Dadawa brings ethnic sounds to big city folk
By Chen Nan (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-12 09:06
 |
Large Medium Small |
Zhu Zheqin's four-month tour of the remote regions of western China in 2009 was a revelation. The singer, who is known as Dadawa in the West, visited ancient forest tribes and nomads, recording their music along the way.
"I thought, this is the best music to hear in the world," Dadawa says.
The result is Dadawa's latest production, Hear The World - Dadawa and Ethnic Music Masters 2010 Tour, which begins in Hong Kong on Oct 15, plays Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts on Oct 20, and will also take in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
She says the show features "authentic" music by ethnic groups, which are generally ignored by metropolitan audiences.
On her journey she recorded more than 1,000 ethnic songs from places like Guizhou, Yunnan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet, which she regards as invaluable.
Fei Ge, or the "flying songs" of the Miao people, captivated her when she arrived at a remote village in Guizhou province.
"I saw some girls wearing traditional clothes singing high-pitched songs, a call to their long-distance lovers," she recalls. "I just could not get them out of my head."
Musical instruments from these places, such as a hand-made horse-head fiddle, mouth harp, kanun (a tambourine from Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) and even tree leaves used by Guizhou's ethnic groups, will also be played at the concerts by ethnic musicians.
When Dadawa and her team arrived at Ili in Xinjiang, near the Kazakhstan border, she found a Kazak dombra musician.
"He played his dombra until 3 am and we had such a good time," recalls Dadawa, saying she has invited him to play at her concerts.
Along with ethnic singers, Dadawa will also present Muqam, an ancient Uygur melody, and The Epic of King Gesar, from Tibet.
"Listening to these musicians you can almost see the mountains, rivers, and grasslands where they live," she says. "I want to use my position to spread their cultures. I want the world to see their treasures, which deserve respect and protection."
"Their musical roots are deep in their cultures and have been passed on for generations," she says.
Born in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, Dadawa grew up with Cantonese pop music. Unlike others who imitated the Hong Kong singers, Dadawa had a love of folk music.
She says it was her father, an editor of a science magazine, who made her look at the world differently.
"He showed me a colorful outside world that drove me to explore," Dadawa says of her journeys since her early 20s.
Discovered by He Xuntian, a Shanghai music professor who had been collecting Tibetan music for 20 years, Dadawa released her first album, Yellow Children, in 1992, which was well received.
She traveled around Tibet with He, her producer and mentor, for two years, from 1995, and some samples recorded there found their way into Dadawa's Sister Drum, released that year.
This album became hugely popular across the country, establishing her as one of the brightest stars in Chinese music and was well received in the West.
The beauty of her voice, ambient sounds and use of Tibetan folk music appealed to fans in Asia and the West and as a result she became one of the first Chinese artists to get worldwide attention.
Her love of Tibet led her to take the stage name Dadawa, which means moon in Tibetan. She then recorded Voices From The Sky (1998), after which she took a long break from recording.
When she returned to the region in 2005, she made the album Seven Days, in which she expressed a new form of spiritual Tibetan music. It was nominated for a BBC World Music Award in 2007.
In 2009, she became a UNDP goodwill ambassador to help save and develop the cultural legacies of China's ethnic groups.
"I don't like promoting, ever since I released my first album, but with the new title, I am willing to speak for those people. They live far away from us but they have the greatest treasures blessed by their ancestors," she says. "It's an honor to reintroduce them to the modern world and spread them worldwide."
While protecting these treasures from extinction is important, she is also keen to reinvent and develop this type of music.
Her views are shared by the renowned folk singer Li Guangxi. At the age of 81, he showed up recently for the fifth Yulin Folk Song Singing Competition, in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. Here he called on more young Chinese musicians to recognize the importance of folk music.
"TV screens are full of singing contests and most of them feature pop music. It's good for young music lovers, but it's not enough," Dadawa says. "I hope that more opportunities will be given to folk musicians as they are the authentic voice of China."