Anda Union revives cultural music from the rolling grasslands of Inner Mongolia
Caravan World Rhythms presents the 10-piece band at the Massey Theatre
Anda Union.
Caravan World Rhythms presents Anda Union at the Massey Theatre on March 14 at 7:30 pm
THE LANDSCAPES WILL look familiar—or at least they will if you’ve ever driven through the dry hills east of Kamloops, or made a speedy beeline across the Saskatchewan steppe, or fossicked for fossils in the Drumheller badlands. Similar geological and climatic forces have shaped the topography of the Canadian west and the Chinese north, which includes the ethnically and culturally distinct province of Inner Mongolia. Looking at Anda Union: From the Steppes to the City, you’ll recognize how glacial ice, moving water, and unfettered winds shaped both worlds—but, for most, this beautiful and informative soundtrack’s will be unutterably strange.
That’s because From the Steppes to the City portrays a month in the life of the Mongolian band Anda Union. More specifically, it examines a month in which its members took their tour bus out of the smoggy city of Hohhot and into the rolling grasslands to visit their parents, grandparents, and siblings, many of whom still live a semi-nomadic life among their herds of cattle and sheep. It’s a beautiful and joyous journey, although not for the squeamish: in one scene a sheep is slaughtered by a method that I’ve read about but have never seen enacted. I’ll say no more.
That sheep did not die in vain, however. It fed the musicians and their family members, in the process helping to sustain a cultural tradition that until recently has been in danger of being lost. And visiting their far-flung network of relatives, the band’s manager Tim Pearce says, is a regular event for Anda Union’s 10 performers.
“They’re never happier than when they are in a yurt in the grasslands,” he explains in a telephone conversation from his home in Spain. “It’s wonderful to be with them like that; they love it. To them, that’s very much the place to be.”
For us, though, the place to be will be New Westminster’s Massey Theatre on March 14, when Anda Union will perform in a presentation by Caravan World Rhythms as part of a rare, long-planned, and Covid-delayed North American tour. We might not hear the wind whistling across the wide Mongolian plains or feast on a high-piled platter of mutton, but we will find out exactly why Pearce was so smitten by the band on their first meeting.
“I started in music years ago, and I’ve been a film producer and music producer, and I was in Shanghai signing contracts for performances at a festival,” he recalls. “They came on, doing a showcase—and they were young; they’d just started—and I was blown away by them. I just went ‘Fucking hell, this is incredible!’ Especially as I was used to hearing southern Chinese music and this was something very different, obviously, when the Mongolians in their costumes and boots came onto the stage. Anyway, at the end of the festival I tried to talk to them. It was quite difficult, but I went ‘Either I just leave and we never see each other again, or I’ll go and do something about this.’ So I took a train to northern China—a two-day trip—and we made friends. I recorded their music and got them work, and we went from there, really. And now it’s been nearly 20 years.”
Since then, Pearce continues, Anda Union has helped create a revival of interest in Mongolian music—with some help from their fellow Mongols to China’s north. “The most Mongolian instrument is the horsehead fiddle, which you see them playing and which the Mongolians claim is the first stringed instrument in the world,” he says. “I’m not quite sure if that’s true, but they used to be made of bone and sheepskin and sheep hair. So if you experience Mongolian music in the grasslands, you’ll just have one person paying the morin khuur or horsehead fiddle, and maybe just one person singing.
“Probably not throat-singing,” he continues, referencing the eerie vocal overtones often used in shamanic music. “They’ll probably be doing what’s called ‘long song’, which are those very long songs that two of the singers do. They’ve learned throat-singing mostly from Outer Mongolia and also from Tuva; it had kind of died out. When they started out, throat-singing wasn’t as common as it used to be in Inner Mongolia, so they’ve brought it back to life. Also there’s a flute which Chinggel plays called morin tsuur, and that was’t being played at all any more. He heard about it, and he found somebody that knew how to play it, and he’s now revived it. They’re very keen to keep their culture alive, and explore and discover and bring back to life things that had been lost for years.”
Anda Union morin tsuur player Chinggel.
In part, he adds, that’s because the past century has been one of “tumult” for China, thanks to war, revolution, and rapid industrialization. Pearce also points out that Chinese-Mongol relations have always been complex. While the legendary Genghis Khan unified the warring nations of Central Asia before riding west as far as the Caucasus, it was left to his grandson Kublai Khan to extend Mongol rule to most of present-day China. His Yuan dynasty, which prospered between 1271 and 1368, is often seen as the genesis of the present Chinese state; consequently many Han Chinese “almost see the Mongol dynasty as one of their own”.
“The word ‘Mongol’ actually comes from Genghis Khan,” he adds. “Genghis Khan was a Mongol; that was his people. And at that point you had the nomads of Central Asia, and they were always fighting each other. But he brought them all together and he said, ‘We are now all called Mongolians’.
“But everybody has a sub-category of their own tribe, so Tsetsegmaa, the singer, she’s a Buryat,” he continues. “That’s from up in the north of China, and there’s a province of Russia called Buryatia as well. She would call herself a Buryat Mongol. Nars would call himself an Ar Horchin Mongol. Each of these groupings would have different costumes, different music, different traditions—and that’s the strength of Anda Union. They combine so many different groupings in Inner Mongolia into one band, so the music is very varied.”
It’s also very dynamic, very beautiful, and quite unlike anything we might hear while roaming our own grasslands and plains. 
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