First and foremost, let me start with an apology. It might be that my review of Joseph Chan Wing Leung’s work and his career might span longer (or shorter) than the actual album, Milk Of Love (母愛), you’ll hear today. Though, in around 20 minutes you’ll get a taste on this album of the esoteric mood music that made this icon of golden-age Hong Kong cinema such a giant in that world and in his homeland. It was in this specific moment in time that Mr. Wing Leung’s ideas would center around nocturnal ambient jazz and electroacoustic music to create a soundtrack of the mind — one for a film playing only in his head, one that still has something to say for ours.
You see, it was not in Chan Wing Leung’s native Zhongshan where his ideas of a different kind of “modern” Chinese music took hold. For that we found him moving far elsewhere, far from Guangdong, to develop a “feeling” for the quicksilver stylistics he’d want to display under his own name. 20-some-odd years of prodigious classical piano and brass training had to be shaken off simply by forcing himself to find a way to make a living as a musician in the Hong Kong scene.
Playing in nightclubs. Exposing himself to the seedier side of the still free international port city, brought Chan into contact with newform jazz ensembles and music, allowed him to come out of the much more conservative world of chamber music. However, Chan still felt that there was much to learn. Rather than stick it out in Hong Kong, he’d apply for entry into the Berklee College of Music, considered the best music university at the time.
For four years, Chan would experience the same issues faced by many immigrants. Unable to fully grasp just how much an education costs here, he’d have to fight his way and work his way through college, busking, taking odd jobs, making just enough to pay for his education. One night, while taking a side gig in some San Francisco Chinatown club, a visiting friend asked him if he would be interested in contributing some music for an album they wanted to release.
On the strength of that first bit of music production, Chan was invited to come back to Hong Kong to begin composing for film and TV. Chan took to writing for film especially well. Now battle-hardened and learned with more liberal Western ideas, he was able to cultivate a looser touch that could absorb technological advances and production tricks more at the cutting edge of the time.
Lighter movies like 1984’s The Return of Pom Pom gave way to films like Tong – A Chinatown Story that would use his intricate and engrossing compositions for fuller affectations. Slowly but surely, Chan Wing Leung, began building to cross a line — to go from film composer to recording artist.
Signing to Hong Kong record label Tao, afforded Chan his first opportunity to make music outside of someone else’s cue. And much like fellow Berklee grad and Tao alum, David Mingyue Liang, this Cantonese New Age label allowed him to have the freedom and space to stretch out in a way that was unlike little else out there.
The main theme to Milk Of Love (母愛) finds Chan Wing Leung staking like-minded territory as American artist Mark Isham. Both are noted for their film work, but share a similar, panoramic, cinematic quality to their personal music. In Chan Wing Leung’s case it’s using a bevy of polyphonic hybrid synths to augment his textural trumpet-driven melodicism. Of course, the stars of these recordings are the impressionistic erhu and piano playing that seems to find various ways to burrow somewhere in every album track.
Chinese percussion fuses with inspired industrial electronic drum patterns, floating through droning pads on “大陸、激怒幹部、被封屋 = Motherland, Infuriated Cadre, Home Sealed Off”. Quick one or two minute songs allow Chan to stake one nocturnal mood to another and put the vision through a prism, revealing all the graduations possible. Ghostly, beat-driven tracks like “苦工、嫲嫲去世、搞四化 = Bitter Labour, Grandma Passed Away, Four Modernizations” appear to flow in and out of consciousness, give way to purel dream sonic levitations like “回鄉尋女（汕頭市）= Return Home To Search For A Lost Daughter”. A central theme, the central theme reappears as if to signal another state of play.
Milk Of Love (母愛) appears to concern itself with giving a voice to the modern Chinese moving from the country into the city. The music itself tries to treat traditional instruments as building blocks to move the experimental bits forward. When signs of modernity appear, like electric guitars and rock drums in “大鄉里、遇男友、離家出走 = Country Yokel, Encountering A Boyfriend, Runaway From Home”, the results are shocking because (knowingly) Chan highlights the datedness of these tools. Returning to a balance between electronic gadgetry and overwhelming “tradition” affords us a way to appreciate just how much more complete the balance is.
The future, if we’re going to succeed in it, isn’t divined through a process, chucking everything we can in or out from our past. This future we’re hearing, as heard in Milk Of Love (母愛), was found on a biforked path, where the present revealed every possibility to choose from was right in front of you — a third way, where both splinters come together right down the middle, on a path laid forward by the one looking right at it.