TIme for some new music off the brow-beaten tracks. I'd been on a short but potent kick of Yulduz Usmanova, Nasiba Abdullaye, Sevda Alekperzadeh, Sevara Nazarkhan, Ağadadaş Ağayev, Azeri Kizi Günel, Ilqar Muradov, Mokhira, Yaqoub Zoroofchi & Co. In short, Azerbaijani or Uzbeq singers in the Ethno Pop vein, with more organic emphasis on folk or Jazz elements than electrified disco. I needed stuff for the exercise bike and would hopefully also chance upon a few more 'serious' tracks. How to find more of this stuff? I trained my goggles on Google, for Azerbaijani singers and wider variations on that query. Voilà, quite a list of names and mugs. I already knew of Röya Ayxan but not Aygün Kazimova, Elnar Hüseynov, Aysel Teymurzadeh and a host of others. My fingers were itching. Time to tickle the black 'n' whites on my rapoo keyboard.


I hit up my Tidal Desktop subscription to see what I could scare up. A number of entries came up empty, others hit pay dirt, in some instances simply requiring slightly changed spelling. Eventually I chanced upon three compilations called a bit deceptively just "Various Artists, Estrada 2. Vol. 1 through 3" but curated with exactly the type mix of more organic and techno/Rap I had in mind, i.e. far from classical mugham à la Alim Qasimov. I migrated to the Tidal store, found the three critters by searching for particular singers. Now I started downloading to my Win 7/64 machine because Tidal's download server doesn't like Safari on my iMac. Despite our lazy rural Internet connexion*, I bit the slow bullet and FLAC'd it like any proper audiophile would. I'd later convert it all to AIFF for integration on my iMac's iTunes library.


After the first track had downloaded and gotten dragged to a new desktop folder named Azerbaijani Estrada 2 Vol. 1 for my preferred sorting in iTunes—I group musicians by country—I noticed that it didn't identify the singer by name. It indiscriminately labeled her 'various artists'. Hola! I'd never find anything else by her or searching my portables by name if I didn't know just who I was listening to other than 'various'. Time to right-click all the tracks and rename them. Keeping a big library organized is important if you mean to find stuff well after the initial familiarity.


Whilst Tidal's track listing gave first names, it mostly didn't give out last ones as you see at left, at best a single letter. Hitting up Google netted a few iron-clad confirmations including artist websites which left no doubt that I had the right one. Others would have to remain on a first-name basis. Sure, all the chasers of Roon trust happily in their cloud but I prefer to own the music I love, on my own FusionDrive, multiple backups and my portables. Call me old-fashioned but undying faith into the big cloud in the sky isn't part of my psych profile. Call it Teutonic control freakiness. And that's how some of us nutters choose to spend a fine Sunday afternoon. Hey, it was raining...
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* For those living similarly 'outback' wondering whether their crappy connection supports a full-resolution Tidal/Qobuz-type subscription, go here. 5Mbps is sufficient. Ask me how I know. Of course if you want to download stuff rather than stream, it could take nearly as long as actually listening to it. That might be the price to pay for living too rural...



In case you were wondering how many 'serious' tracks this catch of the day netted for me, it was better than that. I learnt that I really enjoyed Aygün Kazimova, a chap called just Elnar who might be Hüseynov or not; Abbas Bagirov; and Xatira. Four artists whom I never knew of until now? To me that was proper payback for a day's 'work'. With a quartet of suspects pinned to my action wall, it set the course for some follow-up hard sleuthing soon. Sometimes it's not even a matter of perfect tracks which put the game afoot. It can be discovering a voice or style of delivery that rubs just the right way. Then the hunt is on for more of the same, with tracks even more to one's liking. For one I thought a straight 100, a perfect glossy Pop ballad with surprise shepherd's flute doing parallel tracking of the melody with gyrating acrobatics and a very slick key change, check out "Gunahkar" by Elnar on Vol.2. Wowie. Pay dirt for proper Ethno Pop from Baku or Samarkand...