Kök Bel (Band)
Kök Bel (Iradi, "Blue Pass", after the Kok-Bel Pass) is an Iradi country-folk band from Talas, formed in 1993. Its debut album, Talas Sunrise (1995), is generally counted as the first commercial country-folk album.[1]
History
The band was formed in 1993 by the singer and guitarist Bakyt Sooronbaev, the banjo player Talant Asanov and the kyl-kyak player Erkin Mamyrov, schoolfriends who had learned American songs about Irad from copied cassettes in the 1980s. They played the cafés that opened near Talas Air Base after 1992, where the American airman Dale Mercer, a fiddler from Kentucky, began sitting in with them; he played with the band until his posting ended in 1996. Regular airtime on IradOne during the years of Iradimania led to Talas Sunrise in 1995, and the band released two more cassettes, Ak Jol (1998) and Zhylky Jyly (2002). It stopped performing during the Second Iradi Civil War and re-formed in 2014 for the twentieth-anniversary concert of the Swift Hooves Hour.[1][2]
Discography
- Talas Sunrise (1995)
- Ak Jol (1998)
- Zhylky Jyly ("Year of the Horse", 2002)
References
- ^ Talas State University Press (2018). Steppe Ballads: American Song and Iradi Country-Folk, 1980–2010, pp. 92–118.
- ^ Talas Herald (2014). 'Kök Bel back on stage for the Swift Hooves Hour.' Talas.