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‘I felt caught between cultures’: Mongolian musician Enji on her beguiling, border-crossing music

She started singing in her family’s yurt before a Goethe-Institut residency led her to jazz and life in Munich. The distance from home is ‘bittersweet’ – but both styles, she says, are about trusting your instinct

She anchors her performances in the circular-breathing vocal style of Mongolian long song – a folk tradition where syllables are elongated through freeform vocalisations – her delivery tender and delicate, full of yearning emotion. Rather than employ long song vocals, Erkhembayar takes on a whisper-soft register on compositions such as Ulbar, singing wistfully about the beauty of sunset light over a jazz trio instrumental that wouldn’t feel amiss in Norah Jones’s repertoire. “There isn’t much of a jazz scene in Mongolia, as all the music I would encounter as a younger person was Mongolian artists making English-language pop, which is still largely the case there, or local hip-hop groups like Tatar,” she says.

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