It doesn’t escape me that we restart our journey through the world of Chinese “New World” music right where the cradle of its civilization began, along the banks of the Huang He River (known elsewhere as the Yellow River). Spanning over 5,000 kilometers, nine provinces, from Qinghai to Inner Mongolia — all the way to its delta in Shandong, it’s those sometimes roaring waters that have allowed all people living along its close to million kilometer valley to flourish for millenia, to advance culturally, spiritually and personally. Inspiring both fear and aspiration, this eternal tributary has, as you can surmise, endless stories touching on its provenance.
In music, as heard in the work of Sojiro, or more recently, Yu Su, it’s this Yellow River that can find a way to burrow very intimate feelings through different kinds of highly personal work, taking you right at the river’s edge, giving you a peek into its temporal power. This is what makes Zhou Zhi-yong’s The Great Yellow River just as impressive. Switching its focus from the personal to the communal, it’s his truly panoramic and macrovision inspiration that embodies a different breath, capturing the immensity of its divining source, through music that simply sounds as imposing as it ever was (and will be) far beyond its delta.
Zhou Zhi-yong’s career began not along the Huang He but near the Yangtze and Han rivers, in his birthplace in Wuhan. There he would enroll and prosper in Wuhan’s Conservatory of Music parlaying his studies into a stint overseeing their storied Song and Dance Theater in Hubei. Although increasingly steeped in China’s ethnic folk music, Zhou had grown restless, looking to experiment with modern musical vocabularies.
By the early ‘90s, Zhou would head to Zhuhai in Macau, trying his hand at music production, where he’d encounter and learn the contours of modern synthesizers and computer recording. And then to push himself further, he’d sojourn to Beijing where he’d wind up in the more labor-intensive and deadline-oriented film and commercial work environments. For the next decade or so, Zhou would create countless soundtracks for others trying to create his form of “new music”, as fellow aesthetic-brethren Cong Su tried to.
It was at the turn of the century, in 1999, when the groundbreaking, Hong Kong-based HUGO record label reached out to Zhou offering him the freedom and funding he needed to contribute his particular vision for their new music/Chinese New Age imprint, KIIGO. In Zhou’s vision, this album would be a touchstone recording trying to show the ability of China’s “ethnic” music as having myriad viable paths forward in the rapidly modernizing world. His own attempts would try to draw from different regions, different cultures, and present them united not by some hegemony but by a shared national (and not nationalistic) aesthetic that one could palpably hear. The Yellow River always appeared to be the environmental key to hold all these ideas together.
For the span of a month, in June 1999, Zhou wrote, arranged, and directed a slew of choral groups tasked to add vocals to his The Great Yellow River. From the more traditional Beijing Chamber Choral Group to the more folk and ethnic-oriented ones like Beijing’s Indigenous Choral Group and the Charm Choral Group, they all added distinct dialects, phrasing, and touches, more than hinting at the kaleidoscopic vocalese one can discover when digging deep through Chinese music far from its mainland. The rest of the sonic atmosphere would be a collaborative work between his breathtaking electro-acoustic instruments, and musicality, and that of traditional musicians versed in Chinese instruments like the erhu, dizi, shakuhachi, and xun. China’s Prime Orchestra would take the unlikely, but quite brilliant, role of adding hypnotic edges to Zhou’s engrossing arrangements.
Songs like opener “Rippled River”, according to Zhou’s liner notes, were distinctly made to affect, via harmony and sonic flavor, the feel of flowing down the river and watching the rippling waters. Hearing it with virgin ears, is something one never forgets, as the melodies and arrangements are distinctly Chinese but distinctly contemporary, shockingly so, drawing down to us powerful transmutation of those elements in a way that is new to our musical vocabulary. The Beijing Chamber Choral Group tries to become the bright sun trying to part imposing clouds that rain down the thunderous electronic percussion of “Source” — otherworldly, as a definition or a word, would understate just how impressive Zhou’s musical vision is here.
The title track cements this musical push through force further by unabashedly using power, volume, and complexity to recreate that impossibly slipstream terrestrial force that is the Yellow River, using an almost danceable groove to represent the strength of indigenous vocal folk music and a sway for those sailing its roaring waters.
What do you say about tracks like “Beauty”? For Zhou, he attempted to arrange parts for the Beijing Indigenous Choral Group that could float above his cascading melodies, inspiring a carefree feeling. Once again, as a listener, one can’t help but feel like on an album like The Great Yellow River one must set aside what one knows and just float along. The album as a whole, and even at the track level, has its own rhythm and muse that richly rewards close listens. Songs like “Hometown” hint at a lingering nostalgia available for those not new to the region. Closer listens, take you — a person who’s far from the source — vividly to its nexus, unafraid to throw you in its waters.
Mystery of mysteries will envelop foregoing tracks. “Misty Hills” uses verbarating arpeggios to place female vocalist Tan Jing’s voices far away. “Golden Yellow” presents almost beatific, wordless chants enclosing on album vocalist MVP, Wu Yan-Ze’s spirited poetry, extolling the gifts of the Yellow River on its “yellow” wheat grains and culture. Then the album ends as it begins, trying to balance the thread of beauty, hopes, and dreams, with a river that has its own course to run. In this final element, everything that makes the human aspect meaningful, subsumes itself into an even more powerful story, tying us to a land that outlives us in the only way we know how, with elemental music (just like Zhou’s) divining a story that still needs to be heard.
As I said before, in The Great Yellow River, these are our new musical stories.