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Written in fRoots issue 223/224, 2002
 

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Great Awakening - Music of the Eastern Khanty
Global Music Centre GMCD 0107 (2001)

A tune on four twangy notes in a whole-tone scale far from equal temperament, on the slack-tuned metal strings of a nearly extinct nine-stringed angle-harp, made from a whole cedar-root and in shape somewhere between a boat and a crane, whose name in the Eastern Khanty language means “crane-head-wood”. The player, Timofey Ivanovich Kechimov, accompanies his exposition of the tune with a steady scratching unpitched pulse on, presumably, a low string. He stops playing, then delivers the same tune in a fractured voice as a vocal recitative, his voice matching not only the intonation of the harp but somehow embodying the impatient rattling throbbing of the low string.
      That first song on this, to me at least, treasured CD is the one that opens the Bear feast, a ceremony in which a slain bear is honoured as a noble totemic link between the human and the godly, practised among several northern peoples but surviving into the present day, just about, among the Ob-Ugrian Khanty/Mansi or Yugrian people in the region of the river Ob to the east of the northern Urals.
      T.I. Kechimov died in 1997 at the age of 57. He’d been a reindeer herder, fisherman and hunter, but oil pollution had destroyed his reindeer pasture, the fish in the rivers and much of the hunting grounds. Finnish researchers Jarkko Niemi and Ilpo Saastamoinen and Yugrian Vera Nikiforova encountered and recorded him in the village of Russkinskie in the winter of 1992. Other recordings on the CD feature his son and nephew singing and playing the plucked kantele-like “sounding-wood”, the angle-harp, the Khanty shaman drum (similar to the Sámi form but with rattle-stones and no drawings) and hoarse-toned two string bowed lute.
      Aware of the dwindling of Yugrian cultural identity, some of the Russkinskie villagers, including Kechimov’s son Semën Kechimov and another singer recorded, Nadezhda Medvedevda, are involved in a folklore collective.
      Further recordings were made in the village of Ugut of singer Egor Bisarkin and of Sof’ya Multanova, singer and player of the tumran, a string-operated jew’s harp made of elk rib or wood. There are shaman songs (learnt from Multanova’s shaman father), songs of work, humour, wedding ritual, and a tumran instrumental from the bear feast about a bear being tormented by gnats.
      Ways of thinking and being from what now seems another world, but surviving, barely, just over the mountains from Europe and perhaps evoking images and echoes from way back in our own western European history and psyche.


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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