The building has a portico with four columns, a mosaic of a tractor and a harvest, and a hall for four hundred people. Every Thursday at six, twelve of those seats are filled by the amateur komuz ensemble. Their oldest member is 81. Their youngest is 11 and plays better than all of them, they admit, the way you admit the weather.
For thirty-one years the ensemble was led by Jumabai Sydykov, an akyn whose poems are still online thanks to his granddaughter. He died in 2013. Nobody took his chair at the front of the stage; they put his komuz on it.
"We tune to his instrument. It went flat in the cold and we went flat with it. Now that is our key."
The heating stopped being paid in 1998. The ensemble brings an electric heater from home, plugs it into the one socket that still works, and plays in coats. When the power is limited, they play by a torch. They have not missed a Thursday, they say, since the winter of 2009, and then only because the road was closed by snow.
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