Deep Throat

KARAKORUM, Mongolia - Bobby is my guide on this five day tour through Mongolia's outer aimags, but since neither my companions nor I are paying her any money for the privilege, we are careful not to make arcane requests. I have not demanded a chance to sample the local delicacy of boodog - lamb mutton roasted in the stomach of a deboned marmot - nor requested a retelling of the her parents' experiences during the Communist purges of the Khorloogiin Choibalsan (Stalin's neighborhood stooge). No, I've tried to avoid anything that might make Bobby reconsider her generosity and run back to Ulaanbaatar.

But I didn't even need to ask Bobby about my greatest Mongol desire: She brought the throat singer to me.

For the final night on the steppe, we drove several hours from Tserterleg to Karakorum, the old Khanate capital. The city is a major stop on Mongolia's minor league tourist circuit. In the summer, thousands of people pass through here to see where Genghis Khan's grandson issued decrees for subjects as far away as Romania. During peak season there are apparently sizable, if not Great Wall-level, crowds but on this blustery February afternoon, I could not see any other foreign faces as we drove through town to our destination: a tiny ger camp at the edge of a field.

Although the tourists are gone for the season, the infrastructure remains. We no sooner arrived than Bobby asked if we wanted to hear a local man perform traditional music in the evening. The cost would be just 4,000 tugrugs, or $3.50 a person. Even though I am generally leery of song-and-dance on the tourist trail, I feared declining might offend Bobby, the sole link to our monolingual Mongolian hosts. We agreed to the show. Bobby went off to contact the performer, but not before - perhaps she felt emboldened by how quickly we agreed - pointing in the direction of the camp's only building, a tiny wooden structure. Inside we found a wrinkled woman with beet-red, wind sheared cheeks, offering dozens of tchockes for sale.

Seconds later, Bobby appears without her usual smile. "The old man did not answer his phone," she said. "I guess he is not home."

Caleb, holding a camel figurine, whispered to me: "That means he's too drunk to leave the house. He's on a bender."

Bobby then left us to shop. We were standing in a one-room house the size of a small walk-in closet, crowding around a few sleeves of knick-knacks, wasting time before a dinner of mutton buuz and pickled vegetables. The Mongolians we encountered (continued to) confounded my western ideas of living spaces. Here the proprietors live and serve meals in a ger, keep guests in a second ger, and use the only permanent structure on their property as a gift shop. Considering the way the gelid winds pierced the cracks in the cabin's siding, my hosts are clearly not irrational, just adaptable.

With the concert apparently off the table, we four guests continued with preparations for our final evening on the road. Caleb fetched a bottle of cheap Russian vodka from his pack, I found bottles of Coke and Sprite for mixers and Myriam produced a pack of cards. But I no sooner dealt the first hands of hearts when Bobby burst into the ger with good news. The old man not only has been found, he is next door, waiting to perform. As a manner of introduction, she asks - in the most pro forma way possible - if we are still interested in a bit of music. When we nod, she sticks her head out of the canvas and gestures with her hand. A few seconds later, the evening's entertainment steps into the ger.

In walks someone who appeared to have several decades of hard-living under his belt. The "old man" - whose Mongolian name I immediately forget - sports a face that is covered not with wrinkles but full crevices, scores of lines that look more like heavily whipped meringue than skin, and eyelashes that bush in every direction except perpendicular to his eyes. Take away his garments, an olive green del with a bright orange cumberbun and a loovus, the traditional Mongolian hat that curves to a point like the onion domes of St. Basil's in Moscow, and the person he would most resemble in America is a Berkley hobo. I am surprised he can walk a straight line from the ger door to small bench, where he lays down his bundle of instruments and begins the show.

"Hello," he says, tentatively, and then launches into what is certainly a well-trodden tour through the Mongolian folk song canon. He sings a tune about doomed lovers, a ballad to the country's open spaces, and two songs about a horse. Between each tune he pauses to tell a bit of history behind the composition, at first speaking in Mongolian and having Bobby translate, but as the evening progresses switching to stuttering English, which is not hard to comprehend.

His act is vaudevillian and high-spirited, he works the claustrophobic ger and audience of five as if playing a large concert hall. He taps his feet with the beat, and flashes his decaying teeth filled smile during the pause between verses and choruses. Instruments are swapped out between nearly every song. He starts with a two-string fiddle known in Chinese as the erhu, which is played by rubbing a bow of horse hair across the instrument's long neck. The next piece is played on a small recorder-like flute, and then he switches to a bigger stringed, instrument, the morin khuur. It resembles a guitar with a square base. Like the erhu, it has just two strings, and is played like a bow. When played by the old man, the tones are long and deep, like the rumble of a commercial airliner high in the atmosphere.

The instruments and lyrics of these songs are secondary to the way they are sung. Bobby did not specifically say the Old Man was a throat singer, but it is clear from the first note that this man has mastered the technique. There is no mistaking the two tones filling the air.

When I first encountered throat singing - on Bjork's 2004 album Medulla - it was like discovering a new, secret part of the English language. It was as if before I was a songwriter composing with just E and F, and suddenly became aware of every other note. Suddenly there was just so much more to music. Now, hearing it performed live for the first time, those feelings of discovery are magnified by a factor of ten.

Throat singing, like everything else alien to Westerners, has now been throughly dissected by scientists and ethnographers. We know that the sound, technically known as overtone singing is produced by changing the shape of the resonant cavities in the mouth and throat. This allows people to produce two pitches at once, as the sound is bounced around in the vocal chambers.

But I don't care if throat singing is easily explained. No matter how hard I try, I can't make my throat make the high and low pitches that I normally associate with hearing tests and dishwasher cycles, yet here most men can do it with ease. I think there is something magical about the magnificently bizarre sight of an aging drunkard making these otherworldly sounds. He may look disheveled, but by the time he finished with a cover of The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" on the horse-head fiddle, it didn't matter. This was the concert of the year.