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Movie Review: 'Genghis Blues' 'Genghis' can: Trip to Tuva finds strange and wondrous things Friday, March 03, 2000 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
Music is the universal language yet Tuvan throatsinging would seem to defy translation. There's simply nothing quite like it. By isolating overtones, its practitioners can produce three or more notes at the same time. One style sounds like a gutteral twang reverberating through your entire body. Another resembles the jaunty whistle of a teakettle amplified by prairie winds.
It could only come from the last place on Earth and, in fact, it does. Tuva is a Russian republic on the border with Outer Mongolia. This was the homeland of Genghis Khan, a place so obscure that it drew the interest of people like the late physicist Richard Feynman, who thought it would be a trip to visit a place with a capital city called Kyzyl.
The Oscar-nominated documentary "Genghis Blues," now at the Melwood Screening Room in Oakland, demonstrates that Tuva may not be as remote as we think, and that no part of the world has a monopoly on strange and wondrous things.
Paul Pena, a blind blues musician, has played with B.B. King and T-Bone Walker and wrote the Steve Miller hit "Jet Airliner." He lives in San Francisco, the son of immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands. He was dialing around on a shortwave radio one night and heard Tuvan throatsinging on Radio Moscow. He taught himself to sing it and learned some of the language by translating it through Braille into Russian and then into English.
When Tuvan throatsinger Kongar-ol Ondar played a concert in San Francisco in 1993, Pena astonished him by performing for him in the lobby. Ondar invited him to Tuva for the 1995 throatsinging competition.
This sounded "crazy enough to qualify for a Friends of Tuva project," decided Ralph Leighton, an associate of Feynman's who co-founded the organization, which funded Pena's trip. He was accompanied by a motley crew including an eccentric old disc jockey named Mario Cassetta, a soundman with the unlikely name of Lemon DeGeorge, and two first-time filmmakers named Roko and Adrian Belic, who would capture the journey for posterity.
Events both comical and nearly tragic occur. But the images you can't forget show the adulation of the Tuvans toward Pena, who was sometimes dazed by it all; Ondar's face, always smiling and laughing and celebrating his new friend from far away; our grand tour of Tuva, which appears to be a beautiful country that seems far from backward in many respects; and the ruminations of Paul Pena, a complex man and sensitive artist. He connects with the Tuvans in a way that eludes him in the United States, where he is isolated, vulnerable and virtually homebound.
What a long, strange and fascinating trip is "Genghis Blues."
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Rating: Not rated; contains brief shot of a sheep being slaughtered.