Sen

“I simply love working with a kaleidoscope of musical bits,” she says in her chatty, upbeat way. “That is my ocean to dive into. I choose lyrics very carefully. Uzbek poetry is intoxicating, emotionally-involving. It tends to lose its magic in translation; perhaps you have to be Uzbek to truly comprehend it. But the emotion and feeling are the same.” Oral poetry has particular significance in Uzbekistan. It is the language of both the natural and the spiritual worlds, heavy on metaphor and delightful to the ear. “A flower or a star might represent a lover. A love song may be a hymn to God. It has always been like this: I use excerpts from a 13th Century poem written by the great poet Saadiy (Debochadan), just as I do a poem by the 16-year-old boy who approached me on the Tashkent metro a few years back (Tushim).”

Sen was created with touring in mind. Onstage, Sevara is a whirl of joyous, co-ordinated movement; her love of live performance is as palpable as her spontaneous, child-like nature. The sort of seize-the-day spirit, in fact, that saw her persuade the famously uncompromising Victor Sologub – late of Soviet post punk outfit Strannye Igry— to come on board and produce. Sologub is now an avowed fan for life. “I love Victor’s mix of craziness and sincerity,” Sevara says. “We met when I watched him recording his album in St Petersburg. I loved his ideas and the way he worked. So I phoned him up and asked him to come to Tashkent to do some programming.”

Sen began as all great albums should: as a bunch of jams. Sevara’s compositions evolved courtesy of a tight-knit band playing everything from twanging tanbur lute and rhythmic doira frame drum to keyboards and bass-guitar. Convinced and intrigued, Sologub visited Sevara’s home studio in downtown Tashkent, in the city’s quieter, non-industrial green belt. “It was days of fierce fighting, lots of arguments and lots of learning for me,” she laughs. “We’d work on the songs. My band would play their lines. Then we’d lunch in a nearby Bukhara cafe while Victor would swim for an hour in the Soy, the canal that passes a few hundred metres from my home. Then we’d go back to work. There wasn’t much time for fun, though I suspect Victor spent more than a few late evenings in the local nightclubs.”

Everyone then decamped to Real World, where Sologub’s inspired electronic treatments were carefully remoulded by the equally visionary Bruno Ellingham. Where Sevara, determined to pour exactly the right emotion and power into each and every track, re-recorded all of her glorious vocals —including all the backing arrangements— until they did precisely that. “There were never any constraints on me with this album,” she says happily. “No one said ‘we want this’ or ‘we want that’. Everyone at Real World was very supportive— maybe a bit worried, too, I guess.” They needn’t have been. “That freedom helped me create an album that I am very, very proud of.”

Sen: a gorgeous, song-driven album, as melodious as it is danceable, as harmonious as it is edgy. An album that treads both traditional and contemporary paths. Which, for that matter, today’s Silk Road does anyway.

“Is Sen traditional or contemporary?” Sevara Nazarkhan gives a good-natured shrug. “That’s for other people to decide.”

“But either way,” she says, shaking out her long dark hair and flashing a dazzling smile. “Sen is who I am.”

Words by Jane Cornwell