Singing Central Asia: Uncovering Kazakh and Uzbek Estrada
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Leora Eisenberg
It would have been absurd if it wasn’t quite so sincere: at least seven Kazakhstani composers sitting in a conference room, drawing up lists of people I needed to interview for my dissertation chapter comparing Uzbek and Kazakh estrada, a difficult-to-define genre of music one of my interlocutors had called “pop music in a planned economy.” These were all members of Kazakhstan’s Association of Composers – or at least people who worked in the same building. And they were thrilled that I was working on estrada. For at least two hours, I took notes as each one scrolled through their contacts list to determine who among their classmates and former colleagues were now suitable interview subjects. I might have been embarrassed to have taken so much of their time if I wasn’t so grateful.
The issue was that I simply could not find anything on the topic. One local composer had contacted me after seeing my interview for a national Kazakhstani newspaper about my research on Soviet Kazakh music. In it, I bemoaned the lack of scholarly attention to the topic of Kazakh estrada, which I hope to help rectify. This dearth of information is particularly striking in comparison with the study of estrada in, say, neighboring Uzbekistan – which has not only attracted significant foreign attention, including Kirstin Klenke’s Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era and Laura Adam’s The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan – but tremendous domestic funding, as visible in the construction of the Institute of National Estrada in Tashkent, located on Botir Zokirov Avenue, itself named after one of the most prominent Uzbek estrada performers of the 20th century.[i]
Estrada – a term of French origin, from the word estrade (stage) – has existed in Russian since the mid-to-late 19th century. Already in the earliest years of the USSR, cities across the country had “concert-estrada bureaus” responsible for managing performances of estrada (which was sometimes intuitively considered by administrators to refer to everything that was not European classical music). However, many would argue that the genre took center stage - pun intended - in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after the death of Stalin, when it took on a post-Stalinist “jolly and internationalist spirit,” one informed by “ease, liveliness, and [personal] revelation,” as David MacFadyen writes in his book on estrada.[ii] There were two reasons for this. First, political destalinization also entailed musical destalinization, wherein formerly banned “bourgeois” western styles like tango and foxtrot were permissible and assimilable by Soviet musicians – and incorporated into estrada repertoires. Such globally popular music was an ideal candidate for performance at international events like the 1957 International Festival of Youth and Students, hosted in Moscow. As the USSR entered the post-Stalin “Thaw,” it participated and hosted more and more of such international congresses, conferences, and festivals, where estrada – with its notes of chanson francaise, classic rock, and swing – could demonstrate the modernity, youthfulness, and recent liberalism of the Soviet state.
Naturally, each Soviet republic produced its own estrada stars able to sing in their respective national languages. Their influence was boosted by the growing ubiquitousness of particular estrada institutions across the USSR, such as republic-level “estrada-symphonic orchestras” that performed on the radio. Yet, some estrada stars were truly all-Soviet, appealing to audiences far beyond their home republic, such as, most famously, Muslim Magomaev and Nani Bregvadze, who both first rose through their republic’s musical infrastructure in Azerbaijan and Georgia, respectively. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were no different: they each had their estrada stars and their own estrada-symphonic orchestras, established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Kazakhstan, Gulvira Razieva, Laki Kesoglu, and Eskendir Khasangaliev dominated radio waves and, later, TV screens. In Uzbekistan, their counterparts were Rano Sharipova, Muhabbat Shamayeva, and, of course, Botir Zokirov.
Yet, despite these performers’ shared genre, their repertoires and contexts were, in reality, quite different. Uzbekistan’s status as the “star of the East,” as memorialized in a famous estrada song, made it into a much more in-demand locale for the signature international events of the Thaw era (and after), as seen in the Tashkent International Film Festival (1968) and first-ever Asian-African Writers Conference (1958). These events frequently catered to peoples of the “East” – a problematic term that was nonetheless widely used in the Soviet period – namely the lands of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Uzbek performers were expected, then, to adopt somewhat “eastern” repertoires, wherein they sang songs in “eastern” languages and on “eastern” themes. This self-orientalized repertoire proved to be massively popular. Many describe how Zokirov became a star nearly overnight after his performance of the “Arabic Tango” – sung in Arabic – at the 1957 festival in Moscow. His repertoire grew to include Hindi, Persian, and Arabic songs, in addition to Russian and Uzbek ones. Shamayeva and Sharipova also performed songs in “eastern” languages – with Shamayeva coming to sing fairly frequently in Crimean Tatar. Rather than singing in Uzbek alone, these “broadly Eastern” repertoires made it easier for Uzbek estrada performers to reach broad audiences who either knew these languages or liked their orientalized style.
On the other hand, Kazakh estrada performers – with some exceptions – tended to sing in Kazakh. In some part, I suspect that this was because of their far more local audiences: Kazakhstan simply hosted fewer international events (much to the consternation of the republic’s leadership), which warranted less diversification of its repertoire. But I also suspect – and hope to eventually prove – that the republic’s Kazakh minority (30.02% in 1959, as opposed to 42.69% Russian) caused great “national anxiety” within the state apparatus, causing officials to push for performances by ethnic Kazakhs in Kazakh in order to mask the republic’s demographics. Though there were exceptions – Kesoglu tended to sing in Russian, and Razieva often sang in Uyghur – these were not the rule, making it hard for all-Union audiences to want to consume estrada from Kazakhstan, no matter how beautiful the performers’ voices.
Moreover, estrada seems not to have become part of national ethos in Kazakhstan to the extent that it did in Uzbekistan, though this is hardly to say that it lacked popularity entirely. Yet, one cannot help but notice that estrada did not become an element of state ritual to the extent that it did in Uzbekistan. I suspect that this is because Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era estrada singers did not have the chance to participate in the abundance of festivals and congresses that their counterparts in Uzbekistan did. Of course, Kazakhstani performers sang at plenty of events – but not as often at large-scale international ones catering to foreigners.
I write this not to disparage the Kazakh performers for whom I have tremendous respect, but to explain the context behind why it’s taken me so long to track them down! I am grateful for the accidental Union of Composers plenum that I had gathered not too long ago and I hope that its input will help Kazakh estrada gainthe attention it has long deserved.
Leora Eisenberg is a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University, where she studies the development of national music in Soviet Central Asia. She earned her B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton in 2020 and her M.A. in History from Harvard in 2023. More importantly, however, Leora enjoys interviewing Soviet-era pop singers across Central Asia, singing Yalla tunes, and traveling to the region as often as she can.
[i] Kerstin Klenke, The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era, SOAS Musicology Series (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019); Laura L. Adams, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan, Politics, History, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
[ii] David MacFadyen, Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991 (Montreal ; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 81.
