This look at Tuvan singer Sainkho Namtchylak is from an early draft of a chapter for

a two-volume anthology now in press at Duke University Press, on cross-cultural

improvisation in music. Namtchylak was one of five Asian women profiled, the others being

Korean composer/geomungo-player Jin Hi Kim; zheng player Han Mei, and pipa players

Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man, all from China. Namtchylak’s part was cut from the final draft to

keep it within the word limit, and for other reasons having nothing to do with her equal

significance as an artist. In fact, the roughly 15,000-word long version of the draft featuring

all five women is my prospectus for five separate chapters on each of them for a book of my

own in progress.

I may publish this snapshot of Namtchylak somewhere, sometime. Once the Duke

chapter is published, I’ll try to get permission to post either it or my longer version of it here

as well. Meanwhile, here are the first 15 or so pages of the latter for anyone interested…

!
Sainkho Namtchylak: Mythoi Merging, Emerging in the Asian Woman Tinge

Jelly Roll Morton famously referenced “the Spanish tinge” as a key ingredient in the

creole music called “jazz” he helped concoct in New Orleans. (He was referring to a Cuban

rhythm more accurately sourced to Africa, but never mind.) I suggest here a similar infusion

—of an Asian tinge, in a woman’s voice—to the global discourse of improvised music

spawned, through African-American music, in the Atlantic triangle of the slave trade: East-

and Gulf-Coast North America, the Caribbean, East-Coast South America; West Africa; and

Europe and Russia, both for the latter two’s initial exported Western art music and later

imported (then reconfigured) jazz. Reflecting the Pacific Rim’s linked but somewhat parallel

history and current rise, the Asian/woman tinge brings its musical elements to that “creative-
music” scene’s suggestions of Western (patriarchal, cultural-imperial) power blending down

into the growing rise of its formerly enslaved, colonized, and oppressed peoples.1

I look here at the work of five musicians, all Asian women expatriates (four in North

America, one in Europe) who have labored long and extensively to establish themselves

within those originally Atlantic-world contexts of musical improvisation grown from jazz,

free jazz, aleatoric and maverick composition, “noise” and other such “experimental” music

scenes born and grown over the last century. They have done so by contributing thereto their

variously different and similar Asian-traditional instruments, sounds, techniques, and

aesthetics. I trace the arcs from their original styles and contexts to their various practices as

improvisers in their new cross-cultural, transcultural, and transhistorical collaborations and

contexts. I look at those contents through the bifocal lenses of logos and mythos to view key

features of the nature of such arcs.

Tuvan vocal master Sainkho Namtchylak and Korean composer/komungo2 master Jin

Hi Kim come from two different traditions that share strong and deep living roots in a

woman-centered, improvisation-rich shamanism, while sharing cultural space with still other

(more patriarchal) traditions (Buddhist, Confucian, Western classical, jazz) themselves

variously improvisatory and scripted, in both literate and oral/aural transmissions of material.

That common ground and the contrasting Mongolian and Korean historical and cultural

1 “Creative music” is the term of art used by Anthony Braxton and others in the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to umbrella the rubrics I list in my second paragraph. It
generally denotes music composed and/or improvised idiosyncratically, free of (while also free to
access) genre conventions and systems. I’ll use it for convenience ahead.
2 The more current spelling is geomungo, but I’ll use the one used on Kim’s CDs and her quoted
writings.
overlays collude with their different personal profiles and instruments to produce two

different faces of improvisation both within and beyond their Asian origins.

Both women were born in 1957. Namtchylak’s family and community connection to

the shamanic tradition gave her a natural access to its improvisational nature from childhood,

albeit within the larger context of Soviet hegemony until the latter ended as she came of age.

Kim, born into a Catholic family and first trained in Western classical music, had to de-

alienate herself from the Korean-traditional styles and their kinds of improvisation when they

emerged from official disfavor as she came of age. Both had to contend with their native

cultures’ constraints on women in their chosen practices, spurring them into the Russian,

European, and American creative-music scenes.

From China, zheng master Han Mei mines her traditional instrument and its ancient

Taoist contexts—some in its traditional repertoire, much more in new-and-improvised music

—for how it might speak in and to the global creative-music terrain; and Min Xiao-Fen and

Wu Man, both conservatory-trained pipa masters, have turned from their similar original

backgrounds of Chinese-classical techniques, aesthetics, and scored repertoire to their

respective improvisation-charted paths. All three, unlike Namtchylak and Kim, come from a

musical milieu and practice devoid of improvisation, which they encountered only after

moving to North America. Concurrently, they’ve done their own separate excavations into

Chinese music history to rediscover and revive improvisation from that tradition as well.

!
Sainkho Namtchylak (voice)

The singer the world knows as Sainkho Namtchylak was born Lyudmila Namchylak,

in Pestunovka, a small village in a gold-mining region of the former autonomous Soviet

Republic of Tuva, in southern Siberia, near the Mongolian border. She was the first of four
children, two sisters and an adopted brother, the youngest. Her father, Okan-ool Kyrgysovich

Namchylak, lectured, worked in Tuvan TV, and was a member of the Journalists' Union of

USSR. Her mother, Tatiana Arakchayevna, was an elementary school teacher.

Her own choice of details about her beginnings comprises the most salient signs of

their influence on her adult work, and the roles of music, improvisation, and shamanism

therein. One, not particularly about either, strikes me as at the heart of all three.

“Kok-Khaak village, in Kaa-Khem district, under Saryg-Sep,” she relates in an

extensive interview (Antufieva, 2011).

We lived in a house on the edge...steppe and plush mountains were right there. I am

standing there, about five or six years old. I am looking at the steppe; some kind of a

mirage is moving from the mountains, colorless air is moving, something invisible is

coming across the whole huge steppe and disappearing behind the mountains.

Then I see something glitter in the steppe, like a diamond, I run up to it and there it is

—an ordinary greenish fragment of glass, then I turn my head and I see a tractor

driver driving a light-blue tractor, and he also turns his head and our eyes meet. And I

feel that something mysterious is going on, that is impossible to describe in words.

She continues to describe the unfolding of a sequence of sights and sounds and

actions, the world’s and her own, in similarly evocative details that suffuse and charge the

essentially mundane moments with a curiosity-mined magic and mystery that pop into this

concluding sentence: “And afterwards I remember this simple episode for the rest of my life:

fifteen minutes of childhood.”

Such an unremarkable “earliest memory” that lasts a lifetime is perhaps common to

all—I know I have one, and have read of many others—but as the seed of a remarkable

artistic life to follow, it looms remarkably larger (think of Stravinsky’s account of his earliest
exposure to Russian folk music, and to the sound of winter ice cracking with the onset of

Spring). More: as such a seed presaging specifically shamanic improvisation in sound, the

pure phenomenologic of it is even purer gold.

Namtchylak recalls family musicking in her childhood:

My parents both liked very much at youth time to play on music instruments, father

on seven-string guitar and mother on mandolin (Russian kind of 4 strings, usually

dabbled, banjo). Father had nice, soft baritone voice and often presented his song with

amateur groups at the concerts in Tuva...(Namtchylak, 2004)

One from the more traditionally nomadic generation of her family was the primal

source of the Tuvan side of her Russian-Tuvan world, including the now widely known (in

the West) technique of “throat singing,” or khöömei,3 “something that was generally reserved

for the males; in fact, females were actively discouraged from learning it (even now, the best-

known practitioners remain male, artists like Huun-Huur-Tu and Yat-Kha). However, she

learned much of her traditional repertoire from her grandmother” (Sainkho Namtchylak,

2015)

Her professional career took off in earnest in 1986. Most of her 20s before that was

spent as a music student in a few different schools, first the University of Kyzyl (Tuva’s

capital city), then the Ippolitov-Ivanov School of Music followed by the Gnesins Institute,

both in Moscow. Her training and work throughout was a mix of scholarship and vocal

3 “Khöömei is a form of singing originating in western Mongolia, in the Altai mountains. The
performer imitates sounds of nature, simultaneously emitting two distinct vocal sounds: along with a
continuous drone, the singer produces a melody of harmonics. Khöömei literally means pharynx, and
it is believed to have been learned from birds, whose spirits are central to shamanic
practices” (Mongolian National Commission for UNESCO, 2009). See also a close study of these
styles by Levin and Edgerton, who describe Tuva as “a musical Olduvai Gorge—a living record of a
protomusical world, where natural and human-made sounds blend” (1999, p. 80).
performance, of ethnic folk and Western art music, peppered with some tastes of “the

enemy’s music” (pirated underground BBC broadcasts of Western rock groups such as Led

Zeppelin and Pink Floyd).

At that time my big interest was about discovering recordings and books or

dissertations about different techniques of singing in archaic examples of cult music

of lamaistic and shamanistic traditions of Siberia. As well as Tuvan and Mongolian

throat- and overtone-singing styles. (Namtchylak, 2004)

I remember when I saw Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" for the first time, I

had a feeling like all space was broken up into geometric shapes—pyramids and

triangles, just like Kandinsky's paintings…and it all suddenly began to open up. Just

like if I was inside this painting…

I was in the folk-song department, a Russian folk song at that. I, who came from a

remote province, was accepted as an exception, because they were surprised by the

range and flexibility of my voice…It was terribly interesting to me to study and

learn...I was expected to start research work. They wanted to keep me at the institute

as an instructor. (Antufieva, 2011)

The abovementioned range and flexibility grew in the fertile soil of Tuva’s Tungus

style of singing that imitates birds at the extreme high and the Tibetan lama chant style at the
very lowest extreme.4 However, such traditions were suppressed by the Soviet state, and the

young student’s path to their post-1989 flowering in her own music of necessity started

through that state’s cultural apparatus and aesthetic contexts.5

Her career as a teacher was deflected when her exceptional voice propelled her to the

first of two performance opportunities she names as her transition from the Russian national

to the global stage. In 1986, she entered a competition of folk singers staged in the Russian

city of Krasnodar. She describes its “impressively large geography and forgotten mystery of

syncretism of old songs from minorities and other nations of Siberia: nganasan, itelmen,

korjack, nivch, nanai, buriat, tuvan and Russian traditions” (Namtchylak, 2004).

In artist jargon this was called "cabbage"—kind of a mixed pickle show: horse riders

and drummers from the Caucasus, artists from Chukotka, from Krasnoyarsk ensemble

of song and dance, from Piatnickiy's choir, Bashkir kurai players, and me... I danced

and sang at the same time, and I did throat-singing—sounds imitating bird song...I

4 “In Tuva numerous cultural influences collide: the Turkic roots it shares with Mongolia, Xinjiang
Uighur and the Central Asian states; various Siberian nomadic ethnic groups, principally those of the
Tungus-Manchu group; Russian Old Believers; migrant and resettled populations from the Ukraine,
Tatarstan and other minority groups west of the Urals. All of these, to extents, impact on Sainkho's
voice, although the Siberian influences dominate” (Sainkho Namtchylak, 2015). On shamanism there:
“A shaman is a part-time religious practitioner who acts as a medium between the human and spirit
world. A shaman is believed to have the power to communicate with supernatural forces to intercede
on the behalf of individuals or groups. The term ‘shaman,’ as defined in Schultz and Lavenda (2009,
p. 211), ‘comes from the Tungus of eastern Siberia, where it refers to a religious specialist who has
the ability to enter a trance through which he or she is believed to enter into direct contact with
spiritual beings and guardian spirits for the purposes of healing, fertility, protection, and aggression, in
a ritual setting’ Shamans are generally thought of as healers, and yet they may also be feared or
mistrusted by their own people because of their supernatural capabilities. Although having the power
to converse with spirits may make them subject to suspicion, shamans are usually considered to be
powerful, influential and valuable members of their society” (Cultural Anthropology/Ritual and
Religion, 2015).
5 See Bulgakova (2013, pp. 193-96) on that suppression.
 sang Russian, and Northern, a two-minute Tuvan song, Nanai song, a Saami song that

is a nationality that lives in Russia on Kola peninsula... I received the second prize

and a special Irma Jaunzem prize; she was a National artist of RSFSR [Russian Soviet

Federative Socialist Republic] who collected and performed songs of all the nations

of the world (Antufieva, 2011)

That success led to a world tour of Soviet Union artists that took her to Spain, North

America, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. The sound of her part in it was still

well within the aesthetic context of an ethnic-minority folk presented as a patch in the Russo-

Soviet quilt, but the tour also coincided with the last two years of that empire.6

It was in this time that she became Sainkho Namtchylak. The name change—itself an

improvisation, of identity—was a standard show-business ploy, most obviously, but it

reflected a deeper concern then as well: to make a personal break from the local-traditional

culture that disapproved of women singing khöömei, at least publicly.

A woman of that name used to live in Kyzyl - Sainkho Darzhayevna Dorzhu. She was

a dancer, and later, after she retired, she worked in the Union of Theatre artists.

Charming, kind, woman. I liked both her and the combination of the sounds of her

rare name. And when it became necessary to have a mysterious, exotic-sounding

name which would reflect what I was doing on the stage, that is what I chose.

As a matter of fact, name changing is a traditional Tuvan custom. If a child is sick, or

there is some other danger menacing the child, the parents would put their son or

6 The CD Out of Tuva’s (Cramworld CRAW 6, 1993) liner notes and some tracks give a sense of this
sound and context. When it came out, Namtchylak had already moved well beyond the time of its
earliest tracks (1986) into her new work with the Russian group TRI-O for the Leo label. “I used to
sing folk songs. Actually, I was the lead singer for Sayani, the Tuvan State Folk Ensemble. But I got
bored with it. Improvised music is a lot more challenging.”
daughter with another family, with a different name, to protect the child from disaster,

so that evil spirits would not find it. So in the same way I took my artistic name and

put it in the passport: now they definitely won't find me…

Many things were prohibited to women - all over the world, as well as in Tuva. And

they fought for their rights for a very long time - including in the arts. So, should we

renounce all these rights today, because "traditionally it is not possible"?

Speaking of development and preservation of traditions, we have to remember that

female version of throat-singing in Tuva has always existed, it simply was not public.

Earlier, there were many more female khöömei performers than we think. Now our

scientists are interested in it, and I think that they will have their say.

Today, women all over the world learn and perform Tuvan khöömei: Germans,

Americans. And we ourselves should prohibit it? We have to stop this cannibalism,

we have to say: yes, there was women's khöömei. And we have to keep it and develop

new forms.

But I have this kind of an estrada variant, close to an authored song, because I already

use elements of contemporary music. I change from one register to another, now I

sing in a very delicate, glittering voice, then suddenly low and thrumming, and now

again in the middle register.

I work in the field of sound research, invention of new forms, and I improvise a

tremendous lot. I am an avant-garde singer. (Antufieva, 2011)

If you want to hear sygyt (a style of Tuvinian throat singing), you won't ... When a

man sings he compresses his lungs, which demands great physical force; and I noticed

that women who try to learn to sing in a man's way, lose their own voice. So I decided
 not to do this, but to create something that sounds like Tuvinian throat singing, but

keeps my voice intact.7

Having thus broken out to the wider world, she saw the latter break in to her own part

of it at Abakan, Russia, in 1989, “the first festival in our country where I performed as an

improviser” (Antufieva, 2011). The opening caused by the fallen Iron Curtain brought in

music business people and other artists from throughout the world. After meeting Austrian

bass clarinetist Georg Graf during a gig there, Namtchylak married him and moved to Vienna

in 1990, where she’s been based off and on ever since (though also as much a nomad as an

artist on the road as her grandparents were in the steppes).

Some letters she wrote to her father, made public as liner notes with the (Leo Records,

1993) CD Letters she dedicated to him, include telling glimpses into her self-preparations and

visions for her journey as it was beginning. These included immersions as listener in the

music of Russia’s Ganelin Trio, known for its seamless and exciting meld of jazz, folk, and

art music practices/aesthetics; and “the music of the '60s, free jazz of the '70s, John Coltrane,

early recordings of Cecil Taylor. I listened to vocal recordings of the '70s and '80s,

experimental vocal recordings of Dimitry Stratus from Greece, Diamanda Galas, Meredith

Monk, Laurie Anderson, and also folk music and world music. I listened to songs of Eskimo

people from Alaska, African pygmies, choral music from Bulgaria and Corsica, and also

songs from Sardinia. But at the same time I listened to the classical music of the Far East,

7 See Czaplicka (2012) for more on women and shamanism.

classic Chinese operas, Korean and Japanese music, Noh theatre, kabuki and gagaku

music...” 8

This heady brew informed her own hands-on research in her performances, starting

with another Russian trio, Tri-O, which launched her long and prolific tenure as one of

(Russian-born, London-based, Leo Feigin’s) Leo Records’ most illustrious recording artists.

Her recorded collaborations with peers on that roster and others include Wadada Leo Smith,

George Lewis, the late Peter Kowald, Günter Sommer, Evan Parker, Ned Rothenberg, Hamid

Drake, Joëlle Léandre, and William Parker, to name just some of the better known in just the

Anglophonic West (outnumbered by Eurasian-label releases by more than half).

While all of her performances exude the elements of her Tuvan-traditional

vocabulary, the Russian and Western contexts of avant-gardism and experimentalism both

musical and political, and in both liner notes and reviews, have inevitably framed them

mostly in the aesthetics and rhetoric of the cosmopolitan radical cutting edge, focusing on

phenomenological accounts of them as sonic exotica: the female voice as one among the

other (mostly Western) instruments, extended technically and aesthetically like them to fly

beyond their conventional sounds and roles into whatever new ones they’re capable of

making.

Some of her own more authored initiatives—concept CDs associating such sounds via

titles, liner notes, and lyrics with shamanic (The First Take [FMP, 1994], Cyberia [Ponderous

Music and Art, 2010]), Buddhist (Stepmother City [Ponderosa, 2001), In Trance [Leo

Records, 2008]), and nature and Tuvan (Lost Rivers [FMP, 1991], Tuva-Irish [Leo Records,

8 See Cooper (2006) for a conversation touching on issues pertinent here: “Meredith Monk joins
essayist and novelist Pico Iyer for a talk moderated by Asia Society's Rachel Cooper. Topics include
the promise and pitfalls of a trans-national culture, Monk's experience performing in Sri Lanka, and
their respective processes.”
2007], Naked Spirit [Amiata Records, 1998]) themes—clearly present them as flowers of her

deeper local and ethnic roots, not sounds divorced from them to serve another culture’s

conversation.

She describes the East-West Janus face of her oeuvre’s single bloom so: “[I]t was easy

for me to be a bridge between what is called traditional music and the new improvised music,

which already had the same openness. Our traditional music is not of a fixed form that one

must adhere to without changing... It is living, it lives with and in us, and it requires all from

us to determine how we can apply it to the situations of our present...The shamanistic culture

has this art of being in the here and now” (in Kowald, 1998, my translation).

I think that I am a necessary connecting link in the chain of cultural continuity between the

past and future, between the people of the East and the West. Like an antenna, tuned to a

certain frequency, I perceive ideas in the form of images and thoughts and I believe in their

realization. The basis of these ideas is the community of people, their historic continuity,

expressed in music, in my singing...(in Letters liner notes,1993)... for me these sounds

personify the sounds of nature and of the universe, which we do not have the possibility to

perceive. As monks say, our consciousness has not awakened enough to encompass and

reorganize these inaudible sounds imperceptible to most, sounds of subtle worlds and distant

galaxies. (in Antufieva, my emphasis)

Lara Pellegrinelli rightly makes several points in her contribution to Big Ears:

Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (2008), “Separated at 'Birth': Singing and the History of

Jazz”: the voice-as-instrument was indeed generative to that music, was more a woman’s than

a man’s terrain, and was shunted aside unduly by historians and scholars of the music for

sexist and classist reasons. Her essay’s project was to correct jazz historiography for that, and
de-marginalize/re-centralize woman’s voice in the way we hear and think about the music,

both historically and moving forward.

Kara A. Attrep (2008) also makes a good point in her review of this book when she

writes that “there is a need for gender studies scholarship in jazz outside of North America

and Europe—particularly in western and southern Africa, Central and South America, Asia,

and transnational considerations of jazz...”.

It seems unlikely that Pellegrinelli would have had Namtchylak in mind as an

example of the kind of jazz vocalist she was discussing—but I will appropriate her point for

my thesis anyway, with the support of these words from the singer:

I like to listen to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. I would like to

sing like them, but I sing the way I can, the way it is coming to me, the way I feel.

And I know I am getting better and better with all those African and Latin-rooted

rhythms. It is like my throat singing is natural stone and the rhythm of jazz is

sculpturing this ancient sound. At the end every improvisation is like craftwork.

(Broomer, 2010)

I want to argue that Sainkho Namchylak is doing for the field of creative music and

the female voice what, for example, Louis Armstrong did for early jazz and the trumpet:

establishing her instrument as a central generative channel of such music, in from whatever

margins Western art music, jazz and other male-dominated traditions she herself has trained

in have consigned it to. I want to ground that preeminence of hers in the ancient one of

women in Central Asian shamanism.

I see Sainkho Namtchylak as “first among the sisters” who are staking out an area

only they can (the female voice) who are thereby also staking out the wider area of the human

voice that men too could be taking on, but who don’t seem to be doing as much as the
women, and as much as they are taking on all the “artifactual” instruments (and making new

ones of their own). As Louis Armstrong might be dubbed “first among the brothers” who

established American jazz on the national and global stages as a preeminently African-

American music, I consider Namtchylak and the other women here as a sisterhood in the field

of global creative music that is leading its charge and staking it out as a woman’s world

(albeit one with plenty of room for men to live in), and an Asian world (again, open to all).

!
References

!
Attrep, Kara A. Review of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Nichole T. Rustin

and Sherrie Tucker, eds.; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Critical Studies in

Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 4, No 2, 2008.

Antufieva, N. (trans. Heda Jindrak). (June 9, 2011). Not like everybody else. The New

Research of Tuva. Retrieved from http://en.tuva.asia/135-namchylak1.html.

Broomer, S. (2010). Terra (Leo Records, CD LR 590, liner notes).

Bulgakova, Tatiana. Nanai Shamanic Culture in Indigenous Discourse. Fürstenberg/Havel:

Verlag der Kulturstiftung Sibirien, 2013.

Cooper, Rachel, moderator. “In Conversation: Meredith Monk and Pico Iyer,” 2006.

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http://asiasociety.org/video/conversation-meredith-monk-and-pico-iyer

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from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cultural_Anthropology/Ritual_and_Religion

Czaplicka, M. A. Shamanism in Siberia. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, May

15, 2012.
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American (pp. 80-87). Retrieved from www.sciam.com.

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Khöömei” (video), 2009. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV8EJOvvPvY

Namtchylak, S. (1993). Letters. Retrieved from www.avantart.com/music/sainkho/

letters.html.

____________. (2004). Sainkho Namtchylak. Retrieved from http://www.ponderosa.it/

downloads/0000/0134/SAINKHO_NAMTCHYLAK_BIO_ENG.pdf.

Pellegrinelli, Lara. “Separated at 'Birth': Singing and the History of Jazz.” In Big Ears:

Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

“Sainkho Namtchylak.” In Wikipedia, 2015. Retrieved 8/18/2015 from https://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainkho_Namtchylak

“Sainkho Namtchylak, Singer from Tuva,” (n.d.). Retrieved 8/18/2015 from

www.avantart.com/music/sainkho/sainkho.html

Schultz, Emily A. and Robert H. Lavenda. Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the

Human Condition. 7th Edition. NY: Oxford University Press, 2009.