Anchiskhati meets khinkhali

Wow,

Just had an unexpectedly fabulous evening.

C and I took our friend Pam out to our favorite restaurant near City Hall in Tbilisi. We were coming from a Fulbright hob-nob session in Saburtalo. It had been fun, and we'd left pretty happy, looking forward to visiting an Armenian restaurant near the Isani Metro station that I was planning on writing about for GT this week.

Our bus was a long time coming. By the time we were in the neighborhood of Old Tbilisi, the further journey to Isani Metro seemed less appealing, so we opted for our (name as yet unknown!) khinkhali place up the hill from Tabisuplebis Moedani.

We were greeted by this very friendly man, Temo, who is invariably seating people at this restaurant. He waved us into one spacious room dotted with rectangular tables. We sat, checked out the menu, ordered some delicious kebabs, melty khbos shashapuli (?), badrijani nigvsit, pomidoris salati, and kartolpili pri (shemsvari).

A few minutes after we'd ordered, the room filled with music -- Georgian folk songs, sung by an expert choir. I looked around to see if anyone was seeing, and the source of the sound seemed to be a speaker mounted on the wall above a curtained window. I figured that the restaurant must have put on a CD of an old recording of a professional folk choir. Cool, I thought -- nice and atmospheric.

C, however, was pretty sure that beyond the curtained window there was a room of people singing. After a little while, it was clear that he was right -- the curtains stirred, and parted briefly, and I could see the besweatered torsos of presumably Georgian men at supra.

As the night went on, they kept singing. I thought about asking Nana, our waitress, who the "jgoopee" behind the curtain was, but then decided that she probably wouldn't know. C speculated, "Could it be Anchiskhati?"

The Anchiskhati choir kicks ass. They're a group of a dozen or so virtuoso vocalists, all of whom have marvelously warm hearts and lovely senses of humor. They are friends with my mother, who helped host them on a tour they did of the US, and who has sung with them in other contexts as well. This fall, when my mom was in Georgia, C and I accompanied her to a "thank you" supra that the choir and their friend, L, hosted It was a really good supra, with incredible music, food, expressions of friendship. C and I sat opposite Dato, who beamed his extroverted, sunny, and extraordinarily kind smile at us all night.

Anchiskhati has visited my house in Vermont, and played drums with my brother, Kei, who did Beatles jam sessions with some of their bass singers. C and I saw them in Bloomington when they toured the US with our friend, John Graham. We'd just been speaking of their director, Malhaz. This weekend I copy-edited an article about Anchiskhati's collaboration with a French composer, who iss making new compositions based on Georgian traditional folk and sacred music styles and techniques. I'd just added their new songbook to the Village Harmony online store.

So no, it couldn't be Anchiskhati, could it? That would be too much of a coincidence.

And then Dato stuck his head through the curtains, spotted us, and came over with his 1000-watt smile and warm bear hugs. We were invited to join their supra.

Weee! I still have a bit of a warm buzz going from the two (or so) glasses of wine I had, and so will maybe write about this in more detail tomorrow, but basically, it was a great evening.

Anchiskhati was hosting a French composer and a French chef, who were in Tbilisi to study Georgian music and food, respectively. There were two Georgian women, translating between Georgian and French. And there was music to down in.

We joined the table, nibbled on some khinkhali, and basically basked in the music and company until the supra wound down. It was nice. It was very nice.

And Malkhaz picked up our bill -- even though we'd eaten before we even sat down with them--
and I tottered home full of much better feeling than I had for a little while.

Dato made a toast to the effect of, "This was not a chance meeting -- this was not God's mistake." I certainly hope not. It pulled tight quite a few threads of the last several months, and I think I am going to approach Malhaz to see whether I can finagle an interview with him about his work.

Anyway,

Aba he!