THE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOOLS OF GOD

Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)

by Theodore Levin

Indiana University Press

This is a draft copy review sent to Dirty Linen Magazine and published and copyrighted in edited form.

The term "fools of God" is taken from Sufi Muslim tradition, and refers to "...musicianship as a form of service in which the musician assumes the moral weight of guiding humankind toward the just and the good." Dartmouth ethnomusicologist Ted Levin has spent a substantial portion his life searching for Fools of God in Transoxania-the synthetic Former Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikstan-and has from these experiences produced what may be destined to become the definitive work on the music of this newly accessed region. Drawn from interviews and personal experiences, Fools of God travels from Tashkent (only the outhouses betray a Central Asian provenance) to the Edenesque Zaravshan Valley (where men beat their wives as a matter of course); from wedding music laced with the lethal influences of Soviet "national music" and western pop to kochs (healing rituals) in which evil spirits and Zororoastrian customs layer with Muslim traditional music. In these travels he encounters drunken Georgians, pop star Yuluz Usmanova, the classical Shash maqâm, gender segregation, Bukharan Jews carrying the tradition for Muslim music, lots of hospitality, a tanbur wizard characteristically ravaged by alcoholism and "beat up from living," the Cotton Affair, rural musician-poets and healers, white spirits, and finally, an incredibly glitzy wedding at Leonard's in Queens, the adopted home of Uzbek musician Ilyas Malayev. The result is a choice commentary on Transoxanian politics, religion, sociology, and history and their interrelations with Transoxiana's multiple musical personality.

Wisely included is a 74-minute CD of field recordings, (which I really wish had been put into a case instead of a plastic sleeve in the back of the book...but which is far superior to those thin plastic records), arranged from the urban to the "rural and ritualistic"...a travel in itself into horizontal deep time. The recording quality is uniformly excellent, but listenabilty varies without too much relation to the rural-urban continuum; as with western "source music," the age of the singer is a major determiner. I especially liked the Field Hollers from a group of girls in scenic Dargh, accompanied by frame drums (selection 23) and selection 3 by Tashkent traditional singer Munâjât Yulchieva. Also included are small chunks of the Shash Maqâm (a very polished and westernized exerpt from the Maqâm Ensemble of Uzbekistan Radio as well as a more "authentic" piece by Malayev), sub-Tuva, Jew's harp, the Euro-classical "Night in a Ferghana Garden"...and lots more.

-Judith Gennett (Bryan,TX)

write: gennett at gorge dot net