Songs From The Steppes: Kazakh Music Today CD - Import

This is one of a few albums to recently appear featuring Kazakh music. Could it be there's a bit of a trend happening? But if you're expecting anything radical and outlandish in this excellent collection, you're going to be disappointed. You'll find heavily arranged material by the Folk Ensemble of the Presidential Orchestra, recasting folk music to be more acceptable to the masses alongside the real, unadorned thing from artists like Klara Tulenbaeva and Edil Huseinov. In a way this is little more than an illustration of the breadth of Kazakh folk music, and in that, it's fine. The raw material is indeed raw, attacking the ears in a wonderful way, and a sharp contrast to the more arranged material. If there are artists pushing at the folk boundaries in Kazakhstan, you won't find them here. But that's fine, too. ~ Chris Nickson

Kazakhstan is now an independent country in the heart of central Asia. Formerly part of the Soviet Union, the nomadic peoples that populated the country were penned up by Stalin in collective farms, but their Nomadic culture and spirit survived. This CD,The Wire (p.72) - "'Korogly' serves as a perfect coda to this anthology's variegated pleasures: a dombra duet snaking around hairpin curves, tumultuous, sufficiently impassioned as to seem nearly unhinged..."
Dirty Linen (p.52) - "The strongest musical impression is made by the powerful vocalists, many of whom are extremely dramatic."