Ezir-Kara is the name of a horse that, with its owner, Sayan Sandangmaa, won many races during the Naadym festival, a yearly celebration of the herders' holiday, held in settlements throughout Tuva.
Sandangmaa was shot as an "enemy of the people" in the 1930s during the Stalinist oppression.
Sandangmaa wrote the lyrics for this ballad, singing the praise of Ezir-Kara as a race horse and a faithful companion.
To this day, Naadym festivals feature a contest to compose the best melody for the text. The melody which Kaigal-ool sings here is one he composed himself.

(photo Mark Marnie, copyright Shanachie Records)

Tracks 2 and 15 are live recordings of  Anatoli and Kaigal-ool singing, while riding horseback across the Tuvan grasslands. These are excerpts of tracks recorded by sound engineer Joel Gordon, on a field trip to Tuva, May 1998. The full soundscapes can be found on the Smithsonian-Folkways release 40452, Tuva, Among the Spirits, produced by Ted Levin and Joel Gordon.
 

It was in a small recording studio in Friesland, an ancient territory in the rural north of Holland, that Huun-Huur-Tu took time out from a European concert tour to record the present collection of songs and tunes. Though far from Tuva, the musicians felt at home amid the windswept pasture lands that nourish herds of sheep, cattle, and proud black Friesian horses. For Tuvan music, so deeply embedded in a sense of place, the landscape was ideal, and surely contributed its own power to what transpired inside the studio. Late one evening, after a long mixing session, the four members of Huun-Huur-Tu sat down to talk about the current direction of their music. The remarks transcribed below are taken from that conversation.

HHT: "The music is better. We're two years older, and we've been uncovering a lot of interesting material. Last autumn, we went on an expedition and recorded old singers in different places around Tuva. From these people we learned nuances — particularly of melodic ornamentation — that aren't conveyed through the musical transcriptions that served as our original sources [i.e., transcriptions made in Tuva in the 1930s and published in the 1980s and 1990s]."

TL: "Say a little about the contemporary Tuvan songs you perform on this recording."

HHT:     "They are songs, composed during the last three decades, that are popular in Tuva now. People listen to them on the radio; children sing them. You can't understand Tuvan music if you only hear throat-singing. It's true that singing in harmony, the way we do on some of the songs in this recording, appeared only as a result of Russian influence during Soviet times, but this kind of singing has become in its own way a kind of Tuvan folk music.

    "At the same time, we're looking for much older contacts between Russian and Tuvan melodies. Last year we met Sergei Starostin. He's a very sensitive musician. He's been in a lot of villages, and he understands folk music. Working with Sergei, we have found a lot of similarities between some of the sounds of Russian and Tuvan music. For example, the shoor, a wooden flute played in Tuva until recently (we are not aware of any living players), is similar to the wooden kaliuka flute used in Russian villages, and Sergei plays the kaliuka on the present recording.

    "We want to show the musical colors of different times in Tuva, from old times to modern times. When you hear Tuvan music played on the flute, you hear it differently, and it shows a different side of the music. When you hear kargyraa [throat-singing style] together with the shoor, you feel the connection — the  way that the high melody in kargyraa sounds like the shoor. We're not turning away from tradition; rather, we're using what we imagine might have existed before our time — and before the means existed to write it down.

    "For example, it's impossible that people who spend so much time around horses — one of the most rhythmic animals alive — would not have absorbed their sense of rhythm. Horses have a harmonic rhythm. People who ride horses absorb the horse's rhythm physically into their bodies, and this rhythm is reflected in music. It's not like a metronome, that is, it's not stable; rather, it's alive, and the rhythms change, the lengths of the phrases change. The music is continuous, but it doesn't break down into square phrases. Melodies can be elongated — they are a function of the length of  a singer's breath. You can hold notes for as long as your intuition tells you they should be held. The phrase lengths of our melodies are based on a singer's intuition, not on preserving a strict metric sense in the music. For example, the way we use the doshpuluur hasn't been heard recently in Tuvan music. It has been used mainly as an accompaniment to throat-singing. But the doshpuluur must have once been played the way we're doing it — that is, as if representing a horse. It could have been used rhythmically, or as a solo instrument, or even harmonically. We're trying to recover a sense of what might have been."

(Liner notes, photo by Ted Levin, copyright Shanachie Records)

    "There's a kind of truth of feeling in Tuvan music that makes it easily accessible; there's a naturalness and sincerity that anyone can understand," Sayan finally replied. "It's not only in the West that there's been a growth of interest in our music," he continued. "It's happening in Tuva as well. People there have heard our CD. We gave it to our friends and to other musicians; the reactions have been very positive. A lot of young people are hearing these old songs for the first time from us, and we're proud of the continuity of interest in tradition that we're helping to create. Respect for ancestors is a key concept in our music, and we've been searching around Tuva for their voices. I read that in the old days, men got together and played and improvised the way we are doing. There was a tradition that everyone would play the melody in his own way. We don't know what that music sounded like; so we're winging it in a way, based on our knowledge of traditional material and traditional approaches to music making. We're trying to get back to older, slower rhythms from the faster rhythms of a lot of contemporary music. We're trying to create an instrumental accompaniment that matches the emotional spirit of the songs we sing. At the same time, we don't feel confined by the conventions of tradition.
For example, the frame drum is our own addition [it was used in shamanic rituals, but not to accompany instrumental music or lyrical songs]. We include it because, like the other instruments we play and like our voices, it creates a rich overtone field that has its own melodies and rhythms. The rattle made from a bull scrotum and sheep kneebones is also not a traditional instrument. People used bull scrotums for salt shakers; we added the sheep kneebones. And of course, the guitar is not a Tuvan instrument.

    "Timbre [sound color] is the basis of everything in Tuvan music. Tuvan hearing is timbral hearing. All of our different instruments and styles, all of our musical imitations of birds, horses, crows, wolves, and other natural sounds, are based on characteristics of timbre. This kind of timbral hearing has a lot of subtleties. Perhaps that also helps to explain the interest in our music. More and more listeners both in Tuva and in the West are tired of having their ears blasted with electrified music. They're searching for different musical values  — a music that links them to their past, and perhaps to their future." And that's what tradition is.

Sasha Bapa: "...We're trying to preserve our musical heritage, but at the same time, we're trying to look forward. If a musical tradition stops evolving, it is destined to die."

Sygyt: "Lament of the Igil"  — Following a traditional form, Kaigal-ool Khovalyg combines the throat-singing style called sygyt (Tuvan: "whistle") with  instrumental accompaniment on the igil, a 2-stringed fiddle with a carved wooden horse's head attached to the top of the neck (thus known as a "horsehead fiddle"). The igil is held upright, like a 'cello, with its base anchored in the player's boot. A Tuvan folk tale explains the connection between horses, the igil, and the plaintive sound of its music.

Kombu  — Kaigal-ool Khovalyg performs in the style of his great-grandfather Kombu, known as the Khöömei Singer. Many singers are known by their individual styles, which embrace not only a particular method of throat-singing, but a specific melody or melodic medley.

Khöömei ("Throat-singing") — in his rendering of this khöömei, Kaigal-ool produces three separate tones at once: a drone, a melodic line consisting of high harmonics, and (harder to hear) an intermittent mid-range harmonic an octave and a fifth above the fundamental.

Ching Söörtükchülerining Yryzy ("Song of the Caravan Drivers") — this song describes the caravan drivers' longing for home and sweetheart during the lengthy camel trek to Beijing. It is dedicated to Frank Zappa, who was very fond of this song. A video clip of a salon recording at Zappa's home studio in 1993, featuring this song (Khovalyg and Kuular), can be seen on the video "Tuvans invade America", available from Friends of Tuva.

(Photograph by Alexander Shishkin, "on the Tuvan Steppe", copyright Shanachie)