MELODIES ON DUTAR/DUTAR MELODIES
from the musical heritage of the Uzbek people
ДУТОР НАВОЛАРИ
Ӯзбек халки музика меросидан
Melodiya, 1983, M30-44639-40
This monophonic LP is a didactic recording the kind of album Melodiya used to produced about certain musical traditions in Central Asia. It's like a lecture with somebody reading a text (here in Uzbek only) illustrated by musical parts. Seven dutar players including one female player are featured here with recordings made previously between 1956 and 1982 hence the bad sound quality of some of these tracks. I had to make 18 tracks myself out of the two sides in order to separate the oral presentation from the music so that you can skip the text unless you understand Uzbek. The text on the cover is in Russian though which I suppose is a sort of summary of what is read.
There are no titles on the cover but they are sometimes mentionned by the reader. The names of the players are listed on each side. I tried to follow the names of each player in order to identify the musical tracks but I'm not sure about what I'm able to hear so if you know better you are welcome !
If you don't know it, the dutar has only two strings (from Persian dotar = 2 strings), one for the melody the other one for the drone which can change at times according to the melody. It might seem dry and difficult to listen to but it is an exciting and highly rich music as is the whole Uzbek-Tajik musical culture.
This is superb. Thank you very much, Hervé!
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