Perfect pitch

If you think I’m crazy about Tuvan throat-singing, just try this.

Out in San Francisco lived a blues singer named Paul Pena, a man who had worked with greats like B.B. King and Muddy Waters. He had recorded an album in the seventies that failed to get a release, but a song from which had become a hit for the Steve Miller Band. In the way of all things blues, he was blind, unlucky, sickly and prone to depression.

In the eighties, he gave up his music to look after his sick wife. He spent his sleepless nights listening to shortwave radio, picking up stations from all round the world. Late one night he tuned into Radio Moscow and heard something extraordinary, something that haunted him.

He spent nearly eight years trying to find out what he had heard. Finally he discovered just what it was he had chanced upon: khoomeii, throat-singing from the Tuva province of Russia. The technique is one of a number used by Tuvan singers, and involves forming the mouth into two chambers so that two tones are produced simultaneously; a bass hum and a keening harmonic whistle that modulates high above. He located a CD of the music, and set about studying it.

At the same time, he attempted to learn as much of the Tuvan language as possible, so that he could understand what was being sung about. In the absence of a Tuvan-English dictionary, this meant translating through a Tuvan-Russian dictionary, then through a Russian-English one. For this he used an obsolete ‘Opticon’ scanner that turned the characters on the page into sensations he could interpret, meaning that Paul was effectively translating across four languages and two dimensions.

Khoomeii is only ever taught in Tuva by contact with a master. There are no instruction manuals, no courses. The technique is still only partially understood by musicologists. Paul Pena, left alone after the death of his wife, with a single recording for reference, taught himself.

In 1993 some Tuvan singers pitched up in San Francisco for the first time. Paul was ready, waiting backstage after the concert. He met Kongar-ol Ondar, a champion khoomei-singer, and gave him an impromptu performance of some Tuvan folk songs, in Tuvan.

Pena and Ondar became firm friends as a result of this extraordinary encounter, and Ondar invited him to take part in the next triennial throat-singing festival back in Tuva.

In 1995, Pena, nicknamed ‘Chershemjer’ (Earthquake) for his rumbling voice and quake-zone home, travelled out to compete in the week-long competition. He came back with two awards.

Since then, a certain recognition has followed. June 11th 1999 was ‘Paul Pena Day’ in San Francisco, and he has been made the city’s ‘Tuvan Blues Ambassador’. Even that lost 1973 album has finally been released. This being a bluesman, however, there is no happy ending. Pena is suffering from a very serious pancreatic illness, and is now forced to accept donations to pay his medical bills.

This story pushes so many of my buttons (as the marketeers would put it) that I can hardly believe that I hadn’t encountered it until now. As it is, I am now awaiting delivery of the album that Paul and Kongar-ol recorded together. Even better, it forms the soundtrack to a documentary recording Paul’s 1995 journey to Tuva and participation in the competition, ‘Genghis Blues’. You will not be surprised to hear that the documentary won a hatful of awards at film festivals, including the audience award at Sundance.

I am nervous of watching this film. I suspect that it can only break the perfection of the story, particularly its tremulous, precarious existence on the edge of my world. An acclaimed documentary is going to make it too real, too concrete, too particularised. As it stands there is a mythic quality to the story, a universality of human sentiment that exposure to a more faithful record of the events can only leave scratched and weatherworn.

I am nervous of watching this film, but I must watch it.

POSTSCRIPT: Paul Pena died on 1 October 2005.