afterquake: nashville and china groove compassionately

First, check out a song. I can't link directly to it but if you have two and a half minutes, go to this NPR story and scroll down until you can click on "Tibetan Wish." Then come back.

That’s two Tibetan girls from western Sichuan province singing a song they heard at home growing up, enhanced with some tasty beats. It's from a remarkable project out this week called Afterquake.  Here’s the backstory:

By happenstance, I left Chengdu, China last week on May 12, the one-year anniversary of the tragic earthquake that struck that region’s rural areas, leaving 80,000 dead and 5 million homeless. The events felt much closer than they otherwise might have for several reasons. My wife’s nascent culinary tour business is centered in Chengdu for one thing, so we’d been there and decided it was one of the great sleeper cities of the world: bustling, easy-going, full of parks and gardens and tea houses and joyful music-making. There was also the remarkable coverage of the quake and its aftermath on NPR, because they’d had a large crew already there reporting on the new China far from the coastal cities and shipping ports.

Finally, we knew and appreciated the work of Abigail Washburn, a Nashville-based folk music phenom who studied in Chengdu as an undergraduate, mastered Mandarin Chinese and returned to China often to play and cultivate a cross-cultural dialog. (She also gave us great food tips, but that’s another story.) She’s a former founding member of the band Uncle Earl, a terrific solo artist and now a member of the Sparrow Quartet with Bela Fleck, Ben Sollee and our pal Casey Driessen. Afterquake is her latest and it's too cool for words.

At one level, the project illustrates and supports the recovery effort underway in Sichuan province. And it marks a new collaboration for Washburn, working in this case with an innovative producer/composer named David Liang. I'm excited additionally because it's such a worthy example of collage/remix music, a hugely promising frontier. Abby and David gathered field recordings from the quake zone, mostly children singing folk songs and sounds of reconstruction projects, and assembled them into absorbing sound collages and moving songs. I’m just getting into these tracks, but they’re vibey and vibrant and they build that exquisitely difficult bridge between music’s oral and regional traditions and the contemporary vocabulary of musical progress.The stories behind the tracks at the Afterquake site are profound and difficult, but one of the reasons I cherish this kind of music-making is that it's also a kind of new media form of journalism.

Abby’s own words: 

The purpose of the project would be to use the children's stories and voices to create music that would help raise awareness of the continuing needs in the earthquake zone, raise money for Sichuan Quake Relief, and hopefully add some cool music to the world.

The interview with Abby and David by Melissa Block at the NPR site is well worth your time.