KONGAR-OL ONDAR

Tuvan Throat Singer

Kongar-ol Ondar_2

Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar has died. Saw him several times after Jim Ed Norman signed him to Warner Nashville and co-produced his Back Tuva Future album for the label in 1999. The album featured true “country crossover” titles like “Tuva Groove” and “Little Yurt on the Prairie,” and guest artists including Willie Nelson, Randy Scruggs and Bill Miller.

I laughed out loud when I read The New York Times obit on Ondar—admittedly an inappropriate response.

But writer Margalit Fox’s description of Tuvan throat singing, the demanding Central Asian vocal art that Ondar excelled in and requires the singer to produce two or more notes simultaneously, was just too artful and funny.

“To the uninitiated,” wrote Fox, Tuvan throat singing “sounds like the bewitching, remarkably harmonious marriage of a vacuum cleaner and a bumblebee.” I’m not sure I would have said it quite that way, but I do wish I had her facility.

Fox further noted that the “small, round and beatific” Ondar, who died July 25 in the southern Siberian region of Tuva at age 51, was a superstar there, “like John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Michael Jordan kind of rolled into one,” she said, quoting from Genghis Blues, the Oscar-nominated 1999 documentary about throat singing.

But Ondar’s reach, Fox said, “extended far beyond the region,” with international performances including prestigious gigs at the Kennedy Center and … the Grand Ole Opry!

Yep, I was at that Opry gig, which must have been around Fan Fair or CMA time, 1999, and during the Back Tuva Future sessions. Ondar came out in full regalia, during Bill Anderson’s segment.

Bill had been briefed just moments before by David Hoffner, the longtime playing and songwriting partner of Michael Martin Murphey, who had become a top Nashville session musician. Like Jim Ed, he was a big fan of the brilliant and eccentric Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who was himself a fan of Tuva and Tuvan throat singing.

Kongar-ol OndarI was backstage when Hoffner explained everything to Bill, whom I met in a La Crosse, Wisconsin high school gym, shortly after I started writing about music in the mid-1970s. Even before then, I knew he was a genius from his songwriting. But how he managed to absorb Hoffner’s necessarily complicated explanation of Ondar and his music in a manner of seconds, then relate it in rich detail but simple English seconds later to a packed Opry house, even I don’t know.

As Hoffner recalled in an account on his website, Bill compared Ondar’s music to American country music. “He mentioned that the Tuvans sing about their sweethearts and their horses. Kongar-ol sings high like Bill Monroe, he plays a banjo like Grandpa Jones, and he wears flashy clothes like Porter Wagoner. He’s singing ‘country music from another country.’ By the time Kongar-ol stepped onto that sacred stage, the audience was primed and ready. He didn’t disappoint and received a tremendous ovation.”

I contacted Jim Ed, now at Curb Records as “chief creative advisor,” after Ondar died.

“We were doing a record with Bill and Steve Wariner, and Bill was incredibly gracious to do this incredible introduction for Ondar,” he said. “And here we had this guy from Tuva with an interesting story attached to him, and his dream of playing the Opry. An indigenous cowboy singer from Tuva!”

And I got to Whispering Bill as well.

“I was in a fog that night and had no idea what I should say, but I’m glad that history recalls that I didn’t make a fool out of him—or out of myself,” he said. “What a memorable occasion!”

Indeed, I remember many inspiring moments from years and years of going to the Opry, none more so than when Bill Anderson introduced Tuvan throat singer Kondar-ol Ondar to the Grand Ole Opry.

It was like they’d grown up together. Brothers from a much different mother.

Jim Bessman

 

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