strange flights in a big ol' jet airliner

Paul Pena, a blind blues singer, grew up on the east coast but moved to San Francisco in the early '70's. His one major AM radio hit, "Jet Airliner," attracted little attention when it debuted on his second album, "New Train," in 1973, but four years later Steve Miller's cover of it went to number eight on the national pop charts.

In 1984 Pena's career took a strange turn when he picked up a Soviet radio station on his short-wave receiver and heard Tuvan throat singing for the first time. Tuva, an extremely remote area of far-southern Siberia, is actually, geographically and ethnically, the northwestern corner of Mongolia.

Pena searched for a record of Tuvan music for years, finally finding one in a neighborhood record store in San Francisco in 1991. He became obsessed with the sound and learned to approximate it through close and tireless attention to the record. Learning the language was tougher, however, since there is no Tuvan-to-English dictionary, and Pena was blind. But he managed to find a Tuvan-to-Russian dictionary, combined it with a Russian-to-English dictionary, and somehow secured the use of an optacon (optical tactile converter), an electronic reader and output device which converts printed material to Braille.

Two years later Pena participated in a Tuvan throat-singing performance at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and met the famous throat singer Kongar-ool Ondar, who encouraged him to visit Tuva in 1995 for a festival and competition there. The story of his arduous and sometimes bizarre journey to farthest-outer Mongolia, how he won first prize in both the singing contest and the "audience favorite" category in Kyzyl, Tuva and became a major celebrity in one of the most obscure corners of the world, are beautifully documented in the 1999 film "Genghis Blues," which won the Sundance Film Festival grand prize that year and was nominated for an oscar in the documentary category in 2000.

After 1997, when he was severely injured by smoke inhalation in a fire in his bedroom and in a coma for four days, Pena's already-tenuous health declined. He died in 2005 at age 55, from complications of diabetes and pancreatitis.

Paul Pena left some worthy monuments, including "Genghis Blues," a joy to watch which also underscores the practical and pragmatic aspect of following that dream, no matter how strange it may seem to others and no matter where it leads. There's also this wonderful live performance of his hit song on Conan O'Brien's show, backed by a rock-solid TV studio band, in 2001. Unless you've been living in someplace like Tuva for the last 20 years you should be able to hum along.