Six Reasons to Travel: An American Singer in Georgia

From the stage of the Tbilisi Opera House to pagan sacrifice in a Caucasus Mountain village, here's an accessible, in-depth, personal look at traditional Georgian music.

But Six Reasons to Travel also has a surprising lot to say about how to propose a Georgian toast, how to go hunting if you're a vegetarian, how to learn all the parts to a song entirely by ear, how to fend off both wild dogs on the street and the death grip of Georgian hospitality at table-even how to make enemies in the Georgian academic world. And behind all the comedy lies the deeper story of what it was like for the people of a small country with a rich ancient culture to live through the exhilarating, traumatic collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Stuart Gelzer first visited Georgia in the Cold War 1970s and has been back repeatedly over a span of more than thirty-five years. Much of Six Reasons covers the period when he was living and studying language and music intensively in Georgia in the 1990s, the critical decade in which Georgians saw their lives uprooted as they staggered into the post-Soviet world.

Gelzer is far from an anonymous reporter gliding unobserved through modern Georgian life. As a member of Trio Kavkasia-quasi-celebrities in a country that takes its traditional music very seriously-he played a part in the early popularization of Georgian folk music abroad. Rather than a work of reportage, therefore, Six Reasons to Travel is the highly subjective, often irreverent, unexpectedly comical account of what happened to him along the way.