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Ondar demonstrates Tuvan throat singing Audio clip: 150k MPEG-3 Audio clip: 210k WAV Video clip: 1.2Mb QuickTime

June 4, 1999
Web posted at: 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT)

From Serena Yang
CNN WorldBeat Correspondent

(CNN) -- As B.B. King is to the blues, Ravi Shankar is to the Indian sitar, so Kongar-Ol Ondar is to Tuvan throat singing. Of course, this will mean little to you if, like most people, you've never even heard of the former Soviet state of Tuva, located between Mongolia and Siberia.

If you haven't heard anything about Tuva 'til now, expect that to change. The nation's indigenous art of throat singing is in the spotlight, with Ondar, the master of the craft, leading the way.

Throat singers produce overtones by varying the shape of the voice box. As a result, two, three, or even four distinct tones can be heard at once. It may sound something like listening to Popeye talk at first. But if you listen carefully, you'll hear two distinct notes, a deep, mesmerizing drone and a shifting series of high harmonics.

Ondar is Tuva's musical ambassador to the world. He's a professional vocalist, teacher, and winner of the culture's first International Festival of Throat Singing in 1992. Today he's also a member of parliament and a national treasure.

"Throat singing is central to our culture," says Ondar. "It's our soul. The children grow up with throat singing around them, and they learn to do it, and by this way they are passing on the traditions of Tuva."

INTERACTIVE:

Flip through some photos of Tuvan culture

Tuvan culture owes its higher profile to the efforts of two men, the late Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton, founder of the organization Friends of Tuva.

"Back in 1977, I was over at the home of the late great Richard Feynman, physicist, adventurer, raconteur," recalls Leighton. "And I was bragging a little bit too much about how I knew every country in the world. So he came back at me with a question, which I've printed on this shirt, which says, 'If you know every country in the world, whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?'"

Leighton, who thought his friend was joking, told him, "'There is no country Tannu Tuva.' But indeed there was a country Tannu Tuva," he says, and "We read descriptions that there was a style of singing in which one person could sing two or three notes simultaneously."

Leighton and Feynman weren't the only ones fascinated with Tuvan culture. So was San Francisco blues musician Paul Payna, who taught himself how to throat sing after hearing the exotic vocals on a short-wave radio program. Payna and Ondar became friends, and in 1995, Payna traveled to Tuva to compete in a throat-singing competition, a musical journey documented in the 1999 feature film, "Ghenghis Blues."

As word of mouth about this vocal tradition began to spread, Ondar found himself in demand for a diverse range of globe-spanning projects, recording with Frank Zappa, Mickey Hart, and the Chieftains, among others. A new release, called "Back Tuva Future," marks his debut on Warner Brothers Records, combining his throat singing with strains of bluegrass, country, American Indian chants, and even rap.

"Tuva has got a strong enough culture that it can stand right up equal to American culture, I think," Leighton says. "And I think this project, 'Back Tuva Future,' demonstrates that pretty well. Ondar sings straight-out Tuvan-style throat singing, he doesn't change that one bit, and he's right in there on an equal level with American musicians of many styles.

Tuva may be on the other side of the world, but Ondar finds that throat singing and American country music have a lot in common.

"Many things are similar, especially the things that we sing about, the life on the land, missing our sweetheart. It's the themes that are very common," Ondar says.

"We sing them in different ways, but what we're singing about is almost exactly the same."