Ari Babakhanov's grandfather was the court musician for the last emir of Bukhara, whose Persian principality died with the advance of the Soviet Union and the formation of Uzbekistan.
The centuries-old classical music - Islamic music that was usually performed by Jews - almost disappeared, too. The new Soviet rulers didn't like the idea of individual effort - including singing alone. People were meant to sing collectively, in chorus.
Quietly, Babakhanov and others preserved the music, singing it alone at home, paying homage to the Bukhara of memory, the great city that was once a glorious stop on the Silk Road.
Now, the Smithsonian Institution is taking the legacy of people like Babakhanov, cities such as Bukhara and the great cultures of the Silk Road and introducing them to Americans by devoting its 36th annual Folklife Festival to "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust."
The festival, expected to attract more than 1.2 million visitors, is being held on the National Mall in Washington from Wednesday through Sunday and July 3-7.
It will have an enormous scope - summoning forth the route that ran from China and Japan westward and on to Venice when that city was built - offering art, food, music, ideas from along the road, and people to explain it all.
Bukhara was perhaps the most Silk Road city on the Silk Road. It was Islamic and Jewish, an important center of Islamic religious life where Jewish artisans and musicians thrived. It was an oasis city, full of merchants trading spices and textiles. And there, Muslims and Jews together created a great musical tradition.
Last year, when a consultant for the Smithsonian festival visited him in Bukhara, Babakhanov described what the rest of the world should know about the city and its classical music, a repertoire called the Shash Maqam.
The name translates roughly into "six songs," but it is far more than that, says Babakhanov, a 68-year-old music teacher and Bukharan Jew.
"Inside of each one there are six others," Babakhanov says, "and in each of those there are six more. They are infinite. There's a singing part and an instrumental part."
The instruments include the ghijak, a fiddle with a round body, three or four strings and a fretless neck, and lute-like instruments called the dutar, the rubab and the tanbur.
The songs are poetic and full of emotion; they were performed to entertain the emir and his court, but musicians also played for themselves and private celebrations.
"It's so complicated not even a whole life is enough to learn it," says Babakhanov. "A musician must have a very good memory and a huge talent. It doesn't have an end. It goes up to the sky and finally down to the steppe."
That day in Bukhara, Babakhanov was sitting in a caravanserai, drinking hot tea to cool off. It was a reasonably cool day, at just below 100 degrees. The day before, the temperature had been 114.
The caravanserai was built as a motel for camel caravans. Small rooms for travelers circle a courtyard where the camels could sleep overnight. Today, the rooms house workshops for artists, and several young people who sell and make instruments there listen worshipfully as Babakhanov talks.
Emotion and history
Playing and singing the Shash Maqam, he says, puts the performer in the grip of emotion. "You are trembling when you finish," he says. "You feel as if ants are moving on your spine. It begins with a simple sound, but when you're finished, there's an entire monument."
The listener, sitting in the caravanserai, can almost feel the endless camel caravans bearing cloth and spices, the lost loves, the empires won and lost, the star-filled, lonely desert nights, all the images so powerfully summoned by the simple words Silk Road.
The music was considered the property of the Islamic rulers of Bukhara, but they employed Bukharan Jews to sing and play for them. Jews, who probably came from Persia, have lived in Bukhara for more than 2,000 years. The city celebrated 2,500 years of existence in 1997.
"The Muslims considered that to sing and learn music was not one of their duties," Babakhanov says. "For Jews, it is different. They can devote their whole life to music. And the emirs gave that duty to Bukharan Jews."
His grandfather, Levi, who lived from 1874 to 1926, was famous as the court musician of the last emir, Alim Khan. The emir's mother was said to have had 40 singers.
"You can't live without song," Babakhanov says.
But when the Russian Revolution came to Bukhara, Babakhanov says, the new authorities decided that the Shash Maqam was not the song of the people but of the emirs. It wasn't forbidden, but it was decidedly incorrect. It was not the music of the Russians, and it was not performed in public.
"We sang it for centuries in Persian," Babakhanov says. "To establish such music you need centuries. You can't create it by order. It's not arithmetic. It's light in the soul."
The emir fled the revolution; the capital was moved to Samarkand. Babakhanov's grandfather died there in 1926, apparently poisoned by the Russian secret police.
"Stalin gave an order to kill all people who worked for the emir," Babakhanov says. "The more the better."
Babakhanov's father, Moshe, became a singer, actor and musician, and his son inherited talent and tradition.
Preserving music
He has made it his mission to transcribe the Shash Maqam, incorporating the changes of the centuries. The work takes up about 400 pages, written on both sides.
He has tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Uzbek government, in Tashkent, to publish his work for posterity. It would cost $15,000, he says, and such a large sum has not been forthcoming. Babakhanov wants the world to know the music.
"In European music, each octave has 12 half-tones," he says, "but here, in the East, one octave has 17 half-tones. The notes are there like a skeleton, but the master needs to put the meat on it.
"It's impossible to write down all the details. Even if you write it down, others cannot understand it all. You see a note, but the teacher fills the note with sound."
Babakhanov was gladdened at the news that the Silk Road and its music would be part of a festival in America. Americans won't understand the words of the music, he said, sung as it is in Persian Tajik and Turkic Uzbek, but surely they will understand its meaning because they will feel it.
"It's a feeling given to you by God," he says.
Echoes of past
Outside of the caravanserai where Babakhanov was talking that day, Bukhara looked much like the 16th-century Silk Road city it once was.
Women walk along the streets in brightly colored ikat - a fabric in which the threads are dyed before weaving, resulting in lightning-like streaks of colors surging through the clothing.
In the second cupola of the market, next to the 16th century bath house, Mirfaiz Ubaidov sells spices as his forefathers did before him. His family has been selling there for 600 years.
Ubaidov offers saffron, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cumin, paprika, coriander, cinnamon, star anise, cloves - the spices of the Silk Road. Little has changed here, he says, except now the spice man has a Web site - www.bcc.com.uz/~spices.
That is appropriate, because one of the inspirations for this year's Smithsonian festival is the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who proposed devoting the festival to a single theme for the first time, the Silk Road. Ma calls the Silk Road "the Internet of antiquity," alluding to how it was used to exchange ideas as well as goods from as early as 200 B.C. to the 1500s, when the Portuguese developed sailing routes and took away the best business.
Ma, who was born in Paris to Chinese parents, had begun to explore music of the Silk Road in 1998, when he formed the Silk Road Project. He commissioned work from musicians in the region, put together a Silk Road Ensemble to perform the music, scheduled concerts from Tajikistan to Washington and lobbied the Smithsonian to adopt the theme for this year's festival.
Festivalgoers will find nearly 400 artists from 20 countries - silk weavers, clothing designers, storytellers, puppeteers, throat singers, cooks, dancers, potters and more.
The exhibits will occupy 25 acres on the Mall, stretching between Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument. Amid it all will be a representation of Samarkand, also a great Silk Road city.
Part of Samarkand's Registan will be represented, a complex of 17th-century mosques and religious schools decorated with brilliantly colored mosaics of lions and deer and tigers.
But don't forget Bukhara, advises Babakhanov, who sees the old world slowly disappearing. During the Soviet years, more than 10,000 Jews lived in Bukhara. Now, more of them are in Israel and Queens, New York, than in Bukhara. They are leaving their ancient home, fearing discrimination as Uzbekistan becomes more Uzbek. Babakhanov says fewer than 150 families are left.
One of his earliest childhood memories, he says, is of a woman taking him to visit a garden. He was vanquished by the beauty.
"I saw a simple garden with its fruits, its flowers, its greenery, and I felt Bukhara was in paradise," he says. "Since then, it has been paradise to me."
And he, too, is thinking of leaving it forever.
Relatives in Germany beckon, and Babakhanov thinks that after 2,000 years, perhaps there is no more future for Jews in Bukhara.