Aslan Gotov is a Circassian, a representative of the people which inhabit the territory of Western Caucasus and the Black Sea coast from Taman to Adler. Presently, the Circassians, or Adygeis, reside in Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, as well as abroad. The people are proud of their rich cultural traditions, which date back to the remote past, and a musical heritage with its brilliant, festive, dancable melodies.
In the 1990's Aslan Gotov became known as a founder and artistic director of Oshten, the most popular group outside of Adygea (Oshten means the one who stops hail and is a name of one of the most beautiful mountains of the Large Caucasus mountain ridge).
Led by Aslan Gotov, Oshten were prize winners of numerous pop and jazz festivals and contests that took place in the Caucasus at the time. Oshten recorded two albums, accompanied famous vocalists and was featured in a documentary film about the group.
From 2002, already in Moscow, Aslan Gotov began working in the Yuri Silantiev Academic Grand Concert Orchestra. He has written music for Moscow and Adygea theatres, and arranged music for some large projects such as Music for the Front by Dmitri Kabalevsky, How Ravishing the Nights in Russia by Alexander Dobronravov, Feelings by Sergei Penkin to name just a few. Aslan has worked with popular performers such as Joseph Kobzon, Ludmila Rumina, Zaur Tutov, Renat Ibragimov. Recently he has been working for the Fonograf company as an arranger.
In his first personal solo project called Hymn to the Sun, composer Aslan Gotov discovers for his listeners a colourful palette of Adygeyan folk music through a contemporary musical language that combines a whole range of styles, from World Music to jazz, from rock to ethno-techno. The originality and freshness of his musical images are conditioned by the folk background which, in many ways, is similar to the contemporary stylistics, by precise and, at the same time, syncopated metres and rhythms, comprising an almost jazz triplet swing. This particular organic combination of the traditional and the most contemporary brings in an inimitable colour to Hymn to the Sun. This is not only in the musical style of the bonus track with its techno remix of a historical recording of an ethnic performance, as it is a fact that the album was recorded employing the newest electronic music technology. Some of the performers took, so to say, a virtual part in the recording of the album through exchange of sound files with Aslan while staying not only, or to be more precise, not so much in Moscow, but in locations in the Caucasus such as Maykop, Nalchik and even in America.
Dmitri Ukhov,
President of the Association of Moscow Jazz Journalist,
Music Critic
The album Hymn to the Sun presents a vivid example of how carefully the peoples of the North Caucasus preserve their ancient culture. Aslan Gotov has found a remarkable means of prolonging the life of the traditional ethnic music of his people, Adygeis, better known as Circassians. All the compositions of this album could with every reason be attributed to hautes examples of the style which in the second half of the 20th century was endowed with the name World Music being an organic fusion of ancient folklore and contemporary forms of electronic music, rock and jazz. This approach in particular not only preserves the folk traditions, it also allows giving them a new sound that brings the generations of today back to their roots, back to the sources of their native culture.
Alexey Kozlov,
People’s Artist of Russia,
Ensemble "Arsenal"
