Redemption songs

Friday June 22, 2007, The Guardian
 

One of the earliest photographs of the north Caucasus shows a whole village dancing in a circle, symbolising a space protected from the chaos and menace beyond. That menace has long come more from foreign invaders than from rival tribes: ever since Catherine the Great drove her highway down through the mountains to her Christian friends in Georgia, the Muslims of the north Caucasus have been victims of a periodically genocidal colonial war, and their wild music a key expression of their defiance.

The music of this part of the world did once have classical champions: Balakirev, enthralled by what he heard on holiday there, responded by writing his piano fantasy, Islamey, in homage to the local dance of that name. Rimsky-Korsakov loved the exoticism of Caucasian melodies. Prokofiev, who was evacuated in 1942 to the Kabardino-Balkarian capital, Nalchik, built his Second String Quartet out of Kabardinian folk songs, and mimicked the sound of the local shichepshin (spike-fiddle). But despite the rich variety of its culture, musicologists have seldom set foot there. Britain's National Sound Archive has just two wax cylinders from 1910, plus a handful of Soviet LPs aimed at the internal tourist trade in the 1970s, when trips to the mountains down south were a sought-after workers' treat.

Since there was no CD of this music, I decided to make one, little suspecting how difficult this would prove, with endless warnings about kidnaps, an arrest, and a labyrinthine geographical quest.

I had begun the project by accident several years earlier when I chanced to hear and record the Chechen singer Sahab Mezhidov when he was passing through London with a dance group from Grozny. Accompanying himself on the balalaika, Mezhidov delivered two songs in a high, hard tenor, at a volume to carry across mountain tops. My next two tracks were from a young Circassian singer named Cherim Nakhushev, whose rock-firm intonation on incredibly long-held high notes defied all notions of human frailty. I tracked down more musicians last year in Moscow, where they had taken economic and political refuge, and where the worst they had to put up with was the Muscovites' racism (Chechens, Circassians, and Dagestanis are called "blacks").

Exile had intensified their culture. With an accordion, drum, clappers and shouts, one ensemble I recorded whipped up such a skilful storm that we might have been in the middle of a huge crowd, rather than just four young men in an underground studio. When the grizzled Dagestani singer-songwriter Shirvani Chalaev saw that forbidding little space, he asked wryly if he had been brought there to be tortured. His unaccompanied songs were evocations of a tribal world where manly defiance is de rigueur - and never more so than in the face of certain death. And if we heard the mountains in his rugged, intransigent tone, that was deliberate. "The mountains don't like loud laughter," he explained. "When you are among them, you behave with respect. For what is around you, and for who has been there before you." But these sessions were anything but grim: the Karachai singer Lydia Bachaeva, looking like an exotic bird in the brightly coloured woollens she knits for a living, recorded a boisterous song she had written about a girl who so completely controls her lover that she turns him into a drop of water and drinks him.

Chechnya itself being a no-go area for recording, I settled for the statelets bordering on it. North Ossetia has a still-thriving polyphonic tradition: hearing of a choir ready to record in a village a few miles down the road from Beslan, I went to meet the Batu Dzugaev People's Choir of North Ossetian (Alanian) Heroic Song - they insist on that title, brackets and all - who launched into a chanted toast over a gigantic foaming goblet. Managing to record just the last 30 seconds of that rare musical outburst, I asked if they would do it again, but they refused, saying it wasn't a performance and must spring from the heart. Then they delivered a series of songs in which solo voices surged out over growling drones. Dead Ossetian heroes - and the dead children of Beslan - were their subject matter, but they ended with a joyful paean to the beauty of their land. Then in walked the mayor flanked by three policemen, and I was arrested.

My questioning went on for hours, with a secret-service officer pointing out that I'd also been spotted recording in Vladikavkaz. Finally, I was told that, by recording without official permission, I'd committed an offence. The choir's protests - that they wanted their music to be heard in the west - were to no avail. I was fined and told to leave the country, but at least they didn't impound my tape.

Next stop, Nalchik, leafy capital of neighbouring Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Chechens' favourite singer Tamara Dadasheva now lives, after escaping death in the bomb blast that killed President Akhmad Kadyrov three years ago. Chasing each other around town all day, we finally got together in a head-teacher's office, with traffic roaring past, where she recorded one of the most delicately coquettish love songs I've heard. After 12 minutes my local minder dragged me away, saying he couldn't vouch for my safety after dark.

My most memorable Chechen encounter came in neighbouring Georgia, where the tribe from which the Aznach Ensemble is drawn have lived since their ancestors were deported in the 19th century. And what Aznach purveys is Chechen music in its purest, most electrifying form. The group consists of four women, including a mother and two daughters, with a balalaika for colour, and an accordion - the Chechens' favourite instrument - for ballast and momentum. But when mild-mannered 20-year-old Tamta Khangoshvili - a trainee teacher - opens her mouth to sing, she seems possessed. Her normally caressing timbre hardens to a guttural shout as she launches into the Chechens' unofficial anthem, with its defiant refrain in which the rest of the group joins: "There is but one god, and Allah is his name." When she sings this for fellow Chechens, her mother says proudly, the auditorium is always awash with tears. But if their music is rough-hewn, their artistry is ultra-refined, putting delicate embellish-ments on its basic minor triads.

When making the final selection of tracks for the CD, I thought my choice was being governed by strictly musical considerations. Listening to the whole, it became clear how political it is, with song after song reflecting dead heroes, desperate hopes, terrible communal memories, and an intense religiosity. When a singer like Tamta Khangoshvili belts out their anthem, how can the Chechens not weep? How can they possibly forget their history, when it is repeating itself daily? They sing, and want the rest of us to listen.

· Michael Church's field-recording collections, Songs of Defiance: Music of Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and Songs of Survival: Traditional Music of Georgia, are released by Topic Records, available through amazon.co.uk