ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
About a decade ago, music producer Vik Sohonie was in New York and stumbled upon an old record.
VIK SOHONIE: I came across this really dusty 45 by the band Original.
(SOUNDBITE OF ORIGINAL SONG, "SEN QAIDAN BILASAN")
FLORIDO: Original was from Uzbekistan, and this track had been recorded in 1981 in the capital, Tashkent.
SOHONIE: And I remember hearing it and thinking, OK, one day I'm going to do something with this, but I never had an in. I never had an in to that part of the world until Anvar contacted me.
ANVAR KALANDAROV: OK, let's go. My name is Anvar Kalandarov. I'm from Tashkent. I'm a vinyl collector.
FLORIDO: Calling Kalandarok a vinyl collector might be an understatement. He's like a bloodhound for rare Central Asian music. He showed Sohonie what he had, and they began to build a collection of rare Uzbek pop music from this same period, the late '70s and early '80s.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SEN QAIDAN BILASAN")
ORIGINAL: (Singing in Uzbek).
FLORIDO: Finally, in 2023, they met up in Tashkent. The plan - track down the artists and reissue the music on Sohonie's record label.
KALANDAROV: After we meet, in two week, I found all the contacts we needed.
FLORIDO: But it wasn't just Uzbek artists. It was Tajiks and Crimean Tatars and Uyghurs, all of whom had recorded songs in Tashkent in this sliver of time when the city's music scene was thriving.
SOHONIE: Tashkent was long this sanctuary for musicians across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union.
FLORIDO: As they prepared the album, Sohonie and Kalandarov began to unearth a surprising history behind that musical sanctuary, including wartime displacement and a disco mafia. Today, for our weekly segment of short-form audio documentaries, we have a slice of that story. We begin in the summer of 1941, as Soviet authorities evacuated millions of people from Eastern Europe after the Nazi invasion.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: In a sudden coup, Germany's military might has been thrown against her former ally, Russia.
SOHONIE: One of the great untold stories of the Second World War was this evacuation. The vast majority were sent to Uzbekistan and its capital, Tashkent.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LEORA EISENBERG: Evacuation was huge for the development of music in Soviet Central Asia. My name is Leora Eisenberg. I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Harvard, where I study the development of Soviet Central Asian music.
The entire body of places like the Leningrad Conservatory was, in its entirety, evacuated to Tashkent, which obviously had a huge impact on the development of music, and this creates, obviously, an incredibly diverse area.
SOHONIE: On those trains were also engineers who could produce vinyl manufacturing plants. And at the end of the war, they set up one of the key vinyl manufacturing plants just outside of Tashkent. And this, by the 1980s, was pumping out around 200 million vinyl records just within the Soviet Union.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
EISENBERG: With the death of Stalin, we see Nikita Khrushchev come to power, and Nikita Khrushchev ushers in this time period called the Thaw.
SOHONIE: There was kind of a movement in the Soviet Union to liberalize the arts, in a sense.
EISENBERG: This was maybe the first time that music didn't have to be overtly ideological. That was the period when Western styles were flowing into the country, and it suddenly became legal to make music in them.
SOHONIE: Jazz clubs being born, rock clubs from the 1950s and '60s that would open - eventually, it transformed into disco clubs. But the propaganda, you know, and communication departments, you know, mandated that before the - you know, the needle dropped on vinyl or the party started, there had to be an hour lecture on, you know, Soviet philosophy and Soviet doctrine, just to ensure that there wasn't too much deviation.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) Hey, hey.
ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH POPOV: (Through interpreter) My name is Aleksandr Nikolaevich Popov (ph). In 1975, I created the first discotheque in Tashkent. We had the thematic and ideological portion of the night, then we would start the dancing. We had the most powerful sound and lighting equipment. Each night had its own color. We took an old organ apart and removed the electronics, and we connected the keys to play special lighting effects that we projected onto a screen.
SOHONIE: Within these disco clubs, you started having the sale of imported cigarettes, imported alcohol, imported Western clothing. And there emerged this kind of disco mafia, which said, this is an extremely lucrative business, and, you know, this is not small money. So the disco mafia emerged, and they began controlling all these revenue streams. So you had the first inklings of free enterprise that the Soviet Union worked hard to ensure its music industry did not have.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
POPOV: (Through interpreter) When we started in the '70s, we were only playing Western music.
Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
POPOV: (Through interpreter) But two years later, the authorities began requiring us to play 70% Soviet music and only 30% foreign music.
(SOUNDBITE OF GULSHAN FEATURING MAKHFIRAT KHAMRAKULOVA SONG, "REZABORON")
SOHONIE: There was not only a call from the very top to say, you know, you have to promote Soviet artists. It was Soviet youth themselves and DJs themselves that said, hey, why are we only playing Western music at our clubs? We have an abundance of artists - you know, Uzbek dance music, Crimean music influenced by American jazz or American funk. If you were from, let's say, Tajikistan next door, you had more of those influences in your music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REZABORON")
GULSHAN AND MAKHFIRAT KHAMRAKULOVA: (Singing in non-English language).
MAKHFIRAT KHAMRAKULOVA: Oh, yes. Just remembering. (Singing in non-English language).
My name is Makhfirat Khamrakulova. I am from Tajikistan. That was 1978, and one day, the director from Uzbek record company - he invite me to Uzbekistan studio.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REZABORON")
GULSHAN AND KHAMRAKULOVA: (Singing in non-English language).
KHAMRAKULOVA: That was a beautiful time. Tashkent was a very beautiful town. Uzbekistan accept me. Uzbekistan gave me a power, you know? We know all singers from Gergasia (ph), Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Like, exchange between cultures, you know? Sometimes I just don't even believe myself what I have this life, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REZABORON")
GULSHAN AND KHAMRAKULOVA: (Singing in non-English language).
SOHONIE: So in the early '90s, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the record plant in Tashkent - in fact, all the record plants across the Soviet Union shut down. And with the collapse of these record plants, there's the demise of the music industry. All the money dries up. So, you know, preserving vinyl is not at the forefront of many people's priorities, right? Some of it sat at the plant until they actually destroyed the plant. Whatever the dead stock was, it went into people's personal collections, into private archives. But we were very fortunate, because of Anvar's very enterprising digging work, that he was able to find a great deal of the original records.
KALANDAROV: This is golden era of our disco history (laughter), but now it's very rare. It's music you never heard before. Listeners can learn a lot new thing from a part of the world they probably didn't know anything about. It's an absolute bomb. You take it to a party and dance till you drop (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOLA")
TOHIR SODIQOV: (Singing in non-English language).
FLORIDO: This collection of music from Soviet Central Asia called "Synthesizing the Silk Roads" is out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOLA")
SODIQOV: (Singing in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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