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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:
Continue reading "afterquake: nashville and china groove compassionately" »
Singer/songwriter Jeff Finlin was somebody I was happy to learn about during my years as a music critic in Nashville. In a sea of "next Dylans" he had one of the truly unique voices. Now he's made a different kind of statement, launching "The Songwriter Chronicles," a webzine and community forum for tunesmiths. It promises to be a resource center, support group and workshop online. The opening salvo has interviews with the awesome Amy Rigby, Matthew Ryan, Will Kimbrough and Bill Lloyd. And unlike most of the web music business hoo-ha out there, Finlin has opted to charge a small amount for access to the site. I applaud that. We in music and media have about bled ourselves dry giving everything away. Good luck to the site.
I’m just back from two weeks in China, traveling with my wife in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. It was my second trip, and as before, I came away in awe of this gigantic and ancient country living through one of history’s most extraordinary transitions.
On the long flight home I had the depth of the change brought home reading most of Wash Post reporter John Pomfret’s book Chinese Lessons, in which he describes the life stories of five of his classmates from Nanjing University, where he studied as an undergraduate in the very early 1980s.
These individuals had come of age during the Great Leap Forward and/or the Cultural Revolution, two of the most ill-named and disastrous policies in world history, and their harrowing journeys (as both victims of and participants in a great evil) embody the almost impossible-to-believe transition of China from an ideological dictatorship to a hotbed of art and commerce.
