Guldana Zholymbetova, Freedom Ambassador

When we learned that we would have to wait until mid-January for our official adoption process to begin, we feared extreme boredom would set in. That has not been the case, and one great reason why has been the opportunity to meet Guldana Zholymbetova. At the hotel dining hall, the tables are assigned – we’re table 49 – and Guldana’s table was next to our table for several days until her departure earlier this week. (Since Guldana speaks English – one of the few folks we’ve met who does – we surmise the staff seated her next to us as an act of mercy).

Guldana is a professor, the Dean of Jazz – no we’re not kidding – of the Kazakh National University of Art. Don’t you know there’s a great story here?

Guldana had been invited to bring some of her students to Borovoe to entertain during the New Year holiday. These young people – singers and a few instrumentalists – were very talented and a real treat for us to see.

However, it is feisty, determined, outspoken Guldana herself, and her life story that captivated us. Guldana’s music career has taken her all over the world, including to the United States 44 times –“more times than our President!” – she proudly boasts. She is a classically-trained pianist, having spent many years studying in Almaty, then several years of graduate work in Moscow and on to participate in international competition.

But Guldana was harboring a secret musical passion that was born when she was a young girl in her hometown of Karaganda (the city where Lily Grace was adopted), where her father was the director of the local music school. Karaganda was one of the sites of the Soviet Gulag – prison camp – system, which housed thousands of political prisoners during the Stalin post-war era. Among those prisoners were German musicians, and her father recruited many of them to be teachers in his school. And those musicians introduced Guldana to – jazz! She was drawn to it right away – partly because it was forbidden (when you meet Guldana, you can see why this makes perfect sense), and more importantly because it was unstructured, it was free-form, and to use her words, “it sets my soul free.” Add in a 1973 first encounter with Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, and Guldana was hooked for life.

She had to keep this love to herself – playing or listening to jazz was forbidden in the Soviet Union – but she dreamed of a day when she could become an ambassador of jazz music for all of Kazakhstan. Though she met resistance every step of the way – change comes hard after all – Guldana has perservered, establishing the Jazz Department at the music university in Astana and introducing a new generation of students to this distinctly American artform. Her students give concerts all over the country, playing for free, on a mission to spread awareness. A jazz club has opened in Astana due to her influence. And her student jazz bands have traveled throughout the world as music ambassadors for Kazakhstan, and recently toured the United States. (To see a clip of her students playing a recent concert in preparation for their trip, click the link below.)

“Since independence, our country has been absorbed by the search for a national idea,” says Guldana. “For me, that idea was established long ago by jazz music. Jazz is freedom, democracy, it represents a new idealogy – it reflects the health of our new nation.”

Steve and Tonya

Jazz band from Kazakh National University of Art


Guldana helps us fill out our Russian "menu sheet"