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Central Asia within earshot

Smithsonian Folkways, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Music Initiative, is releasing new ground-breaking Central Asia recordings.

The nonprofit record label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which is a part of the national museum of the United States, has been documenting "people's music," as its founder, Moses Asch, used to say, since 1948. Folkways was one of the first companies to offer albums of "world music," while producing singers and songwriters who formed the core of the American folk music revival (including such giants as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly). Smithsonian Folkways Recordings keeps on producing new recordings that celebrate the sounds of the world around us. For their new set of CDs documenting the music of Central Asia, they collaborate with the Aga Khan Music Initiative, a program of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture to support the efforts of Central Asian musicians to sustain and transmit musical traditions that are a vital part of their cultural heritage.
Volume 7, 8 and 9 are the latest releases of this 10-CD/DVD series.
Entitled "the Footsteps of Babur: Musical Encounters from the Lands of the Mughals," volume 9 revives the Mughal Empire founded by Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur during his journey of conquest through Afghanistan and Hindustan (the northern part of the Indian Subcontinent). Paying tribute to the Mughal artistic synthesis, six musicians from Central Asia, Afghanistan, Northern India, merge their musical instruments and traditions to create new sounds.
Rooted in the sophisticated urban song traditions of Uzbekistan, popular classics come alive in superbly recorded new performances on the volume 7, "In the Shrine of the Heart: Popular Classics from Bukhara and Beyond".
But the record that hold one's attention is volume 8, a bold collaboration between Kronos Quartet, Azerbaijan's best-loved traditional singers, Alim and Fargana Qasimov, and the leading Afghan rubâb player of his generation, Homayun Sakhi.
America's premier new music quartet presented this collaboration during an exclusive concert night at the Carnegie Hall in New York on March 14th.
A making of video allows us to discover the preparation of this memorable meeting.

Music of Central Asia, Vol.8: Rainbow

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RainInEden
06/04/2010

We are a Silk Road music project in Tokyo. The artists and recordings by Smithsonian Folkways have been a great addition to resources to study Central Asian traditional music. We love this series and love the amazing artists who have played for the recordings. Rain In Eden


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