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| In congress : triple-banger-themed harmonious flag-waving impressionism |
Tuesday morning. I'm only slightly limping around today but continuing with the minor cultural incidents theme perhaps already slightly in the dogbox. The notification that we members of the press are scheduled to leave the hotel at 09:30 only comes through at 09:02, about 10 minutes after I've woken up. I strongly suspect what festival officials might love me to prioritise but as alluded to in installment two, my body bluntly insists the priority is breakfast.
I get my blood-sugar and protein levels comfortably well up with the excellent Hilton Garden Inn Samarkand hotel breakfast in their palatial full-of-light dining room overlooking massive lawns, scattered saplings and the rowing canal, then pop back to my room to get my shit together for a day that will only end after the night's competition performances. Returning downstairs I jump in the minivan and head round to another of the complex's nearby hotels, arriving with my helpers at 10:30 – a minor miracle, only half an hour late – to the Sharq Taronalari festival's first ever conference of ethnomusicologists and related musical professionals.
Everyone else I recognise in the low-ceilinged room has a wee bag of useful materials that I've missed out on due to my tardiness but I'm there right on time for the speeches. 'Musical Culture of Eastern Peoples: Principles of Creative Harmony/Integration in the Processes of Globalization' is the conference theme. There's a welcoming spiel in Uzbek followed by a woman giving an intro in English – it seems she may be from UNESCO, one of the main festival sponsors. Spiel over, someone else thanks her in Uzbek. The most important conference participants, such as her, are seated round a big rectangular set-up of tables, each delegate with their own little tabletop flag, name placard and simultaneous translation headset. I eye those headsets with a small degree of envy. Assuming all the Uzbeks understand Uzbek, from where I sit, most of the time quite a large number of the people in the room, in particular many of the international journos, including me, have no idea at all what the delegates are saying. As the conference opening introductory formalities continue, this is perhaps instead a small blessing in disguise. For it means I can simply sit with my pencil and notebook to observe, write, and scoop up random common words from the tide.
During a moment of linguistic darkness I nip out into the adjacent reception foyer and retrieve my complimentary bag of tricks from a handful of volunteers guarding its lonely spot near the top of the hotel's grand and elegant spiral staircase. Inside the bag, an empty paper folder for storing loose notes, a spiral-bound notepad, and a large hardbound book in multiple languages of papers from multiple (I assume) festival-attending academics about the songs and musics of the East and further afield, all items boasting the 8-pointed star Sharq Taronalari logo. While the speeches continue I flip through the book, dog-earing for later reading the first pages of the 10 English-language pieces that I can understand out of the volume's 51 papers.
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| The hefty hardbound volume itself |
A French representative addresses the room in English. If her words to the festival organisers – including an overview of her cultural organisation – are any general indication of the proceedings it's fairly clear that this first conference session is definitely a bit of a U.N. situation, i.e. delegates speak a lot in a diplomatic, friendly and glad to be here kind of way but otherwise say little of pressing importance. It's a lot about showing face, introducing oneself and one's work/workplace and taking turns at multinational friendship. Not that this is not important, but they do only have a couple of days. Just like the festival competitors...
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| Competition rounds |
Jump-cut: Registan Square, Tuesday evening. Due to the compaction of three competition nights into two before Thursday's prize-giving extravaganza there's a packed programme ahead of us and each act in the spotlight has just 15 scant minutes to strut their stuff, including getting on and off the truly massive stage. I'm so immersed in the action that the only note I make in my notebook is little more than a countries list from the first half of the programme:
Bulgaria
Latvia – sticks?
(I later find a source writing about part of this ancient tradition, where sticks, jumped over while crossed on the ground, likely replaced swords or spears. Safety first! Indeed, the ensemble's set includes a graceful and beautiful stick dance, though their choreography as well has sequences in which the sticks are held)
Sudan
Greece
(a duo whose set adeptly transmits their country's numerous musical influences as gleaned from its maritime location and history)
Hindustan
Kazakhstan
It must be said that for reasons at time of publication far beyond my comprehension tonight I also fall well short in visual documentation, bar these scant details...
 | |||
| Sudan, | |
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/India, up close... |
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| and Hindustan/ |
Thanks to what Mahide
sends me post-festival I can also list more fully like this :
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| (N.B. our Nigerian Berlin crew member Angela is ultimately on the next night) |
Unfortunately I don't see any of the performers listed from Iran onwards as, spoiler alert, round half-way through the evening's programme a volunteer comes and tells me "our buses are leaving now". But at least I gladly and with much privilege get to see half the night's entertainment from a prime spot, unlike these groups of dedicated local fans stood scattered about in Registan Square's leafy surrounds...
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| ...in the wings way at the back of stage left... |
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| ...and way out beyond house right, far from the inside-crowd |
I even also get to put my shonky foot/ankle up as part of a very exclusive international friendship club before being whisked prematurely away to the elevated heights of my luxurious hotel bed for the night.
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| The evening stretches into the night. In my dreams |
Jump cut, again: On Wednesday night I insist on staying right on through till the end. I wish I'd been sharp enough to insist on doing the same the night before, as my intrepid and more onto-it Swedish journo comrades had done. Again thanks to Mahide, here's the participant list, although as any good fact-checking reveals, not all of what's listed are people's names but instead sometimes the names of the kind of music being performed. And despite a good few internet searches those missing performer names are indeed sadly missing in action...
 |
...though I can as a name balancing act report that this sweet and friendly Egyptian qanun player has multiple iterations of his name Here's Mo El Egimy's linktr.ee |
And so, on we go with the show :
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The Uzbek trio resplendent in national colours |
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The Russian ensemble from Arkhangelsk Most certainly well worth a listen, albeit punctuated by audience child : |
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The Hungarians utterly slam-dunking on all fronts, from dress to matching decor and on to delivery : |
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| Tajikistan |
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| The duo from Kyrgyzstan |
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From a sublime personal instrumental moment in synch... ...to the Pakistanis totally rocking it out : |
On this second competition night my serendipitous personal theme is 'making friends'. To my right are this lovely quartet, the teenage friends both possessing admirable English-language skills thanks to their high school studies, one of whom I'm still in contact with thanks to social media...
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Two pairs of best friends, mothers and daughters, fortuitously here thanks to tickets come via a family member's workplace |
...this continuing contact of ours also in part because we more deeply forge our friendship once we get talking about a common interest, field hockey. She's dedicating a lot of time to playing the game at a high national representative level; as for me, I played from age 11 till 19, stopping not long after unknowingly fracturing the infamous recently replaced ankle.
(Update, 19 months later, free of school and now 19 she's still going strong on the field. With her excellent attitude and multiple specialist training sessions, she's clearly becoming ever stronger. Meanwhile, despite much treatment and training, my ankle annoyingly remains somewhat dodgy.)
To my left is a young designer and maker of traditional Uzbek jewellery. She takes a shot of us :
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Here's her Insta: check out her painstaking and gorgeous handiwork |
Now another brief segue: it's one of the volunteers who informally placed me into the caring and welcoming hands of the fabulous four. Such attention by the volunteers to our needs is a notable feature of the festival. Their thoughtful liaison work is pivotal in helping we festival delegates feel at home here, is instrumental to our seeing some notable local sites/sights (coming in the final installment), and is crucial in generally getting us to everywhere we should be going during this week. Every single musician, conference attendee, journalist and agent in Samarkand for the Sharq Taronalari festival has our own volunteer assigned to personally assist us, while collectively, should our personal helper not be available, all of the volunteer posse are magically and spontaneously on hand to offer the same help, as in this instance. The volunteers welcome us – mine, Kamola, in fact sent her first welcoming email to me at 06:30 on Monday morning – marshal us, promptly forward daily schedules to us, make sure we get in the minivans to travel to the next location/item on our programme, answer our numerous questions and cater to our random minor desires or find someone else who can, they tour guide us, find money changers, and provide crucial insights into local culture. From first thing in the morning to last thing at night, it's an on-call, on-site working day that can stretch, in my estimate, up to and even sometimes over 18 hours. The festival volunteers are essential to the smooth running of everything. Much applause. And as we see with this English-speaking hockey synchronicity, some of them also have a magical spidey sense about who to entrust hospitality oversight to.
After my new friends and many other audience members have gone home and while the night's packed programme continues on, another of the volunteers introduces me to a couple of guys from the audience who she cannily intuits I might like to meet. The two are sitting down closer to the front – one a Canadian academic, the other a UK-trained Syria-originating doctor.
In
another
cool and
spooky coincidence, we three all,
in a way, have
Edinburgh in common:
they met and became friends there
while studying (the doctor's still living
and working
there)
and continue to
get
together for an annual holiday
–
this
year Uzbekistan
– while
I have
Scottish heritage and originally
come
from 'the Edinburgh of the South', Ōtepoti
Dunedin,
a
simplification of Dùn
Èideann, the
Scots
Gaelic
name for Edinburgh. Possibly
not surprisingly we
have very similar senses of humanity and humour
and we have quite a fun time together.
Our doctor,
who had the fortune to land in Edinburgh to start his studies just
before the war in Syria,
kindly suggests the music of the Chinese act "could be described
as crossover".
You decide :
The moments we Team Berliners have been waiting for finally come, with all three of our musicians on stage one after another. Just like this :
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| Aly Keïta and his balafon on the big stage, photographed on a big screen |
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| Sol Okarina doing Colombia, Venezuela and Berlin proud and always dressed for the occasion |
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| Angela Ordu, elegant and intimate |
In our
pumped-up down-front concert-going
sector, Aly
and Sol's up-beat sets are crowd favourites.
Here's a wee taste, the audience clapping along in time :
At the close of a fairly late night we all bid one another our farewells and head away to sleep happy.
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| The stars above us in the dark night |
Come
Thursday there's another
small
conference
I get
to go to,
namely
a press conference with lauded
Schlager
singer and Uzbekistan's Minister
of Culture,
Nazarbekov Ozodbek,
which
is taking place prior
to the
evening's pending
Sharq
Taronalari
finale and
prize-giving. Arriving
on site one
of the volunteers divulges
he's
just been listening to one of Nazarbekov
Ozodbek's
11
highly
popular albums
before
we came here. If you're curious,
the magical internet can help you if/when you follow the below link... please do so to experience 3 minutes and 42 seconds of his musical charm as well as a lot of impressive carpets, some shimmery hocus-pocus and two gorgeous traditional Uzbek outfits... though so far as I can tell from various translation websites, the title of this song either means 'what I don't like' or 'I don't like it' or even 'what doesn't work'. Yes ok, it's another lost in translation moment. Fortunately, music is an international language: simply click on the following green text and an external link will transport you...
Ozodbek Nazarbekov - Nimam yoqmaydi | Озодбек Назарбеков - Нимам ёкмайди
The aforementioned site we've just arrived at is the Samarkand Regional Music and Drama Theatre, named after dead famous poet Hamid Alimjan. Upon its forecourt is where some of we press people are now pressed into a line up in order to ourselves be turned into a local press opportunity. It's here that I grab an opportunity to make a request on behalf the entire press corps to the culture minister's press secretary in our great journalistic hunt for the missing-in-action official Sharq Taronalari competition artists running lists. Ultimately, the request proves fruitless. So it goes.
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| The theatre itself, one of the country's oldest, opened in January 1914 PHOTO: Wikipedia/Akhemen |
SCENE NOTES
Though of course the real action is inside in the theatre's foyer with the minister himself. Looking sharp in a blue suit accessorized with a pale purple and blue striped tie, this guy is one of the most well-known singers in Uzbekistan, as well as a former short-stint director and producer for the Yoshlar (youth) TV channel, and was the country's 'Male Vocalist of the Year' in 2010. Now he's making politician notes as a youth representative asks him a question.
We've just had a little bit of official translation into English which quickly ended along with the welcoming formalities. But fortunately the super-sharp volunteer sitting behind me, having ceased listening to the minister's musical offerings, now leans in to intone his excellent simultaneous translation service of the minister's political offerings.
Another of our festival volunteers takes a turn to address and question the minister. She begins by mentioning her appreciation of the opportunity to work on the festival then asks about the possibility of more such chances in the future.
CULTURE MINISTER "Be patient for your chances in life."
A Samarkand theatre camera operator asks about finances for development of local film infrastructure: it's a fair question, as to a large extent the country's film industry centres around Tashkent, 300 kilometres away, which replaced Samakand as the country's capital in 1930.
CULTURE MINISTER "Find other non-governmental funding opportunities, do it yourself."
A music school teacher asks about the possibilities of creating a kind of censorship body related to inappropriate online content.
CULTURE MINISTER "Find ways to educate the kids yourself."
We can see that these answers are falling into a common theme.
A
woman asks about how he deals with criticisms about the Sharq
Taronalari festival. (Sadly, I never find out what these are.)
CULTURE MINISTER "No worries."
So it goes.
One last question is not really a question. Another woman talks about how she's created opportunities for youth. "Basically, a bit of self-praise," adds the volunteer in a low voice. I suppress a little smile.
CULTURE MINISTER "Good, you took initiative."
To summarise this encounter, from what I have seen this afternoon Nazarbekov Ozodbek has completely set aside his highly successful musical career persona in order to display his skill as a commensurate politician who's not making any governmental indications of possible financial support to his fellow talented country-people working in the cultural sector because self-reliance is everything. Masterclass.
Though, as an old friend and former diplomat recently reminded me of something we once spontaneously colluded upon at a diplomatic reception in Berlin, one way to both win people over and relax the atmosphere at slightly stuffy formal occasions is to bust out an unexpected song. I suspect many in this room would have felt far more endeared to the minister if he'd dipped into his deep reservoir of melodies to sing a few lines from one of his long list of hit songs, fitting well with the main theme of the week, i.e. the Sharq Taronalari music festival. Also, it would have made a great photo/media opportunity. As the old saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I wish I'd been keen-witted and cheeky enough to ask him to do it. What to do...
Time for another song, this one apparently comparing loyal women to roses and more straightforwardly entitled 'Rose'. (Phew!) Aside from the music, also a chance to see the culture minister in another blue suit, this one accessorized by a rose tie, surrounded by more beautiful Uzbek patterned textiles and numerous flowers. Simply click on the orange text :
Ozodbek Nazarbekov - Atirgul | Озодбек Назарбеков - Атиргул
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| Jump cut, later on that day, back at Registan Square for the ultimate event. Watch out for the leopard, symbol of Samarkand |
As mentioned earlier, tonight is the prize giving. Once ensconced in our seats, for the last time this week we're treated to another mesmerising, glittering, swirling showcase of acts. Unfortunately I don't have any line-up list at all, though this time all we visiting musicians, ethno-musicologists and journos, et al. have got some pretty damn good seats right down altogether at the front.
Meanwhile, according to the volunteer who introduced us the night before, my unexpected 'team Edinburgh' friends are out at the gate hoping to be lucky enough to be admitted again, although unlike last night's show, for which they'd had tickets gifted to them by a contact from a local business, currently they are sadly ticketless. With my press pass and great seat I'm extremely well aware of my privileged position. As, at the time of writing, the Uzbekistan Embassy in Berlin has told me it's still too early to confirm ticket retailers, if you yourself would like to attend Sharq Taronalari in 2026 I strongly suggest you arrive in town beforehand and immediately get super friendly with the locals.
Unusually, tonight's just a tiny wee bit chillier. I lend Kacem my complimentary blue shawl (featured at the end of installment two) until finally he bites the last-chance bullet and pops into the adjacent festival craft gallery to haggle a great deal on a beautiful wool jacket, its fabric featuring traditional geometric motifs. My said shawl had been presented to me by our cheerful main official festival liaison guy a couple of days before (another photo op) along with some wooden and other souvenirs, all in the tote bag also pictured in that same installment. The shawl has since gone on to wrap me snugly against two Berlin winters much chillier than our far balmier Samarkand evening temperatures.
For the record, here are the said wood goods strutting their stuff at their new home in Berlin :
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| outside |
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| inside |
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| right side |
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| front side |
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| and top side, capping the souvenir series off |
Back with the action on the glorious and massive stage here are some of the multitudes of talented dancing people in their beautiful traditional outfits once again strutting their stuff :
...including the extremely famous Bollywood singer Shibani Kashyap who
gets everyone up and dancing :
And here, a couple of shots of some of 2024's prize-winners. In all, according to the performer lists, there were 32 different acts from which the seven-member jury had to choose the lucky winners. No mean feat. The Grand Prix went to Azerbaijani music group Simurg Mugham Ensemble, first place to the National Music Ensemble from Turkmenistan (who could have won a prize for their hats alone), second place to Atameken (Kazakhstan, their name means 'ancestral land') and singers Fazilat Axmedova and Alisher Axmedov of Maqom Band and the National Classical Ensemble of the State Symphony Orchestra of Uzbekistan (Uzbekistan), and third place to Mashu Kamazaki (Japan), Northern Choir (Russia) and Batbayar Batnyam (Mongolia).
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| Batnyam Batbayar, known for playing Numan fiddle, bamboo jaw harp and Jew's harp |
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| A couple of the happy and happily-hatted Turkmen chaps |
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| On her two-stringed lute, the dutor, Mashu Kamazaki was also named an Ambassador of Uzbek Culture in 2025 |
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| Maqom band singers Alisher Axmedov and Fazilat Axmedova |
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Why have just one drummer when you can have more... Followed by a little footage from their performance the night before : |
Getting back to the Silkroad complex relatively early after the prizegiving and festival close, it's a chance for about ten of we journalists to seat ourselves around a large circular table in the dining room for dinner and conversation. This has been one of the truly great things about many of the press corps being billeted together here this week, namely the time and chances this has given some of of us to get to know one another a little. Someone buys me a beer. Then, following my dessert of near-compulsory-with-every-meal delicious local watermelon a flash bottle of local-ish vodka with gold in it appears courtesy of a Tashkent-based member of our party.
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| Watermelon? But of course! |
A chilled out time is had by all. No photographic evidence. Later on at a cosy coffee-table nook, four of us sit talking together till the wee small hours about all the usual important philosophical questions of life, safe in the knowledge that there's no official programme the next day. Represented at this informal conference, India, Egypt, Tunisia/Switzerland, Aotearoa New Zealand/Berlin. Marvellous. Somehow, I end up with the final glinting remains of the vodka bottle. So it goes.
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| Final/finale partying down impressionism |
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