CENTRAL ASIA & CAUCASUS • VOICES OF THE SOVIET ORIENT

Produced in the mid-eighties, when USSR still existed, this album offers an introduction to vocal music in Central Asia and Caucasus. It presents three different cultural areas through the Georgian vocal polyphonies and their coarse but complex harmonies, the regions influenced by the art of the Arab-Persian maqâm (Azerbaijan, Armenia), and finally the bard traditions linked up with the shamanism and the cult of nature (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tuva).