From Uzbek disco to Uighur rock: Forgotten sounds of the Silk Road

The Uzbek pop singer Nasiba Abdullaeva accidentally jumped on an Afghan radio station while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand after a performance in 1983 and was enthralled by a song that was playing.

“From its first notes, the song fascinated me, and I fell in love with it”, Abdullaeva recalled. In order for her to quickly memorize the lines, she requested the driver to pull over. “I didn’t have a pen and paper, so I just asked everyone to be silent”.

Aziz Ghaznawi’s original song, “I Lost My Dream,” was later adapted by Abdullaeva into a cover for the groove-heavy Aarezoo Gom Kardam (I Lost My Dream), which was wistfully sung in Dari. Released in 1984, it shot to popularity in Central Asia, the Caucasus – and even became a hit in Afghanistan.

Forty years later, that cover is the opening song on a new compilation released in August by Grammy-nominated Ostinato Records called Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uighur Rock, Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia, which unearths an eclectic sonic era from the dusty crates of history.

The anaesthetizing drone of state-approved folk ballads frequently dominated the airwaves in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, which bounded the former Soviet Union and its communist allies from the West.

However, a vibrant musical underground was flourishing in regions where cultures had interacted for centuries during Soviet rule in the 1970s and 1980s. Artists from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and beyond were forging a sound unlike anything heard in the USSR.

Imagine Kraftwerk, a pioneer of German electronic music, traveling through the shadowy alleyways of the communist experiment in search of their lost in Samarkand bazaar. A postcard with neon lighting from a region where East and West collided, all while Soviet censors watched closely.

Synthesizing the Silk Roads is a potpourri of experimental fusion: the lush strings of the ballad Paidot Kardam (Found a Sweetheart) by Tajik singer Khurmo Shirinova, the Italo-disco-drenched Lola, Yashlik’s distorted Uighur rock salvo of Radost (Joy) and the melancholic twang of a bouzouki on Meyhane, influenced by Greek refugees who fled to Uzbekistan during the civil war in the 1940s.

The release serves as a correction for myths about the USSR and a time capsule of the region’s music, according to Vik Sohonie, the label’s boss.

If we’re talking about the European side, “the idea that the Soviet Union was this closed-off place that did not engage with the world might be true.” On the Asian side, it was a different story”, Sohonie said.

“This album provides a lot more insight into the Soviet Union’s cultural centers.”

All roads lead to Tashkent

Described as the “central nervous system” of the ancient world by historian Peter Frankopan, the Silk Road connected traders, mystics and empires from China to the Mediterranean.

These caravanserai-studded highways of inner Asia were probably the site of the first “world music” jam sessions, according to ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin, as musicians “adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques.”

When the Soviet Union was in charge of the latter half of the 20th century, those syncretic roads reopened like a cosmic fault line to produce an alchemical brew of 808 beats battling traditional lutes, funky bass lines mingling with Tatar flutes, and Uzbek vocalists belt out disco anthems.

Rewind to the 1940s to learn more about this cultural explosion. 16 million people were forcibly relocated from the front lines to the inner east as the Nazis stormed Europe. These transfers were made for a variety of reasons, including to safeguard military and economic assets, maintain internal security, exploit labor resources, and consolidate control over a vast multiethnic territory.

Echoing its cosmopolitan past, Uzbekistan’s doors were opened to Russians, Tajiks, Uighurs and Tatars displaced by Joseph Stalin’s transfer programme. On suspicion of being Japanese spies, about 172, 000 Koreans were previously deported from the Soviet Far East to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in 1937.

After the war in 1945, the Uzbek capital turned into a haven for scientists, artists, and – crucially – music engineers who would set up the Tashkent Gramplastinok vinyl record-pressing plant. A network of manufacturing facilities run by the state monopolist label Melodiya produced nearly 200 million records annually in the 1970s.

After the 1960s rock dens flourished, disco fever swept dance floors in the late 1970s with about 20, 000 public discos attracting 30 million visitors annually across the USSR.

Many clubs gained notoriety for trading “bourgeois extravagances” like Western cigarettes, vinyl and clothes, giving rise to an underground “disco mafia”. Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish community was integral to the scene, leveraging their diasporic ties to import foreign records and cutting-edge Japanese Korg and American Moog synthesisers.

In Soviet Central Asia, boundaries were always shifting, and political suppression existed alongside glitzy discotheques.

The region’s progressive music was the result of Soviet policies intended to promote cultural diversity, according to Leora Eisenberg, a doctoral scholar at Harvard University studying cultural production in Soviet Central Asia. To cater to a multitude of ethnicities, the USSR institutionalised “acceptable forms of nationhood” into social and cultural forms.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a “thaw” that encouraged cultural expression. Government-funded opera houses, theatres, ballets and music conservatories proliferated as “the state tried to Europeanise national culture while simultaneously promoting it”, Eisenberg explained. Through state-approved youth leagues known as Komsomols, which included disco spaces, were even permitted to operate.

Dubbed the “pearl of the Soviet East”, Tashkent’s historical and geographical importance made it essential to Moscow’s plans to modernise what it saw as a “backward” society into a communist success story. Tashkent hosted cultural festivals like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1958 and the biennial Tashkent Festival of African, Asian, and Latin American Film in 1968 as part of Soviet efforts to reach decolonized states.

By the 1950s, according to Eisenberg, “musicians from Uzbekistan were adopting the styles of foreign countries because of this political need to cater to the nonaligned world,” referring to nations that formed a neutral stance during the Cold War era.

Jazz that was previously outlawed now enjoyed state support. The inaugural Central Asian Jazz Festival was held in Tashkent in 1968, later moving to Ferghana, 314km (195 miles) southeast of the capital, in 1977. In Central Asia, this promoted a vibrant jazz scene in the 1970s and 1980s, led by Kazakh ensembles Boomerang and Medeo, and by Turkmen ensembles Gunesh and Firyuza, who fuses traditional sounds with jazz, rock, and electronic elements.

Then there was the folk-rock group Yalla, which Eisenberg called the “Uzbek Beatles”. Yalla, who is still active today, contributed significantly to the development of Central Asian music for a wider Soviet and international audience by blending Uzbek melodies with Western rock arrangements.

Waiting to be (re) discovered

These Soviet-era artefacts were mostly forgotten after the USSR’s dissolution in 1991 and Uzbekistan’s subsequent independence. Anvar Kalandarov, a record collector from the Uzbekistan, lamented the loss of the country’s cultural memory, lamenting “our people do not know this music today at all.” Much of this music has not yet been digitalized, and it is still stored in analog formats.

It was unsold vinyl pressed at Tashkent’s sole record plant combined with live TV recordings that comprised Ostinato’s compilation, sourced with the help of Kalandarov, whose label Maqom Soul co-compiled and curated the album.

After two decades spent scouring flea markets, garages, radio and private archives, Kalandarov amassed a sizable record collection that eventually caught the attention of Sohonie.

“It’s not a part of the world where there’s prolific music documentation”, Sohonie said. Since he had been considering a release in Central Asia since 2016, Sohonie jumped at the chance Kalandarov gave in last year. “Anvar contacted me, asking if I wanted to trade some records. I thought, ‘ Why don’t we do a compilation? ‘”

Sohonie and Kalandarov sifted through the thousands of records to choose the 15 songs that made it onto the recording at their meeting in Tashkent in October of last year. Although the licensing for all the tracks was initially difficult, the musicians’ surviving families were the ones who received the money.

Some of those musicians were making music because they risked their lives and safety.

Davron Gaipov, the frontman of the Uzbek band Original, was charged with organizing events for which prohibited substances were used and imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp for five years. The album features two electropop bangers, Sen Kaidan Bilasan (How Do You Know) and Bu Nima Bu (What’s This). Gaipov released two albums shortly after their 1983 release.

Others had darker fates, like Enver Mustafayev, founder of the Crimean jazz group Minarets of Nessef, whose track Instrumental simmers with sanguine horns. Mustafayev’s lyrics in Crimean Tatar, a then-criminalised language, and his political activism with a separatist movement earned him a seven-year prison sentence after a vicious KGB assault. Three days after his 1987 release, he was discovered dead from suspected tuberculosis.

Unfortunatly, Kalandarov was able to locate one of the Nessef band’s remaining minarets and turn up the tapes that had escaped the KGB’s possessions.

Musicians like Abdullaeva are fond of Soviet culture. “In my opinion, I feel the music from that time was a higher quality and more diverse. It had character. Everyone had their own sound”, she said.

That sentiment also spanned the time when artists were admired. We were treated with respect and were regarded as stars. Sadly, it is not the case today”.

Decentring the West

This rich sonic tapestry was buried by a sector too preoccupied with studying the rise of grunge in the 1990s or listening to some distant genre-bending recordings in Almaty or Dushanbe after the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago.

In line with the decolonial spirit that underpins Ostinato’s earlier music anthologies that span the Horn of Africa, Haiti, and Cabo Verde, Sohonie said Synthesizing the Silk Roads is appropriate in Central Asia at a time when Chinese investment is poured into infrastructure projects and new Silk Roads are revived, like Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“It’s self-evident from the music that the centres of history are not what we are told”, he said. “If we are entering a post-Western world, it’s probably wise if we decentre the West in our pillars of imagination”.

Kalandarov hopes that highlighting Central Asian music will change how people perceive it. Uzbekistan is “opening up” to the world. We have a beautiful history and culture, and we want to share it with everyone”.

Source: Aljazeera