Mention the banjo and Uzbekistan doesn’t immediately leap to mind.
It’s the most American of instruments, so the former Soviet republic doesn’t jump out as a natural bluegrass backdrop. It’s not inconceivable that you might be able to pick up a bootleg DVD of Deliverance at a market in the capital, Tashkent. But it’s highly possible that until seven years ago there were precisely zero banjo players in Uzbekistan. Today, on the other hand, there is, well…one. She’s a 28-year-old half-Korean, half-Russian wedding singer who started teaching herself the instrument in 2006.
This diminutive Uzbek has won a dedicated fan-base in the mostly male world of online banjo enthusiasts. (The Daisy Duke shorts may also have something to do with that.) But this is only the beginning of her ambitions. Her name is Janna Kim, and she would like to conquer America.
Slim pickings: Janna Kim might be the only banjo player in Uzbekistan
It is not easy to find an audience for banjo music in Uzbekistan, Kim tells me via email. Indeed, some people find the very sound of the instrument offensive. “I remember how, after my first banjo performance in Tashkent, there was a scandal. I performed some American music, and that concert was shut down immediately,” Kim says.
A video she posted online in 2012 of a “jazz” concert in Tashkent shows some of the confusion that results when she does play the instrument before an audience of locals, who sit through her polished performance looking bored and perplexed. It’s a typical reaction, says Kim: “Whenever I have tried to play for a big audience, I have seen such strange faces from the stage. You can’t imagine it. You’d have to be there! Our people don’t understand bluegrass music. They want to dance, and they don’t know how to dance with bluegrass, or what to do when they are listening to it.”
Kim’s banjo passion banjo began by chance, after she saw a “very dusty” banjo on the wall of a Tashkent music shop. She was immediately intrigued, so she bought it and brought it home.
Kim played guitar in a rock band and studied violin, but needed help. ”I wanted to find a teacher for myself in my city,” says Kim. “I went to musical schools, to colleges and even to the conservatory, but most people didn’t know even what a banjo was.”
Frustrated, Kim turned to the Internet, where she found a forum run by a banjo player named George Sobolev. Based out of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, Sobolev was the only man teaching banjo in Russian. He became her first teacher and sent her banjo picks through the mail.
Uzbek audiences remained resistant, so Kim stuck to performing rock and pop in bands, while making her living singing by Dolly Parton and Julio Iglesias covers at Uzbek weddings.
The online world had already been helpful, so Kim taught herself English and she started posting sound files in 2009 to BanjoHangout.org: “I needed to know if I was playing anything wrong. I needed the opinion of other musicians about my playing. I was amazed when I got so many kind and good comments. It made me believe.”
Paul Roberts, a professional musician who started his career as a banjo player on the Southern California folk scene in the early 1960s, was intrigued to see a player from Uzbekistan posting on the site. He was impressed by what he heard: “There’s a high level of musicality in her approach, which serves to raise the art-form. Besides traditional ways of playing, she can create arrangements of complex music such as Mason William’s ‘Classical Gas,’ which blew me away.” Long interested in bridging the music of the East and West (Roberts has played the sitar since 1967), he liked how Kim used the banjo her own way, applying it to rock, pop and Uzbek tunes, and also her own compositions.
Roberts interviewed her for his own site, BanjoCrazy, and Kim spoke with disarming frankness of her dream of performing in America, her love of the banjo, the sensations she felt when playing the strings, while making sure to send along plenty of tasteful glamour shots to accompany the words.
Janna Kim's banjo playing got her noticed online. The hot pants got her a calendar slot.
Roberts felt that the “stunningly beautiful” Kim had great potential. He also had an idea: “We’ve got to get her a good banjo.”
“I started a thread on BanjoHangout.com,” Roberts says, “and initiated a fundraising drive to which banjo players from around the world contributed.” Roberts admits that there was some “initial skepticism.” (One comment on the thread read: “If that was an ugly, fat dude, I wonder how many people would be on the bandwagon for a donation.”) But soon money came rolling in from Japan, U.S., Europe and Russia, and Roberts had enough cash to purchase Kim a decent banjo, in the $500 range. Then one of America’s greatest living banjo makers got involved.
Janna Kim is bringing banjo culture to Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, Uzbekistan doesn't want it.
Tom Nechville started making banjos in his garage in Nashville in the mid-1980s, slowly establishing a reputation as an innovative and skilled luthier before custom-building a banjo for Steve Martin and developing instruments for The Dixie Chicks and the revered Bela Fleck. Today, millions of people recognize the sound of a Nechville banjo, even if they have no idea who designed it.
Nechville was intrigued by the banjo player from Uzbekistan, and so he offered his top-of-the line $4,000 Athena model to Robert’s online campaign, even though he was “not normally Mr. Generosity.” So what caused his change of heart? Nechville tells me that he was impressed to see Kim helping the banjo outgrow its redneck stereotype. Kim’s story inspired him because of his belief that the banjo is, quite literally, an instrument of world peace: “I consider myself not only as a banjo builder, but a little like an international ambassador of music. A talent like Janna’s need to be encouraged, and the thousands of ears she opens to the sounds of the banjo will be ears more receptive to hearing messages of international peace and common good.”
Meanwhile, a Central Asian scholar aware of the online fundraising drive had contacted Jack Clift, a music producer from New Mexico with extensive experience working and recording in Uzbekistan. Clift was working on a project with John Carter Cash, the son of country music royalty Johnny Cash and June Carter, to fuse American country standards with Uzbek sounds. Clift was scheduled to do some recording in Tashkent, and agreed to present Kim with the banjo. Said Clift: “It was a very touching moment,” he says. “I had that feeling that I was involved in some process so much larger than myself.” So Kim had her banjo, and an elated Roberts had grand plans.
Writing on BanjoHangout.org, he declared that he had “envisioned international touring written all over this from the beginning. With a talent this dynamic, and the support she’s getting from the international community, it will surely come to pass.” He added, “Seems like we can go anywhere we want through our Internet-connectedness.”
Kim remained in Uzbekistan, where the locals were still hostile or indifferent to her music. Four years on, much of her time was still consumed by wedding and party gigs.
“I can’t play banjo as much as I really want, because my life is full of daily music work for a living here,” she says. “I must learn popular songs for work, and sometimes I feel very alone with my banjo, because I play it only for my banjo friends on the Internet who really appreciate it.” Still, she persisted.
Kim’s recording of “Mountain Stream,” a song written by Roberts, has so far racked up over 10,000 views: hardly “Gangnam Style” territory, but not bad for an isolated musician trapped inside a semi-closed country. This summer she traveled abroad for the first time, venturing to neighboring Kazakhstan where she hoped to find work performing in night clubs in the country’s biggest city, Almaty.
Unfortunately for Kim, Kazakhs were just as enthusiastic about the banjo as Uzbeks, “so I couldn’t find work there.” Her name is making its way overseas, regardless. Earlier this year, Erin English, a banjo player from California, invited Kim to participate in the inaugural “Banjo Babes” calendar she was organizing. English hoped that the calendar, which contains tasteful-but-cheesy photographs of female players, would raise awareness of this under-represented constituency in bluegrass circles.
Kim posed seductively with her Nechville banjo and is Miss April 2014. She also supplied a track for inclusion on the accompanying CD, her first official release in the United States.
This is, says Jack Clift, a logical progression for Kim, who he notes has displayed skills as a canny self-marketer from the beginning: “The first online material I saw, when Janna was raising funds to purchase her instrument, were clearly aimed at a Western male audience, and this has been a consistent element of focus in her promotional strategy. Now, with the ‘Banjo Babes’ calendar and such, I think it’s obvious that she has identified her niche market. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way.”
Kim’s strategy for cracking the U.S. market does not end there. Since 2012 she has been recording a CD with her producer boyfriend Alexander Kartoyev. She says it’s nearly finished, with only the mastering and cover requiring a few finishing touches. Her banjo playing features throughout, and Kim says it contains an eclectic mix of sounds.
“I wrote all the songs by myself, while Alexander made all the musical arrangements for my songs,” she says. “We decided to use all our previous experiences of music in it, so it includes rock, pop and banjo. We used banjo as spice in modern music, so I hope that people who still not familiar even with traditional banjo music will like it.”
Kim has also expanded her social media presence. She regularly posts updates and content to her own Facebook page, and is currently shooting a video for her first single. However as always, there are obstacles: “We’re still looking for someone who could help me to sell it in the USA. Because, unfortunately, all the international internet shops don’t work in my country.” (Uzbekistan is not served by PayPal.) She adds, with her usual frankness: “So if someone is interested in helping me sell my songs in America, please write me.” And the name of her CD? Why, Nothing Is Impossible, of course.
The post The Only Banjo Player in Uzbekistan appeared first on Vocativ.