Usta Olim Komilov

Usta Olim Komilov was born in 1875 in Margilan into a poor weaver’s family. His parents wanted him to be schooled, but there was no money for it. He lost his father at ten and worked as a day labourer, then went to Samarkand to an uncle who made carts and kept him for more than ten years as an unpaid apprentice. In his spare time he learned to play the doira, the frame drum; back in Margilan he worked as a craftsman, improved his playing and began to teach others. According to the Uzbek Wikipedia, his teacher was one Masaid Ota.

He accompanied Margilan’s yallachi singer-dancers and musicians at weddings and festivals and later in teahouses. After the revolution of 1917 he helped form amateur groups to play at rallies and for Red Army units; by 1920 he worked in music alone, organising music circles in teahouses and a boarding school in his home town. In 1924–1926 he took part in selecting and preparing 26 musicians to teach across the republic.

In 1926 he joined the Uzbek ethnographic troupe led by Muhiddin Qori-Yoqubov, at which the republic’s first dance school was opened and where he taught dance rhythms. From 1929 the troupe became the Uzbek Musical Theatre (from 1939 the Navoi Opera and Ballet Theatre), where he worked as a doira player and adviser on dance. With Tamara Khanum he adapted old dances for the stage and arranged some of them for an ensemble of dancers; he created the dance “Pilla” anew, staged “Paxta” with Mukarrama Turgunbaeva and made the dance “Tantana” himself. He took part in staging the first Uzbek ballets, N. Roslavets’s “Paxta” (1933) and F. Tal’s “Shohida” (1939).

In 1930 he performed at the Olympiad of National Theatres in Moscow, and in 1937 at the Decade of Uzbek Art in Moscow, where he was among the authors of the staged scene “A Festival and a Collective-Farm Wedding”. In 1935 he travelled with Tamara Khanum to the international folk dance festival in London: his doira playing amazed the English audience, and the organisers took a plaster cast of his hand. By some accounts he was handed a personal medal at a reception attended by the British royal family.

He was given the title Hero of Labour in 1932 and became People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR in 1937; on 31 May 1937 he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. His pupils included Tamara Khanum, Mukarrama Turgunbaeva and the doira players T. Inogomov, K. Azimov and A. Tuychiev. The doira rhythms as he played them were written down by I. Akbarov (“Doyra usullari”, 1952), V. Uspensky and Ye. Romanovskaya.

Usta Olim Komilov died in Tashkent on 3 April 1953 and was buried in the Chigatay cemetery. A street each in Tashkent and Margilan and a music school in Fergana bear his name; T. Obidov’s book “Usta Olim Komilov” appeared in 1958.