Kazakhs

The small Kazakh enclave in Mazar was hospitable, allowing me to record and film their traditional musical styles. The musicians were weak, as they had either come to Afghanistan very young or were born there and grew up without direct contact with mainstream Kazakh music. The filmclip shows the playing style on the dombra, or dumbura in the local pronunciation, a two-stringed fretted lute. You can see some similarities in left-hand technique with the Turkmen dutar: the opposed thumb anchoring, but also playing on the lower string. One shot is inside the store where the musician plies his trade of chapan-maker. This popular northern silk cloak became the symbol of "new" Afghanistan when it was adopted by President Hamid Karzai in 2002 to symbolize ethnic unity. The filming conditions"shooting against a backlit crowd in a tiny space"are not uncommon. The presence of a foreigner and a camera in the bazaar quickly draws a crowd.