THE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOOLS OF GOD: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York).

By Theodore Levin. Indiana University Press. 318 pp. $35

If you are not familiar with the city of Tashkent, Levin will guide you through the crooked streets of the Muslim Old City, the broad avenues of the 19th-century Russian quarter ("planned with colonialist precision"), the featureless vistas of the Soviet zone ("creeping out like a fungus"), and finally "the new Uzbek Tashkent," where "the Uzbek nouveaux riches try to outdo one another" in grand houses that nonetheless have outdoor privies and, in a surrealistic touch, are modelled on "the mansions in the immensely popular Mexican soap opera, ‘The Rich Also Cry.’ "

After mapping the lay of the land (in Tashkent, Bukhara, Khorezm, and several mountain villages in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), Levin, a professor of music at Dartmouth College, introduces the musicians. One of the most memorable is Turgun Alimatov, a native of Tashkent steeped in the classical Islamic song cycle, Shash maqâm. Alimatov’s performance of a traditional melody on a long-necked lute called a tanbur is probably the most stunning track on the 74minute CD accompanying this book. Yet as Levin shows, this consummate musician was never part of his homeland’s cultural establishment—administered as it was, for most of Alimatov’s 70 years, by the Soviet authorities.

Levin does not caricature Soviet cultural policies but rather presents them as a complicated mixture of the preservationist and the assimilationist. The exception, of course, was religion: another musician, Ma’ruf Xâja, recalls being asked to perform "folk music" on the radio in 1937 with this proviso: "There couldn’t be any mention of God or the Prophet."

Yet Ma’ruf Xaja continued to play religious music, as did most of the Muslim and Jewish musicians Levin chronicles. And, in the post-Soviet era, so does a pop singer named Yulduz Usmanova. Her songs exhorting listeners "to love one’s parents, to love God" are resisted not by Stalinist commissars but (in her words) by "people who love rock music." One of Usmanova’s songs (featuring a solo by Turgun Alimatov) was a hit in Germany. Levin includes it on his CD, as if to admit that there is little point in searching for the unsullied wellsprings of this or any other ancient musical tradition. The best one can do is bathe in the living waters as they flow.

—Martha Bayles