car trip.

I think I'm going to learn to play the igil, a Tuvan two-stringed, bowed instrument that's probably an ancestor of the cello. The igil has strong connections to khoomei singing-- I'm not sure whether it was designed to mimic khoomei, or whether certain khoomei articulations mimic the igil. However, it's an excellent focus for my Watson theme of vocal techniques that imitate instruments. I'm hoping to speak with igil masters and makers about the instrument and how their singing relates to it. It also helps that Zhenya himself is, according to Sean, the best igil player of his generation. While we were sitting around his house after my voice had had enough, he showed me two awards he won at a previous khoomei symposium-- best igil player and best singer in khoomei style.

First couple days in Tuva

2008-07-12T01:40:00.000-07:00

Sean works in the Dom Narodnovo Tvorchestvo (House of National Creative Arts) where the Ministry of Culture, the International Khoomei Center, and the offices of the national orchestra are located. He's a member of the orchestra and seems to do work for the other offices in the DNT too. I've been down there every day for one thing or another.

I've been trying to track down the director of the Khoomei symposium to register and to try and get a reduced registration fee. They have a two-tiered system set up whereby Russian citizens pay about $100 for registration and foreigners pay $300. I'm hoping that my status as a student and some arrangement to volunteer at the symposium will be enough to catch a price break.
While I failed to find the symposium director, yesterday I did stumble upon the person I needed to talk to to register for Ustuu-Khuree, the music festival in Chadaana next week. I'll be there probably from Tuesday to Saturday, sleeping outside.

----Tonight there was a concert down at the '5 Years of Tuva' stadium. It was the most incredible range of performers I think I've ever seen on a single stage. A couple of traditional Tuvan folk music bands played, along with Sean, the traditional Tuvan American guy (his jokes about being an American in Tuva were apparently hilarious, judging by the crowd's response). There were also a couple of different traditional dance acts and Tyva Kyzy, the all-female traditional music ensemble. A woman who performed an a cappella kargyraa solo probably got one of the biggest rounds of applause of the night.

But then things moved towards the progressive side. A group of students at the university in Kyzyl performed Tuvan folk music with a couple of guitars and a rock flavor. A singer sang Tuvan songs to backing tracks that were very heavy with electric bass and a western drum set.
And then, the MC announced that we were moving into the 'youth' section of the program. This meant breakdancers, a rock band that sounded a lot like Dave Matthews (they featured a pair of saxophones and a trumpet), and a DJ from Novosibirsk who started spinning Russian club music.
All these types of music coexist in Tuva. That is to say, it's not as if traditional music is only for an older generation or as if it's static. At the concert, I met a history teacher, probably around 35 or 40 years old, who came for the folk music. I also met a couple of guys my age, one of whom was still in college. He plays the guitar, but also prefers traditional Tuvan music over the contemporary stuff.

On the vocal imitation front, I heard a great vocal imitation of a khomus (jaw harp) done by one of the performers at the concert. Also some pretty slick igil playing-- it can sound very much like throatsinging in the right hands, or even exactly like a horse's whinny.

Экии!

2008-07-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

I got to Tuva this morning, after a 74 hour train ride and a 5 hour ride in a shared taxi, squashed in the back seat of a Toyota Sprinter between two Russian babushki. Those familiar with American trains will be shocked to learn that this Russian train arrived within 10 seconds of the appointed time.

Sean (my host here) wasted no time in acquainting me with Tuvan culture. Ayan, one of the singers in Alash, the band Sean manages, offered to take me to the banya. You know you've arrived in Tuva when you're perched on a scalding hot pine bench with 5 other naked men, who switch between speaking with you in Russian and with each other in Tuvan. The banya was, though unfamiliar, a positive experience and a very good way to get clean. Apparently, it serves for a week of showering, and I can believe it. I probably sweated half a liter of water during my hour there. As it happens, Tuvans like their banya extremely hot-- when we checked the thermometer, it was 108 degrees. Celsius.

I'm going to be in Sean's place for the next few days, until everyone clears out to go to Chadaana for the Ustuu-Xuree music festival. It's a nice house, and I'll take pictures of it to show you as soon as I can. By American standards, it is spartan. No running water and no toilet, save for an outhouse in the garden. Sveta (Sean's wife) makes remarkably tasty food with just a hotplate. So far it's been almost exclusively mutton-based. I've learned to strip a bone of every possible scrap of meat, as it's considered rude if you don't.

This afternoon, Sveta decided to rearrange things to better accommodate me and the several relatives who are staying here as well. When I got back from the banya, she'd moved a bed into the living room, and dismantled the book shelf that had been there. Together, we reassembled the bookshelf in the master bedroom, which involved lots of hammering nails into the walls.
There are several very cute Tuvan children in the household. Shonchalai is Sean and Sveta's daughter and is just old enough to walk small distances before resorting to crawling. Yumen is Sveta's younger brother (I think?) and spent a while this evening being fascinated with iTunes and its search capabilities. I taught him how to double click. There is also a blond Tuvan girl a little older than Shonchalai who is somehow related to Sveta, though I haven't figured out exactly how.

Tomorrow, I will go meet some people from the Tuvan national orchestra, try to register myself with the local authorities (required under Russian law) and perhaps go with the Alash guys to a music festival where they will be performing. If you get this, I'll also have succeeded in finding internet somewhere in Kyzyl. There's no landline phone here in Sean's place, so I will definitely be buying a Russian simcard for my cellphone. Hopefully, I will know more about how to contact the outside world within a few days.

Wrapping up in Moscow

2008-07-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last few days here in Moscow, reconnecting with Russia and its culture before heading off to Tuva. No mouth-music related activities here, although I realized too late that I could have tracked down one of Russia's few beatboxers if I'd thought of it sooner.

What I did do was fun nevertheless. I've been staying at the apartment of Geoff, Swarthmore '00, who's posted at the embassy. Amara, Swarthmore '06, has been staying at his place too, so we had a little Swarthmore reunion the first night I was here. However, Amara took off for a visit back to the states, so I've been more or less on my own to explore.

Since I've been here before, my strategy for seeing things this time around was a little different. I wasn't as interested in Red Square, Izmailovsky, or the museums. Instead, I've taken walks, directed minimally by a guide book, trying to find interesting parks, stores and the like. On Wednesday, I walked past Gorky Park and stumbled upon the Sculpture Park near the new Tretyakov gallery. It's a fascinating mix of Soviet sculptures that got taken down after the fall of the USSR and modern work. It's also a very relaxing place to walk around or read a book. I bought a bowl of solyanka in the cafe and sat outdoors for a while, eating, reading, and watching people.

Thursday, I gave a talk on War News Radio at the American Center (in the Library of Foreign Literature). A good group of 20 or so people of all ages came. I talked about the history and philosophy of the show, played some clips, and opened the floor to discussion. What followed was over an hour of questions on Iraq, US policy, my views on Russia and Russians, and many other things. It was a lot of fun to hear what a Russian audience thought about the project, and also to talk about Iraq with people with such a different background.

I'm supposed to be heading out to a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow to meet up with some of the people I worked with in the embassy press section two summers ago. Unfortunately, I've got a bunch of damp clothes in the dryer and still need to pack them away. So... I'll be a bit late.

My next update won't be for a few days. Tonight, my train leaves for Abakan-- it will arrive early Wednesday morning, and I'll catch a shared taxi to Kyzyl, Tuva.