Paul Pena

"Late at night when he cannot sleep, he listens to the world on a shortwave radio. We see his fingers delicately touching the dial, rotating it just a little at a time, seeking stations hidden in the bandwidth.One night he hears strange, haunting music on Radio Moscow. He tracks it down. It is called khoomei, or 'throat singing,' and is practiced in the tiny republic of Tuva, which you can find on the map between Mongolia and Siberia. Tuvan throat singing, he learns, involves creating an eerie sound that combines different and distinct notes at the same time.

For years Paul Pena studies throat singing, just for the love of it. He translates the lyrics using two Braille dictionaries, one to get them from Tuvan to Russian, the other from Russian to English (we are not amazed to learn there are no Tuvan-English dictionaries in Braille). He becomes possibly the only throat singer not born in Tuva, all this time without ever meeting anyone else who knows what he is doing.

Now it is 1993. A touring group from Tuva performs in San Francisco. He visits them backstage and sings their songs--in their style, in their language. They are thunderstruck. In 1995, Pena is invited to Tuva for the annual khoomei competition. He is accompanied by the sound engineer Lemon DeGeorge ("I am basically a tree trimmer"), San Francisco disc jockey Mario Casetta, and Roko and Adrian Belic from Evanston, who are documentarians. They return with this film.

But so far we have touched only on the amazing facts of "Genghis Blues." If the film were only about Pena learning throat singing and going to Tuva, it would be a travelogue. It is about much more. About the way we communicate with music." - Roger Ebert on Genghis Blues (1999)

Paul Pena is an ongoing and ever-surprising source of comfort for me. A long time ago, I think as a young teenager, I saw the movie that Roger Ebert is reviewing above -- Genghis Blues -- in which Pena is an amazingly talented musician beginning to enter a huge world that became deeply meaningful to him as he struggled with depression and physical illness. Pena was the original author of that Steve Miller hit "Jet Airliner," which is always on the radio. I think Pena's version was way better. I don't know. After that movie, which you can watch for free online here, Pena's album "New Train" (which you can listen to in its rambunctious, funky, moving entirety here) became something really soothing to me, even though it's bouncy and energetic. I just think it's a beautiful, feeling album. His voice is amazing. Here in self-isolation with my family, we've started something we're calling "Cheer Hour," where we try together for an hour to do something kind of fun and laughter-inducing. Mandatory fun is rarely fun, but so far this hour has been a spirit lifter. Last night we put on "New Train" and drew bad portraits of each other.

If you know this movie or this album, please let me know, or let me know if you watch/listen and if you also enjoyed it!!