Tag: Asia

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MUSIC IN EXILE: THE MANY VOICES OF TIBETAN ARTISTS ABROAD

Ranging from cries of protest to longing for home, the music of Tibetan exile artists creates a complex mosaic that becomes clearer in context.

An aerial view of the mountains outside of Lhasa.
An aerial view of the mountains outside of Lhasa.

Four years ago on a plane bound for Lhasa, I watched expectantly as the aircraft’s shadow passed over the verdant mountains surrounding the airport. I grew up picturing an idealized Tibet of snowcapped mountain peaks, shining bronze Buddha statues, and nomads on horseback. During my stay in Lhasa, I woke up every morning to a startlingly blue sky and fell asleep every night to the sounds of discordant singing drifting from the karaoke hall across the street from my hotel. Nothing I experienced between the open and close of my days there could be configured into a set of simple, congruent images.

The Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States this month led me to think about the complexities of my experiences in Tibet and of the Tibetan community living in exile, including its musicians. Approximately 140,000 Tibetans now live abroad, with the majority residing in India. The Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, the exile government, have been based in the Dharamsala suburb of Mcleodganj since 1960. Over the decades since the Dalai Lama left Tibet, tension has existed between the exile administration and the Chinese government, which makes historical claims on Tibet and states that Chinese leadership has improved the quality of life there.

Rock resistance

JJI Exile Brothers perform with Chinese musician Xiao Bin at a Common Grounds Project event in Dharamsala, October 2009.
JJI Exile Brothers perform with Chinese musician Xiao Bin at a Common Grounds Project event in Dharamsala, October 2009.

For numerous artists born outside of Tibet, the experience of being without a country and the desire to reclaim Tibet from China are prominent messages in their music. Many of the songs by JJI Exile Brothers, one of the earliest Tibetan exile rock bands, deal with these two themes. Encouraged by their mother, who owns a restaurant in Mcleodganj, brothers Jamyang, Jigme, and Ingsel formed their band in 1998. The brothers cite musical influences ranging from Tibetan exile folk singer Techung to American blues legend Muddy Waters. Over the years, JJI Exile Brothers has maintained a strong following and has inspired many Tibetans with their message.

One of the newer Tibetan rock groups to follow in the tradition of JJI Exile Brothers is Melong Band, founded in Minneapolis in 2007. The group incorporates Himalayan regional instruments, such as the dranyen, a long-necked lute, into many of their songs. Revolt, their most recent album, was released this month in conjunction with the Dalai Lama’s visit. Tenzing Jigme, the band’s lead guitarist, has appeared on Soyala, Voice of America’s contemporary Tibetan music show, and is also the founder of the online Tibetan music radio station Bhodshey.

“Bhod Gyalo” by Melong Band

Voice of Tibet

Yungchen Lhamo singing at a Witness Focus for Change benefit event, November 2009.
Yungchen Lhamo singing at a Witness Focus for Change benefit event, November 2009.

Originally from Lhasa, singer Yungchen Lhamo has lived in exile since making an arduous trek across the Himalayas in 1989. Now based in New York, she is often called the “Voice of Tibet” and has gained significant recognition for her music, including signing on with Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records and collaborating with prominent artists such as Annie Lennox. While dealing with the hardships of exile, such as longing and displacement, Lhamo’s music is also filled with hope and encouragement for the younger generation of exiles. Lhamo is known for her solo a cappella performances, but on her last two albums has also experimented with different types of accompaniments ranging from kora to full orchestra. In 2004, she established the Yungchen Lhamo Charitable Foundation, which sponsors relief and education projects for Tibetans around the world.

It is worth noting the potential for confusion between Lhamo and Yangjin Lamu, a Tibetan singer also living in the United States. In February 2011, Lamu was awarded for her contribution to Paul Winter’s new age album Miho: Journey to the Mountain. Although she uses the Chinese transliteration of her Tibetan name, the media sometimes refers to Lamu as “Yungchen Lhamo,” including China’s central television agency in its English-language coverage of the 2011 Grammys. Lamu primarily sings a mixture of Buddhist chant and meditation music, and is popular in China and Taiwan. In addition to her music, she is the founder and president of the China Overseas Tibetan Association.

A complex mosaic

When asked about my trip to Tibet, I find that the stunning landscape is the one element that I describe consistently, followed by a narrative of my trip as jumbled as my experiences. Sadly, this beautiful plateau is at the heart of a tough sovereignty issue that impacts the Tibetans living there and those in exile. Images of Tibet’s pristine sky, mountains, and grasslands are frequently evoked in songs by exile musicians, but the perspective from which these artists sing often differs. Musicians born outside of Tibet describe a place that they have never seen, while artists like Yungchen Lhamo sing of a place that they hope to return to. Beyond rock and traditional music, Tibetan exile music is now also expanding into the realms of hip hop, folk rock, electronica, and other genres. These many voices of the Tibetan musical community form a complex mosaic that is complete only when viewed within the context of the different generations and life experiences of its artists.

“Happiness Is” by Yungchen Lhamo

Aerial photo by Sarah Lin Bhatia.

JJI Exile Brothers photo by Wen-Yan King.

Yungchen Lhamo photo by Kate Glicksberg.

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HOPE SHINES ON, BUT JAPAN STILL NEEDS OUR HELP

Hip-hop music blog Word is Bond joins the global effort to support post-earthquake relief work in Japan with the compilation album Hope for Tomorrow.

Tokyo’s unlit skyline on March 11.

As most people across Japan settled down for bed on March 11, a powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the country. The images and stories of the tsunami and the nuclear disaster that followed are still almost too painful to comprehend five months later. According to recently released figures, 20,889 people are dead or missing and property damage amounts to $210 billion—and these are only estimates.

The other side to these terrible events is that countless governments, organizations, and individuals around the world quickly demonstrated a tremendous amount of support for Japan by sending much-needed relief supplies, workers, and funds. Musicians, both individually and collectively, have joined the efforts by organizing benefit concerts and releasing special albums, such as Hope for Tomorrow compiled by the hip-hop music blog Word is Bond.

Hope for Tomorrow was released within an impressive two weeks after the disasters and features tracks from nearly 40 independent hip-hop artists from eight countries, including Japan. Downtempo piano and other instrumental songs comprise most of the album, with also a sprinkling of rap, soul, and spoken word throughout. “Vespers” by Phish a.k.a Soundzimage, a French artist who maintains an elusive web presence, captures not only the spirit of the project but also the mood of many people in the earthquake’s aftermath: a deep sadness mingled with hope for the future.

Now offered free for digital download on Bandcamp, Hope for Tomorrow raised over $7000 for Japan’s disaster victims within four weeks of its release. Word is Bond encourages listeners who download the album to make a donation to an organization like the Red Cross in support of ongoing Japan relief activities. Japan still has much need for aid—both financial and in kind—especially with thousands of people displaced by the situation at the Fukushima nuclear complex and with basic public services in shambles in many places.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, people across Japan donated relief funds to the United States in a gesture similar to the benefit activities of the past five months. It takes the collective effort of the entire world to rebuild after a disaster of a magnitude such as Japan has experienced. And it shows that hope can shine on even despite seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tokyo skyline image by Evan Blaser.

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IAN WIDGERY: NIGHTTIME IN SHANGHAI

Ian Widgery reflects on the past eight years since he redefined the sound of jazz-age Shanghai and pioneered a global craze.

Seventy-eight RPM vinyl records and curious-looking wax cylinders imprinted with the voices of some of China’s most legendary and talented songstresses—Bai Guang, Zhou Xuan, and others—sat, crated for decades, in a dusty Mumbai warehouse. Leftover goods from the former Pathé recording studio in Singapore, they were slated for disposal until being diverted to EMI Music’s Hong Kong offices in 2003 when the company was preparing to commemorate its one-hundredth anniversary in China.

Ian Widgery

Enter Ian Widgery, a young UK music producer, also newly arrived to Hong Kong. Collaborating with Morton Wilson, founder and president of Schtung Music, Widgery remixed twelve popular pre-1949 Chinese songs, such as “Waiting for You” and “Nighttime in Shanghai,” within the span of a few short months, creating Pathé 100: The Original Shanghai Divas Collection: Redefined. The first album of its kind to revitalize and introduce this early popular Chinese music to audiences worldwide, it has been reissued countless times in the past eight years, including the essential Shanghai Lounge Divas two-disc compilation featuring Widgery’s remixed tunes and a set of twenty-four original recordings of songs from pre-1949 Shanghai. The “Divas project,” as Widgery fondly refers to it, went platinum for the fifth time in 2010. Since 2003, Widgery and Wilson have teamed up for two more successful projects: Retrochine (2008), a journey through the catalog of Hong Kong’s Shaw Studios, and the Shanghai Tang Lounge Collection (2010), an album featuring original and remixed music for the Chinese fashion house Shanghai Tang.

Was it all a matter of destiny? Looking back at the past eight years, Widgery describes the incredible and unexpected outcomes that began unassumingly enough with a set of old, abandoned recordings.

Shanghai Divas

“It was so different from anything that I had ever heard before,” says Widgery of the first time that Wilson played a sampling of songs from the recovered Pathé recordings for him. “I had no idea what it was about.” Without translations for the lyrics—or even the titles of the songs—he went straight to work remixing the songs, feeling the language of the arrangement and the emotion expressed in the voices of the singers as he went along. “I decided one day just to put it in the sampler and to start writing songs around the melodies,” he explains.

The material Widgery was working with was, in fact, the stuff of legends. Republican era (1911-1949) Shanghai was famous worldwide as a glamorous, glittering city with burgeoning music and film industries full of famous women. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China’s last imperial dynasty, public female performances had been largely taboo, and so the women entertainers of Shanghai’s “golden age” were a radical departure from Qing dynasty ideology.

Women such as Bai Guang, the femme fatale of her day, in fact, helped to define the elegant and cosmopolitan lifestyle idealized by the everyday women of Shanghai. The products consumed by Shanghai’s residents and the popular culture of the city—not least of all the music—bear the unmistakable mark of influence from the United States and Europe. But with as much veracity as Shanghai housewives read about the lives of Hollywood film stars and American jazz tunes were played in dance halls, most of the films and music produced in Shanghai were an exploration and a creative adaptation of Western popular culture in keeping with Shanghai’s cosmopolitan atmosphere, rather than outright imitation.

In this same way, Widgery and Wilson’s remixed tracks are a masterful merging of pre-1949 music with electronica—a redefinition of the music that defined the sound of jazz-age Shanghai. The vocals on the tracks emerge, distant- and dreamy-sounding through swathes of beats that enhance, but do not stifle the essence of the songs. For example, Widgery crafted “Waiting for You” into a downtempo masterpiece that retains Bai Guang’s trademark low voice, evocative of both a jazz-age cabaret and a contemporary lounge.

Widgery remixed a few of the songs in Hong Kong before moving to Vancouver, Canada to be married and to settle down. “I ended up putting together the rest of the tracks outside on a computer on a lawn in Canada,” he laughs. He returned to Hong Kong to finish the album with Wilson, a process that was completed within a matter of months. “I have worked on over seventy projects,” he says, “but never on a project that has been able to be produced so quickly . . . In a way, I was so inspired by what was going on, that it really wrote itself. That is a sign of a good project.”

Shanghai Lounge Divas has proved to be so successful worldwide that Widgery is not only gratified, but even a little astounded by it all. Several of the songs have been licensed for use in films, and only a few years ago, Annie Lennox, speaking on television with Jools Holland, enthusiastically praised the album, calling it the “most fantastic thing.” Elton John was also spotted purchasing thirty-five copies of the album at an EMI store. Most importantly though, the Divas project has brought the voices of Bai Guang and her contemporaries to listeners from a different generation and to places where the music might otherwise never have been heard. Shanghai Lounge Divas has inspired imitations, but none as enduring as it. “It just keeps going and going,” emphasizes Widgery. “I am so happy for the fact that all of this music is out there for younger people from different cultures to be exposed to.”

Retrochine

Following the success of Shanghai Lounge Divas, the Shaw Brothers Studios in Hong Kong—perhaps best known for its early martial arts films—approached Widgery and Wilson in 2008 about doing a remix album featuring songs from their catalog of musical films. Although the resulting album, Retrochine, is in a vein similar to that of the Divas project, its fifteen tracks cover a slightly later era—the 1950s and 60s—and a completely different and unique region of China. “We wanted to do an album that represented Hong Kong,” notes Widgery.

There is, nevertheless, an important historical link between the two albums. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the popular culture of jazz-age Shanghai gave way to revolution-inspired art, music, and film. Many popular entertainers, such as Bai Guang, immigrated to Hong Kong—which was then still under British colonial rule—and worked there in the music and film industries.

Retrochine whimsically captures the essence of Hong Kong’s popular culture of the 1950s and 60s as shown through the lens of the Shaw Brothers films, including such songs as the frenetic “Go Go!”. “It follows a different format [from Shanghai Lounge Divas] because it is like a soundtrack to a movie that we never made,” says Widgery. “There are a lot of aspects to it that are not only musical . . . We also had access to dialogues from movies.”

Like Shanghai Lounge Divas before it, Retrochine has enjoyed considerable success, especially in Asia, becoming a top-twenty album in 2010. Time Magazine has hailed it as “fun, edgy, and eclectic,” and its popularity continues, both for the sense of nostalgia that it evokes and for the fresh, contemporary spin that it puts on the Shaw Brothers classics.

A New Dawn for Jazz-Age Shanghai

China, after three decades of significant economic growth and the 1997 re-accessioning of Hong Kong, is undergoing a process of redefining itself, including an official image campaign and a reclaiming of the past. There is even an entire subset of popular culture devoted to “old Shanghai,” encompassing everything from television to restaurants, and so the popularity of Shanghai Lounge Divas in China is not at all surprising.

The Hong Kong-based luxury fashion brand Shanghai Tang adopted Shanghai Lounge Divas as its official in-store soundtrack a few years ago, and in 2010 it released an exclusive album produced by Widgery and Wilson. The Shanghai Tang Lounge Collection features original songs such as “I Like It,” as well as signature Widgery remixes of classic songs like “Crazy Band.”

Despite the key role that he played in launching a global music phenomena, Widgery remains quite humble about his success and gives due credit to the providence of the music. “At the end of the day, the essence comes from the original songs,” he emphasizes. “We tried to rewrite and recreate new things with them. I am only fifty percent of what the work is, and I have always been very aware of that.”

So was it all a matter of destiny? Perhaps so. Had the historical value of the Pathé recordings gone undiscovered and the records and wax cylinders been destroyed, the music might never have reemerged with such popularity. One thing is indeed certain: Widgery gave new life to the voice of Bai Guang and her contemporaries, and in doing so he redefined the sound of jazz-age Shanghai for many years to come.

Experience Jazz-Age Shanghai Online

Shanghai at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Ling Long Women’s Magazine (1931–1937)

All images courtesy Ian Widgery.