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Music from China (and Taiwan and Hong Kong)

K

Knotted

Bet the horse knew his name
This may be U75's biggest oversight. And mine as well. There's a language barrier and a written language barrier on top of that and unlike Japanese or South Korean music, it's not likely to be made with an international audience in mind. But it's a quarter of humanity and if anyone has any pointers...

To start you off here's a collection of solo erhu tunes written by 刘天华 [Liu Tianhua]. This is harsh and wild stuff. Nothing pretty pretty about it at all.



Players 張韶 [Zhang Shao], 孙文明 [Sun Wenming], 张锐 [Zhang Rui], 蔣風之 [Jiang Fengzhi], 甘柏林 [Gan Bolin]

And an album from pipa player 閔小芬 [Min Xiao-Fen].



I've heard some pop balladry and soft rock that I'm not too mad about. But prove me wrong. Or find some banging Nanjing techno or something...

Maybe opera is the place to go next.
 
Love the northwest folk sound and there's a young lad I first noticed as he did a really funny song about COVID lockdowns (if I'd known they be sealing the village off this long I'd have bought more than two packs of fags etc.) called Zhang Gasong 张尕怂 (that's a dialect nickname meaning something like Little Daftie) who does a bit of a tour of his hometown and are in this short doc meeting with some local players:

Here's that lockdown song:

"If I'd known they were putting a roadblock up at the village entrance, I'd not have bothered renting a car to come back for New Year pretending I'd made it rich"
 
Knotted said:
Wow that's the blues.
Click to expand...
That solo song ends with his gran showing up :D; notice he's using a playing card as a plectrum too which is probably hamming it up here a bit but would have been done back in the day. Those long necked strummed instruments came in along the silk road way back IIRC.
 
This is a classic northwest song, an original folk tune adapted back in the 40s as a paean to the Red Army, this lad Ah Bao made it big for a while reviving the style; again a bit hammy be he really has the sound down, love this type of singing:
 
Couple of pop ballads from women I like:
Chen Ming's 陈明 90s classic 为你

And this more recent one from Renee Liu 刘若英 was rightly massive, me and the daughter sing it on the way to school:
 
JimW said:
Love the northwest folk sound and there's a young lad I first noticed as he did a really funny song about COVID lockdowns (if I'd known they be sealing the village off this long I'd have bought more than two packs of fags etc.) called Zhang Gasong 张尕怂 (that's a dialect nickname meaning something like Little Daftie) who does a bit of a tour of his hometown and are in this short doc meeting with some local players:

Here's that lockdown song:

"If I'd known they were putting a roadblock up at the village entrance, I'd not have bothered renting a car to come back for New Year pretending I'd made it rich"
Click to expand...


Really fascinated by that song. Definitely a delta blues thing going on there. I can see the affinity between Chinese folk and blues - that rough and ready quality. It's got me thinking that Chinese immigrants might have influenced delta blues in the first place.
 
Knotted said:
Really fascinated by that song. Definitely a delta blues thing going on there. I can see the affinity between Chinese folk and blues - that rough and ready quality. It's got me thinking that Chinese immigrants might have influenced delta blues in the first place.
Click to expand...
And even more interestingly it'll be an amalgam of influence in China too as the northwest had a now somewhat subsumed ethnic mix compared to the Han heartlands a bit further east, plus all the traffic down the trade routes.
 
JimW said:
And even more interestingly it'll be an amalgam of influence in China too as the northwest had a now somewhat subsumed ethnic mix compared to the Han heartlands a bit further east, plus all the traffic down the trade routes.
Click to expand...

I guess there would be Uyghur and Tuvan/Mongolian sounds mixed in there.
 
I forget the names of a lot of bands I saw in Hong Kong but My Little Airport were definitely a favourite - a lot of their stuff had a political slant so I'm not sure if they're even in HK any more - they definitely couldn't play this one now without leaving the venue in a police van.

 
Two of my favourite tunes





I would strongly recommend Cui Jian, Teng Ge Er, and Hei Bao if you like rock. If pop music, Na Ying, Karen Mok, A Mei, and Xu Meijing (technically Singporean, but ethnic Chinese) can be quite good.
 
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