Genghis Blues touches the very core of the human soul -as great music does- and demonstrates with poetic simplicity how music can be the great cultural leveler. How else can you explain the immediate, symbiotic link that is established between a burly, blind, near-forgotten San Franciscan bluesman and the people of a remote Central Asian nation, Tuva? Tuva you say? Nestled in the extreme southern part of Siberia on the Mongolian border, Tuva was an independent nation during the inter-war period and ruled by Mongolia before then and Russia since. As a character says in the film, any place with a capital called Kyzyl must be interesting!

　　Tuvan folk-blues throatsinging is the musical form that unites the East and the West in Genghis Blues. Unlike any other form of Western singing, throatsinging gives the appearance of multiple voices emanating from a single voice. These enchanting sounds captivated traditional bluesman Robert Pena (of Cape Verdean descent), when he accidentally heard them while tuned in to Moscow Radio short wave. Pena instinctively fell in love with the unique musical form and devoted the better part of nine years mastering its style and learning the rudiments of Tuvan language and culture in the process. Pena‘s claim to fame seems to be writing the song "Jet Airliner", which became a hit single for Steve Miller (another case of a white boy doing good on a black man‘s song, but I won‘t go into that here!). Once a regular on the blues circuit, having played with legends T-Bone Walker, . King, John Lee Hooker, and Bonnie Rait, Pena now seems down on his luck (the documentary makes no mention of what Pena has been doing of late, or how he makes ends meet).

　　The film begins in Pena‘s San Francisco apartment, and introduces us to the oddball assortment of characters that take the initiative to organize Pena‘s trip to Tuva to perform in the Throatsinging Symposium and Music Festival. They include an old, hipster DJ Mario Casetta, Ralph Leighto