Ton's Musical Musings: Chance meeting at Womex

Womex isn't just a tradefair with showcases, it's also a meeting point for people from all over the globe who are involved with world music. And it's not just booking agents, festival programmers and label owners attending the fair, but also quite a few artists. If you're lucky, you can run into a musician you've been eager to meet for many years.

This year I had the great fortune to talk to a singer whom I've admired ever since I heard Aloukie, her first international release, in 2002. Zulya Kamalova hails from the former Soviet Union but has been living in Australia for many years now. Her work is firmly rooted in the tradition of her ancestors, the legendary Tatars.

Despite its rather corny cover art - depicting Zulya in folkloristic dress - the album turned out nothing short of a revelation: meticulously crafted songs, gorgeously arranged, that bear little resemblance to most traditional music coming from former Soviet territories. Her "small" yet delicate voice gives the songs a wonderful feeling of intimacy. After singing exclusively in her two native tongues – Tatar and Russian – for years, with her fourth and latest album she added English to her vocabulary.

I was wondering what caused the change of instrumentation between her first two albums (that were made with various studio musicians) and the latter, which she recorded with her own quartet, named The Children of the Underground. "At first I was mainly looking for variations in texture, to give each separate song a different flavor. But then I became more interested in improvisation, and to be able to do that well, you need a band that has rehearsed the material and knows it through and through."

More information on Zulya can be found on www.zulya.com