SHARQ TARONALARI Music Fest in Samarkand: Great Music & People, Too Many Babies & Police

I guess I’m a sucker for spectacle.  I’ve been known to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies (just leave out the smoke machines, please), and I’ve traveled around the world more than once with music and cultural events in mind and on the itinerary, if not exactly the destination per se.  That includes WOMAD’s and Womexes, and multiple SXSW’s, and music and cultural festivals in cities as diverse as Livingstone-Zambia, Pyongyang-North Korea, and Zanzibar.  

Sharq Taronalari is not the kind of music festival where you top up on your favorite intoxicant, then boogie till the sun comes up with music from all over the world.  No, this is more like music carefully curated from state-sponsored entities in Uzbekistan in coordination with state-sponsored agencies in foreign countries to provide representative selections from representative groups to showcase the world’s ethnic diversity, sort of an Olympics of world music, without the competitive edginess.
 
No, this is not WOMAD.  But then again, it’s not North Korea’s Arirang Mass Games, either, a carefully orchestrated propaganda spectacle that would rival or surpass the opening to the Beijing Olympics in showmanship, but still a carefully-staged propaganda event.  Still, here you are expected to sit down.  That’s one of the only problems really, not that kids threaten to turn the venue into their own private playground, but that the Soviet-era authorities seem overly concerned to try and stop it, acting as truant officers to control the miscreants, to the point of limiting access to the festival’s entry.