Photo of Su Yang. [Photo: bj.8j.com]

Welcome back to this edition of   China Beat on China International. I'm Xu Jue. In today's show, we hear music from a man who sees himself not as a musician but rather as a kind of messenger through whom music comes.

Welcome to this edition of China Beat on China Radio International. I'm Xu Jue. In today's show, we hear music from a man who sees himself not as a musician but rather as a kind of messenger through whom music comes.

Let's open the show with his song, Fresh Flowers in Full Bloom.

(Fresh Flowers in Full Bloom)

That song was Fresh Flowers in Full Bloom, by Su Yang, a "music man" who grew up in Yinchuan City in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. With its strong evocation of Chinese traditional music, the song's actually an adaptation of a Ningxia local folk song and includes some song-like talking in the middle.

Su Yang told me, in our brief chat, that he likes this form of singing very much, as the words and melody correspond so closely. So let's hear, in his own words now, how he grew up to be a man in love with traditional Chinese folk songs, and how he adapted them to the present day.

(Su Yang's words)

Su Yang was first interested in traditional Chinese painting, but while at vocational school in Xi'an, he met a fellow student whose guitar-playing deeply impressed him. So he traded a month's living costs to buy his first guitar and started to practice.

After several years of a nomadic life, especially in western China, Su Yang settled back in his hometown, Yinchuan, and formed the first local rock band, named Lucidity. After the band temporarily split, he went to Beijing to broaden his perspectives but, finding it was not the mecca of guitar players he had hoped for, went back and forth between there and home.

Su Yang resumed his local band and began to take on writing and composition. But though it gained popularity with local listeners, it was still somewhat directionless, and Su Yang called it off again in the late 1990s.

During this apparently fruitless period, however, he became acquainted with African aboriginal tribal music, particularly its ritualistic elements, that were being recorded without any post-production. Somehow, these sounds resonated with the Chinese folk music he grew up with. Inspired by the African rhythms he heard, he started to take more notice of the Hua'er local music style of his hometown, along with other folk singing styles like Qing Qiang and Xian Xiao. And he wondered why African-American music had developed over time into various styles like blues, jazz, and R&B, while Chinese traditional music had long languished on the verge of oblivion.
Su Yang had already recorded a demo by that time, but he felt the Western rock and roll style he began with didn't fit his own expression. So he began adapting local folk music, beginning with the song, The Plain of NingXia.