Tajik Tales

It’s fair to say that English musician Lu Edmonds has had an eventful career. A guitarist, as well as saz and cümbüş player, he has played with The Damned, The Mekons, 3 Mustaphas 3 and PiL, and collaborated with Kirsty MacColl, The Waterboys and Billy Bragg. Quite how he ended up in Tajikistan is anybody’s guess, but thankfully we have Edmonds to tell the story: “I was playing bass in the Siberian band Yat-Kha, and we were invited in 1996 to Bishkek as judges at a talent festival of 40 schools drawn from all over Kyrgyzstan.” A festival in Hong Kong then introduced him to a number of Central Asian musicians, and his ability to speak some Russian saw filmmaker Celia Lowenstein bring him to the region for a research trip. The final piece in the jigsaw, which saw him take base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, was an ambitious project to rescue music from the country. “There are thousands of hours of un-digitised music recorded by Soviet ethnologists across the former USSR, all buried in dusty academic institutions starved of funds and equipment since 1991,” says Edmonds.

With sketchy funding in place, he smuggled tape machines into Dushanbe’s Rudaki Institute of Languages and set about archiving those buried treasures. At the same time acoustic gigs started happening at the Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments, and before long a Finnish engineer, Taneli Bruun, had set up a recording studio in the museum and, in 2008, an album began to take shape. Edmonds says that local musician Iqbol Zavkibekov would invite “everyone in to keep warm and make recordings.” One of these musicians was Samander Pulodov, who provided “a truly visionary modern take on Tajik music,” according to Edmonds. Pulodov also had ambitions to host a music festival in the Pamir mountains, and so the recording studio became mobile, with Edmonds recording more traditional artists on their journey.

Leo Abrahams was later called in to help mix the recordings, finally resulting in the album, Lost In Tajikistan, a document of modern Tajik folk music featuring six different ensembles. And there could be more, according to Edmonds: “If the families can get some money and if we can get some support we can do more, and let's hope the embassies in Dushanbe are kind to these great musicians and grant them visas and work permits so they can play in the whole world.”

Lost In Tajikistan is a Top of the World in October 2023 (#191)