Slumdog tenor set for stardom
Published 29 April, 2009, 11:18
A poorly dressed migrant worker sings perfectly in both male and female voices. His rendition of the 1980s disco hit ‘Jimmy Aaja’ has already impressed thousands of Russian internet users.
Baimurat Allaberiev, more commonly known as Jimmy, made his debut on the web on June 4, 2008. It was a three-minute long video on YouTube, filmed with a cell phone camera.
The flickering low-quality movie shows a middle-aged man in a big warehouse, where among shelves and boxes he sings and drums on a cardboard box. His song, ‘Jimmy Aaja’ by Mithun Chakraborty, is from a Bollywood movie.
While his talent is indisputable, the most surprising thing is the sincere joy of the performer while dancing and singing.
Related videos appearing near Jimmy’s are mostly skinhead attacks on CIS migrants (especially Tajiks) and other horror stories about Central Asian workers, beaten up or cruelly killed by Russian nationalists.
By the end of the year the video was watched on YouTube alone more than 10,000 times. Then Jimmy featured in three similar videos, which almost simultaneously appeared online. Now with more than 200,000 viewings on YouTube, he has become the most popular Tajik in Russia. People have begun to recognise him in the street and have been asking him to sing.
A correspondent from Bolshoi Gorod (Big City), a weekly magazine, managed to find Jimmy’s phone number and address in Kolomna, a town in Moscow Region.
Jimmy’s neighborhood doesn’t strike one as particularly life-asserting, to say the least. Poverty, dirt and rubbish can be seen everywhere; policemen are involved with illicit gold dealers; used cell-phone buyers gather in a messy crowd. And here is the citadel of Kolomna town – the shopping mall ‘Rio’, where Jimmy works as a loader. He was born in Tajikistan, but is of Uzbek origin. Everybody calls him Jimmy.
The Russian internet star is still badly dressed but has a smile on his face. His strict boss happily lets him leave work for an hour to do the interview. Jimmy hides his disappointment with life behind a wide smile revealing the bleeding hole in his top gum where normally people have two more teeth. For nothing, just for being not Russian, he was beaten up in a suburban train. “I come home – two teeth are missing. The gold one remained, but mine are gone,” he says.
Life for a migrant worker from Central Asia in Russia is not a piece of cake. However, Baimurat earns regular wages and manages to send $100 a month to his dad in Tajikistan (for this money he can live quite well there). Jimmy lives in a small village, wakes up at 6am to start work at eight, drags boxes till the evening and comes back home to sing for neighbors and friends when they ask.
Jimmy says he’s happy where he is. However he claims he used to go to the mosque more often while he was in Tajikistan. Here he simply has no time for that because of his long working day.
A bit of background
Born into an ordinary family in the Kurgan-Tyubinsky region of Tajikistan, Jimmy studied Arabic with a neighbor-mullah, and music at a local music school. Later he served in the army, got married, then divorced, tended sheep, witnessed two wars, but “luckily stayed alive and healthy”.
At music school he studied different instruments, including drums and piano. Then Jimmy started to sing and soon found out he had talent. “I took a microphone, and when I began to sing I noticed that if there were lots of people around, a second voice would come to me, a maiden one. And I have developed it on the sly.”
He discovered he can learn a new song having only heard it twice. So, he started to sing songs from Indian movies at weddings.
“I don’t need much, whatever God gives me – ‘thanks’ I will say. What else should I ask, if Allah has given me two voices, male and female?” His only dream is to have a synthesizer.
This dream touched the correspondent of the Bolshoi Gorod and he called his friend, who’s a producer of the Light Music Company. They were arranging a concert in St Petersburg for the Asian Dub Foundation, a group of Asian immigrants from London. He saw Jimmy on YouTube and immediately agreed to let the Tajik tenor warm up the audience.
The chance
Before the concert he was very intense, polite with everybody, and absolutely quiet. He changed into an outfit of pointy shoes and a white shirt with a pattern of yellow balls and quietly walked on stage. He examined the equipment and suddenly remembered his instrument – a bucket.
“Normally, when there’s no drum, I play on a flank, the good sound turns out. But at a concert a bucket will be enough. A good iron bucket that’s what I need now”.
The audience started applauding when they heard the familiar sounds of “I’m a Disco Dancer”. And the musicians of Asian Dub Foundations were left wondering if this really was the first time this Tajik worker had performed in front of a big audience.
“It was a lucky chance,” Jimmy says in farewell. “And there can be further luck from this. Maybe, Insha’Alla, there even will be a synthesizer. But it’s secondary, it’s a dream. The first is God. First of all I think of Islam. Islam is humility, it means it is necessary to pray and keep standing, whatever happens.”
Half an hour after the concert, Jimmy was signing a contract with Light Music. Then he took his bucket, signed by the Asian Dub Foundation, and started packing for the flight back to Moscow.
This story touched the hearts of thousands and thousands, provoking interest in the fate of the talented singer from the slums of Tajikistan. Now professionals are contacting him to give the man a chance for a better future.
On April 29, Jimmy will sing at a party at Moscow’s Solyanka club. So, don’t miss the chance to see this rising star.
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