HUONG THANH AND NGYUEN LE

From fRoots May 2002

Vietnam. Just the word conjures up images of war. Even if you don't remember it in real time, all those films have provided their own images. So much so, it's almost become a war of everyone's imagination. The realities of an ancient or a contemporary culture of Vietnam are all but forgotten.

The country has changed immeasurably since the war. The Americans may have lost the war but perhaps won the battle. Ironically, seemingly everyone in Vietnam is in a rush to embrace the American dollar and anything else America throws at them, including music. Several years ago I travelled for six weeks in Vietnam, from south to north, and apart from the obvious tourist shows, or the odd anomaly on the street, didn't really come across that much music that I could call, well, Vietnamese. And nothing that was remotely like what I was really looking for; something modern, with it's root in some form of tradition. Instead I had to go to Paris for that.

Duc Des Lombards, is a small, dark jazz club in the centre of Paris. Huong Thanh is here tonight with Nguyen Le and their Dragonfly group, mixing up Vietnamese traditional music, with all kinds of extraneous influences. The audience is similarly mixed and kind of reflects the music itself.

At the front sits a row of rather serious looking, smartly dressed Vietnamese. Their attention is focused on Huong Thanh, dressed in traditional costume, who has one of those beguiling, beautiful voices that floats around a melody, that only singers from east Asia seem able to do. She addresses the audience purely in Vietnamese. We are handed small envelopes with fake money inside and the message, "Bonne Annee du Cheval!". Tonight we are also celebrating the Vietnamese New Year. As I discover later, these kind of "feasts" are intrinsically linked to traditional music.

Behind Thanh sits the Dragonfly group, from different nationalities and backgrounds. They are fronted by the cool looking figure of Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le. He's the man behind the sound as producer and arranger. Le comes from a jazz background, as technically brilliant as he is creative and sensitive in mixing Vietnamese music with jazz and other styles. The rest of the packed audience are mostly here, I suspect, for the jazz side of things. Le speaks in French, translating Thanh's stories about the songs. Those songs from Thanh's albums, Moon and Wind and Dragonfly, sound much as on record, but with extended improvisational passages. It's a mixture that everyone seems to appreciate as they perform three sets over three hours. Next day I'm at an archetypal and airy Parisian flat in Barbes, in the heart of the North African district of Paris. There's a buzzing energy on the street but an immediate soothing calm as I enter. As well as his flat, this is Nguyen Le's soundproofed studio, where Huong Thanh's two albums were recorded. Tastefully decorated, even the flat is a crafty mixture of west and east. Thanh is here, and the group's French keyboard player Dominique Borker. We all sit around a huge table, the coffee is flowing, and perhaps as this is Paris, over the next few hours the interview turns gradually into a philosophical debate.

I wondered if the Vietnamese at the Duc the night before, had known Thanh for a long time. "Yes, all those at the front, who always get their early. They've known me since I was seventeen. I was a kind of star in this Vietnamese association, where I had a lot of work because I could sing every style from pop to traditional. I was working within the Vietnamese communities, singing every weekend and all over Europe as well, but only within the communities."

Even with the change of direction, and forays into Western music, Thanh's Vietnamese fans have stuck with her. "They love my music now, because nearly all there is these days is pop music" she says. "In fact our music has a modern side to it," chips in Nguyen Le, " it's more modern than much pop in a way, but when talking about tradition, it has a more pure tradition which is why they like it. In addition, Vietnamese people can see that Vietnamese culture is recognized and liked by Western people which is very unusual. The Vietnamese are proud of us. As you saw last night, it's very new to do that music in a jazz club."

Back in Vietnam is traditional music really that hard to find or did I just look in the wrong places? "It's very difficult to hear the real traditional music" says Le. "You have to organize private concerts and bring the musicians to you. I was in Hanoi one and a half years ago, and asked in music or culture related shops in Hanoi, but there wasn't much. One of the best places is the Water Puppet theatre, but that's just one style. Otherwise at the Hue festival there's beautiful traditional music."

According to Thanh it's a similar story in the south. "I was in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) about a year ago, but there's little traditional music, it's disappearing. There's a small theatre dedicated to Cai Luong, but it's only open on special days such as feasts. There's a conservatory in Saigon where they teach Cai Luong, but it's disappearing now because the youth don't care anymore. Videos have taken over from the live shows. When people graduate from the conservatory they don't have any work."

Cai Luong is a kind of theatre, which was revised in 1917 by a group of southern Vietnamese. They encompassed elements of other traditional theatre, Hat Boi and Hat Cheo, plus French influences, and gradually it took shape as a modern theatre.

It was within the Cai Luong tradition that Huong Thanh grew up. "My father, (Huun Phuoc) was one of the biggest stars of the style. I was born into a very musical context in Saigon. My father was always singing, and I was surrounded by musicians. I was very precocious, by the age of eight I was already singing on TV and following my father around to his shows."

In 1977, two years after the war ended, her entire family moved to France. "I had a French Great grandfather from Corsica, and because of that my father had dual nationality. The government asked those people to choose between nationalities, so he chose to be French and came here. He was afraid of having a hard time with the political situation in Vietnam. I was 17 at the time, and we went to Marseille and soon integrated into the Vietnamese community. My father continued to sing, which he did until he died. I started to have private music lessons when we came to Marseille, and I too started immediately to sing in the Vietnamese community, mainly doing pop music, and at the weekends, Cai Luong. Then we moved to Paris and continued this lifestyle. My style of singing now is still rooted in Cai Luong, which is the deepest thing in me. "

However no one, including Thanh, is performing the real Cai Luong in Paris anymore. "There was a group but now there is nothing. All the musicians have died. It has no relationship with Western instruments and there aren't any musicians here to play it. Plus it's a theatre, so there has to be a stage and costumes, not to mention an audience! Since my father died, I've very much missed singing this style. From 1995 when I met Nguyen Le we haven't done that much Cai Luong. The music we do now is several styles from several regions. The music of the south and north is very different, but I learnt three styles, south, north and central. Usually a traditional singer doesn't do that.

"That's because I asked her to, " says Le. "I'm not that precise or exclusive. I just hear some nice melodies and want to work on those. The first thing is if I like it, if it inspires me, if it gives a good emotion or vibe and then if it has the space to be accompanied by something new. I tried to work on Cai Luong but haven't yet found a good way to do it. "

Nguyen Le was born in Paris. His parents, both Vietnamese, came to France after the end of French colonization in 1954. "My father came to study because it's a big part of Confucianism, so he was studying many things; Philosophy, Chinese, History and Economics. My parents are from the same generation as Ho Chi Minh or Polpot, all learning about Marxism here! Now my father's retired but he was a teacher of Educational Sciences at the Sorbonne. My family was not musical, but they were music fans and I grew up listening to Vietnamese music. Especially at the New Year and at different feasts I would hear lots of music."

Gradually however, Le forgot about his Vietnamese roots. "I was very much French and didn't like the Vietnamese community. Trips were organized for the kids to go to holiday camps, so I didn't want those associations. I had a long period when I forgot about Vietnam. Then I started to play the guitar just by ear for two or three years. At first I liked hard and progressive rock, and then I became fascinated with the sound of jazz so I learnt all the standards and learnt to read music. I wanted to write my own compositions and wasn't into accompanying songs, so from the beginning I was improvising. Then I decided I had to do something more personal, which is when Vietnam came back into my brain. "

I wondered what inspired the new direction. "I had the idea for a while, but had to wait until I was mature enough to start to do something with my own roots. Jazz was like a language and I needed to process the guitar and style I had chosen. The real start was when I did my first record in 1989 called Miracles. When you start to do a project on your own, the first question is what is your identity, to express something different from other people. The most simple solution is to get back to your roots, because that's what defines you. There's some ideas on that record for what I thought could be the Asian sound in music or in jazz. At that time though, I was too intellectual about what could be an Asian sound. If you play the black keys on the piano, you immediately have the pentatonic scale but I hated that, it was too simple. I was looking for something really deep. I found the answer in 1995 when I met Thanh and started to work on the real Vietnamese traditional music because the best thing is to work with other musicians and study the real music."

The next record on which Le explored his roots was Tales From Vietnam, which featured Thanh's vocals on some songs. "This came from an offer from Radio France who gave me a budget to do something completely new, so I thought this was a good opportunity to do this kind of thing. I had to form a band, had to meet people I could work with and meet traditional musicians. That's why I'm still a jazz musician, because that live interplay and work is something essential for me. There was a little feast and show at the Masion de Vietnam, a little cultural centre, and there were several singers who came to sing two or three songs. Thanh was one of them. She was recommended to me, but also she was young, whereas the others were from another generation. Being young, I hoped, she could be open to my strange experiences."

Open she is, but it took Thanh a while to get used to the jazz influences. "When we first met I didn't know anything about jazz. In the beginning I didn't really like some of the music the band was playing. It was too noisy. Then naturally and gradually it came into my body. Now it's there in the way I move, whereas the traditional way is to stand still and express everything through the voice and face. Another thing I love is that everybody in the band is very important and has their own function, which is like it is in theatre. Compared to pop music, in jazz it's really a band experience. When I'm not singing on stage I listen to the improvisation of the musicians. I would love to improvise myself but at the moment I don't. Maybe later, why not?"

If she does try, perhaps Thanh won't find it such an alien experience. "Traditional music is very improvised" says Le, "it's not completely free improvising and it's not based on chord sequences, but there's a rhythmic sequence you have to respect in Cai Luong and in the tone of the words. There are five accents, and if the accent goes high you have to sing a higher note than the one before. The relationship between the notes is not that fixed, you just have to go up or down, otherwise you change the meaning. I love the idea that the text has its own internal melody. It's a great concept."

For Thanh their meeting also opened up new opportunities. "What it's meant is I that I can get out of the small, closed community. My sister Huong Lan is a star in California where there is a big Vietnamese community. She even has her own record company, but it's mainly for pop music. She knows the tradition but the public ask for pop. Because the Western public has liked our music, the Vietnamese people think they should listen again to the traditional music and then they like it. When we had the big feasts such as at New Year, when the traditional music started, the young people all left. Now, some young people are coming back to those traditional styles because of us."Is this their main motivation, to make Vietnamese music more popular with the Vietnamese? "It's both sides, the westerners and the Vietnamese here and in Vietnam." says Thanh. "One tune we played last night, the Black Horse song is a tune which disappeared from the Vietnamese repertoire because everyone thought it was an old tune and nobody cared about it. After we did it on Tales of Vietnam a similar version was put on some CDs and videos. There are cafes and bars now in Vietnam where you can listen to this version. So I'm happy if people in Vietnam can have a new look on the tradition because of what we do. My dream is that more people, whoever they are, can love the tradition."

For Le, it's more of a personal search. "I'm doing this primarily to recreate my identity, to find my Vietnamese soul that I lost because I was born in Paris. Then I want to bring the music to the widest possible public because I love people who love Vietnam."

Does he feel he's getting towards reaching these goals? "I've always thought life is a way, not about a goal. You construct your life through the way you work. I never think that at some point I've succeeded. It's a continuous search and while you are are working you find new goals. At the same time as working with Thanh, I'm still doing these very different projects. My next solo album is a project on Jimi Hendrix! Then I did a north African project, and I'm still doing these jazz things. I love to do all these together, mixing things. It's a long process of constructing an identity, of every experience communicating with the other. While working on traditional music I'm working on my guitar style, adding some Asian sounds or technique or phrasing. This I can then apply in a non Asian context. I might be playing jazz with only jazz musicians but I have that Vietnamese sound that I created on my guitar."

The songs on both albums, which are given English titles as well as their original Vietnamese, are nearly all based on traditional tunes. "After Dragonfly we are getting to the point where we are going to have less and less traditional melodies to work on." says Le. "The most beautiful are on Tales of Vietnam, for Moon and Wind it was a long search and for Dragonfly even longer. Some melodies when you take them raw, are a little less interesting so I had to do more arranging and producing to make them more appealing. For the next one, we'll have to write some new songs."

Those traditional songs, typically date back about 100 years. "The lyrics are mostly about the same as everywhere else, love." explains Thanh. "But in Vietnam love is expressed in every possible form. Not just between a man and a woman, but within a family. There are lots of lullabies expressing love for the children, and sometimes about friendship. On Tales From Vietnam, there's a song called Don't You Go Away My Friend which used to be sung at some feasts in Vietnam. In the north, around a river called Bakning, several villages used to get together. Young girls from one village sing with the young guys from another village, in a question and answer form. It's about friendship with a little humour and seduction. It's very important for me to sing these words. Sometimes I like the tune less than the words. I find the words more inspiring.""On Ten Reasons for Loving You "(the first track on Dragonfly), adds Le "it's describing ten reasons why girls from Hue are so beautiful. The reasons are the whiteness of her teeth, or the way she walks or the blackness of her hair. The tune Two Sisters is a more historical song about the first independence of Vietnam in about 40AD".

Some of the songs are ones that both Thanh and Le grew up with, others are more recent discoveries. "Firstly they're the ones I heard in my childhood" says Le, "the ones my mother sung as lullabies. Then I bought every CD I could of traditional music. Thanh though, knows thousands of songs, she's a great resource. "

"I listen still to lots of old records and I have books of written music" she confirms, "Then I learnt about northern Vietnamese music and then I had the opportunity to learn the central style from a teacher from Hue".

The city of Paris, with it's multicultural mix of musicians, has also had it's own influence on Le. "I did a North African record with Karim Ziad the drummer with Cheb Mami, and we invited Thanh to sing on one tune. With this latest album, I wanted to open up even more than on the last record, so I invited Richard Bona, a famous singer and bass player from Cameroon who used to live in Paris and now lives in New York. This idea came about to have a duet between Thanh and him, on the title track, Dragonfly. I love to do that kind of thing, it gives such a strong new sound, and I like bringing together a new meeting like that. We have in the band a bass player from Martinique, Michel Alibo, although on record we used another Martiniquan bass player, Etienne Mbappe. On percussion there's Francois Verly, who is more of a jazz musician and plays lots of instruments. He also loves Asia."

There is also the small matter of the French keyboard player, Dominique Borker, sitting two feet away from me, who is helping to translate. "Dominique helped me a lot to produce and arrange. " says Le. "She played on some songs on both of Thanh's albums."

Playing the traditional instruments in the Dragonfly group is Hao Nhien Pham. "He's my age" says Le, "at the same time that I was learning jazz, he was learning Vietnamese traditional music. He was also born in Paris, so we went in a different direction but came back together." Pham plays an amazing range of instruments from all over Vietnam, including the bamboo flute, (sao) lutes, (dan nguyet) fiddle (dan goc) zither (dan cheng) and monocord (dan bao), plus a Vietnamese percussion instrument with coins as it's metal shaker.

On record, the instrumentation struck me as not purely Vietnamese, but with elements of other Asian countries, particularly China and Indonesia. "Yes, that's my fantasy" says Le, "Thanh's singing is pure Vietnamese, but the instrumentation is my imagination. Talking as a producer, when I'm working on Thanh's CD and arranging Vietnamese melodies, I'm finding ideas that would work with the melody and open the space." I wondered if he had heard the music of the Japanese producers who have had a similar idea of producing a pan-Asian sound. "I'm a big fan of Sakamoto, especially the album Beauty. I like it that he had the courage to mix all those things together. Of course I also love gamelan."

Jazz and world music have always been fairly comfortable bedfellows, especially in the hands of German labels such as ECM or Enja. Perhaps it's no accident that Huong Thanh and Nguyen Le record for another pioneering German label, ACT, founded by an ex-major record company mogul. As well as quality, this project has "vision" written all over it.

Huong Thanh and Nguen Le have their own individual motivations, but a shared passion for trying to put Asia, and Vietnam in particular, on the world music map. "I've worked a lot with African musicians" says Le "and in a way I'm very jealous about the state of African music within world music. The answer I have in my mind is about rhythm. Those cultures of Africa and Latin America have a strong rhythm which is a universal language, and I think Asia lacks that. There's not that strength of rhythm, that immediacy. I would love to see Asian music have the same success as African music."

In the same way that Paris provided a base for African musicians, and was partly responsible for introducing the rest of Europe to the riches of African music, just maybe Huong Thanh and Ngyuen Le can do something similar for Asian music. "In Vietnam, it's more difficult for me to express my love of tradition," laments Thanh, "because the people in Vietnam don't care about it anymore. The public's taste changed in the last 20 years. Now people have more of a superficial taste, dictated by youth and beauty. If I wanted to sing in Vietnam I would have to sing pop, and I would now be an old women because they want young girls, model types. It's not about talent anymore, but in Paris, people have more respect for quality."

She admits to feeling like a foreigner when she's in Vietnam. "I lost 25 years of the evolution of Vietnam. When I'm in France I miss Vietnam, but in Vietnam, I miss France. The problem for me when I'm in Vietnam, is that I'm looking for something that doesn't exist anymore, the Vietnam I loved before coming here. So that's why it's important to keep the tradition because that's the only thread I have to this past Vietnam."

Musically, that past Vietnam, and its most exciting development is existing right now, in Paris.