Uzbekistan: Spiritual and Sufi Chant

A brilliant compilation of sacred Uzbek chants from the remote and religious area of Ferghana Valley, this album shows how ancient devotional music is still performed in independent Uzbekistan. The genre is shown to have survived Soviet colonisation, through its careful selection of non-professional Uzbek performances. At the start of the 20th century this spiritual repertoire was performed by highly professional hereditary singers such as Mulla To’ychi Toshmuhammedov or Sadyrkhan and later transmitted by Mamurjan Uzakov and Hofiz Djurahon Sultanov. These contemporary recordings display the same repertoire but by amateurs. The CD covers various genres, from a dynamic dance-style singing to a purely religious and devotional Sufi ritual, ‘Zikr’, in which the repetition of the name of God thickens into the polyphonic texture. The vast and varied collection of spiritual songs, still part of day-to-day life in this little-known area, is addressed to music lovers and experts alike.