We Hear Tuvans!

(LISTEN TO TUVANS HERE) Love Will Tear Us Apart

Jennifer says: "look, there go the Tuvans (pause) I can't believe we heard them."

there go the Tuvans

Albert Kuvezin started the South-Siberian Tuvan throat singing band, Yat-Kha, many moons ago. He is the guitarist and singer of Kanzat, his special style of kargiraa khoomei. When he was a little boy he was thrown out of the choir and told never ever to sing again. But he decided to get a guitar and start singing again anyway despite objections from the ideology department of the Russian communist party.

Nobody else in Tuva can sing like Albert, perhaps it is because his style is closer to some of the singing in the Khakass, just north of Tuva. His father, Budachy (he who likes soup) Kuvenzin, took Tuva to the quarter-finals as a coach and player in the all-Russia volleyball competition. He is the best Tuvan volleyballer of all time.
His mother's family came from the Tuvan/Khakass border high in the narrow gorges of the Sayani mountains where the river Ust-Usa meets the storming river Yenisei. But when he was 7 years old the Soviets built the greatest hydro-electric Dam in the world - Sayano-Shushinskoye - and the whole of this area was flooded forever.

Now there is a huge lake (but only in summer - not in winter and spring when you can still see the old drowned towns). His family moved to Shagonar (or Rio de Shagoneiro as they like to call it). This is where he grew up in the long hot summer months playing down by the waterside where there are many interesting plants.
From the lake you can see "Hairukn" - the great bear mountain which sticks up out of the steppe and which is sacred to all Tuvans. From here the Yenisei flows north to the cold wastes of the tundra and the Arctic Ocean.

this event was made possible by: http://www.bangonacan.org/