This album documents music of the group Moyindau captured at various live performances and informal recording sessions in 2010 and 2011. It includes two of my settings of Kazakh poetry, framed by several other compositions of mine and arrangements of popular/folk tunes from Macedonia and Tajikistan. The group features saxophonist Kevin Bene, cellist Susanna Mendlow, drummer Ryan Ptasnik, and myself as pianist and composer, plus singer Ainagul Abdikalikova on the two central tracks.

Moyindau—a Kazakh word meaning “acknowledgment”—grew out of my collaboration with Ainagul Abdikalikova, an engineering student from Kazakhstan, while we were both studying at Michigan State University. Ainagul and I met regularly beginning in fall 2009 to discuss Kazakh culture, language, and poetry. She introduced me to several poems by Sabyrbek Nurmanuly, a poet who grew up in her grandmother’s village outside Shymkent in southwest Kazakhstan and attended the boarding school where her grandmother was a teacher and principal. Together we analyzed the poems verse by verse and Ainagul found creative ways of communicating to me in English the subtleties of Kazakh expressions that would be lost in a literal translation. Then we met for several sessions of free improvisation on the verses, during which Ainagul acclimated to our process as improvising musicians and we generated material for the songs. As I composed, I brought melodic fragments to Ainagul and taught them to her by ear. Sometimes we recorded these on our phones. In the end, we liked how the phone recording captured our creative process, so we included it as the opening of the album’s title track.

After several US tours, Moyindau’s journey culminated in summer 2011 when we traveled to Central Asia to perform. At the base of Pik Lenin in southern Kyrgyzstan, we played a ten-minute set (kept short because of the cold, biting wind even in July) on a stage constructed from two pickup trucks backed up against one another. More formally, we presented the Kazakh premiere of my settings of Sabyrbek Nurmanuly’s poetry at the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Shymkent. Following our performance, Nurmanuly addressed the audience from the stage. Meeting one another for the first time was an emotional experience, even though (or perhaps because) we did not share a common language. Earlier that summer drummer Ryan Ptasnik and I had the wonderful opportunity to play some of this album’s music in Tajikistan with Norwegian saxophonist Mette Henriette, whom I had met in New York the year before. In what I recall as one of my most moving musical experiences, we were humbled when Munira Shahidi, daughter of Tajik composer Ziyodullo Shahidi, entrusted us to perform her father’s music at a memorial service for her late husband.

Since our 2011 Central Asian tour, the members of Moyindau have parted ways and taken on new adventures. Because we made these recordings primarily to document our musical process, they were never formally released. Now that a full decade has passed—and in this moment of reflection and taking stock that has come with the current pandemic—we would like to share this music with a larger audience. We are excited to be able to partner with Catalytic Sound to do so. Moreover, we are happy to be donating all proceeds raised from album sales to Aral Aru Ana (Mother of Aral), an organization which supports children in the Aral region of Kazakhstan who suffer from genetic disease due to the environmental crisis caused by the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Thank you for listening, and we hope you enjoy the music.

Alex Kreger
August 2021
Ankara, Turkey