From the Central Asian Steppe to Manhattan: A Turkmen Bard in New York

A halal Chinese Muslim restaurant in New York City is an unlikely setting for a concert by a highly acclaimed bard of the Turkmen tradition. Yet on a Saturday afternoon in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, before an audience of attentive listeners and curious onlookers peering through the window, the multi-award-winning Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad filled Beef Up Noodle with sustained melodic phrases and guttural embellishments. At times, his dexterous strumming of the dutar, a two-stringed long-necked lute, deliberately mimicked the rhythm of galloping horse hooves central to the Turkmen bardic style. Mohammad was raised in the Turkmen community of Gonbad-e Kavus in northeastern Iran. At age ten, he became only the second musician ever to receive the honorary title Oghlan Bakhshi, meaning Child Bard. His musical education in Turkmen bardic traditions began in early childhood, before more formal training in Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashgabat. Turkmen culture, shaped by a nomadic heritage, extends across Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, with smaller populations in Turkey, Iraq, and the North Caucasus. It draws on nomadic traditions where performance serves as a primary vehicle of cultural expression. Central Asian music and culture, carried by diasporic communities from these regions, has found a growing audience in the United States. Turkmen traditions, however, given the minuscule size of the Turkmen population in the U.S., remain largely unfamiliar to most audiences. [video width="848" height="478" mp4="https://timesca.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/WhatsApp-Video-2025-12-17-at-18.16.28.mp4"][/video] Even so, Mohammad has brought his music to audiences beyond Turkmenistan and Iran, performing in parts of Europe and the U.S., including recent concerts at the Lowell Folk Festival in Massachusetts and at Roulette in Brooklyn. At the latter, he offered Western listeners rare access to a musical lineage sustained within a family across generations. Performing under his honorific alias Oghlan Bakhshi, he appeared alongside his father, the gyjak, or spike fiddle, master Abdolghaffar Geldinejad, and his wife and regular musical collaborator, Zyyada Jumayeva, a dutar player who represents the female bardic tradition of Turkmenistan. His album Journey Across the Steppes is the first international release of Turkmen folk music in 30 years. His work has also been documented in a book series, The Music of Central Asia. At Beef Up Noodle, Mohammad’s performance, titled Songs of the Bakhshi: Turkmen Bardic Heritage, formed part of a broader curatorial landscape shaped by ethnomusicologist Mu Qian, whose work spans scholarship, publishing, and community-based music making. From Zayton to New York is the concert series he curates, exploring how music travels through histories of migration and exchange. Mohammad’s appearance opened a Central Asian trilogy within the series, to be followed by programs devoted to Kyrgyz and Kazakh musical traditions in early 2026. This trilogy represents one strand of Mu Qian’s wider mission, developed through the See & Sea Cultural Foundation, to support minority musicians and bring underrepresented musical cultures from across Asia into conversation with audiences beyond their places of origin. [caption id="attachment_41154" align="aligncenter" width="1283"] Mu Qian with Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad; image: Paul Adams[/caption] British expat Margaret Murray, an audience member whose chance meeting...