Albert KUVEZIN

Albert started the band many moons ago

he is the guitarist and the singer

KANZAT is his special style of kargiraa khoomei. When he was a little boy he was thrown out of the choir and told never ever to sing again. So he tried playing football instead. When he realised that there was such a thing as Deep Purple and Sonic Youth, he decided to get rid of the football and get a guitar and start singing again, although the ideology department of the Communist Party didn't like it very much.

Nobody else in TUVA can sing like Albert, perhaps it is because his style is closer to some singing by the Khakass, just north of Tuva. His father is Tuvan - Budachy (he who likes soup) KUVEZIN took Tuva to the quarter-finals as a coach as well as playing for the all-Russia team as the top volleyball player ever in Tuva. His mother's family came from the Tuvan/Khakass border high in the narrow gorges of the Sayani mountains where the river Ust-Usa meets the storming river Yenisei. But when he was 7 years old the Soviets built the greatest hydro-electric Dam in the world - Sayano-Shushinskoye - and the whole of this area was flooded forever.

Now there is a huge lake (but only in summer - not in winter and spring when you can still see the old drowned towns). His family moved to Shagonar (or Rio de Shagoneiro as they like to call it). This is where he grew up in the long hot summer months playing down by the waterside where there are many interesting plants.

Also from the lake you can see "Hairukn" - the great bear mountain which sticks up out of the steppe and which is sacred to all Tuvans. From here the Yenisei flows north to the cold wastes of the tundra and the Arctic Ocean...

You can email him on albert@yat-kha.com