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Time Out Chicago, Feature >>
Yat rock
Tuvan ensemble Yat-Kha gives traditional throat singing a rock & roll twist.
Whenever you hit your local record store looking for a rare album, only to go home disappointed and empty-handed, consider the plight of music fans in Tuva. Located above Mongolia in southem Siberia and a part of the former Soviet republic, Tuva gave its record buying public few choices during communism. "We had only one record store where you could buy only one Soviet monopolist label," Albert Kuvezin, lead singer of the Tuvan band Yat-Kha, recalls of his teenage years. "The store had only Soviet patriotic songs about Lenin, classical music, and traditional music from countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Hungary."
That Kuvezin, who plays the World Music Festival this week with his group Yat-Kha, managed to not only discover music beyond the USSR's borders, but eventually fuse it with traditional Tuvan sounds, speaks to both his work ethic and his progressive worldview. When he was a child, his mother taught him Spanish Gypsy-style guitar—but discovering rock was harder. "We had to get it from special dealers on the black market," he explains in a thick Russian accent. "Sometimes, they brought from Moscow vinyl, but mostly reel-to-reel tapes." These formative listening experiences are what emerge on Yat-Kha's newest album, Re-Covers, which interprets metal and rock touchstones in the earthquake-inducing style of Tuvan traditional music.
Rather than some crass crossover attempt, Re-Covers is instead a brazen reappraisal of material that has become easy to take for granted. Mixing in devastating interpretations of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," Hank Williams's "Ramblin' Man" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" with works by Tuvan composers, Yat-Kha creates the powerful illusion of a common ancestry between disparate cultures. "That was the idea," Kuvezin says, "to show people there are many possibilities in this life." Using both ethnic installments (like the small Central Asian zither from which the group takes its name) as well as electric guitars, Kuvezin imbues the songs with a whole new sense of gravity.
A founding member of Huun-Huur-Tu, the traditional ensemble that introduced throat singing to Western audiences in the early '90s, Kuvezin has a voice that's hard to forget. Taking advantage of the natural overtones and harmonics of the vocal chords, trained throat singers like Kuvezin can reach notes a full octave below and above the extremes of their range. The effect is, quite simply, otherworldly. So how does one prepare for throat singing? Gargle with battery acid? "Hot tea with milk and a little bit of salt—that's what we do in Tuva," Kuvezin says. "And then, slowly, without pressure, we try to make sounds in the middle range, not very high or low. Then [go] step by step to high notes. Only after those do I return to the bass notes." Problems with sound engineers were common before Yat-Kha recently decided to bring along its own team. "Some technicians thought I used sound effects with my voice," he says.
When Kuvezin eventually left Huun-Huur-Tu to form Yat-Kha in the late '90s, he had begun to chafe against the group's traditionalist mission. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, things are very different at home. "In the last five or ten years, Tuva has changed so much," Kuvezin says, citing Intemet access and satellite TV as positive changes. "But I worry about customs because they're disappearing fast. Our people prefer to buy an old Japanese car than to breed a great horse," he adds with a sigh. "And young people don't know traditional music but they know very much rap and hip-hop culture from Russia."
As an artist, Kuvezin is aware of the potential success of Re- Covers—but he doesn't want to become known as an interpreter, pointing to his previous three albums of originals. "Right now, I'm recording a lot of new music—a new album, maybe even two albums," he says. In addition, he's at work on a soundtrack for an upcoming Siberian film based on the life of Genghis Khan. Which, we hope, U.S. record stores will be wise enough to stock.
By Matthew Lurie 09/14/06
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