SOUNDTRACK: VAN-ANH VANESSA VO-Tiny Desk Concert #329 (January 4, 2014).
One of the things I love about the Tiny Desk Concerts is that they expose listeners to artists that we’d never encounter anywhere else. As a person who loves rock, there’s no way I’d encounter this artist who plays traditional Vietnamese music. Even though I think she;s amazing, I’d have no exposure to her otherwise. So this is a wonderful treat–even more so to see her play in such a small space.
Van-Anh Vanessa Vo is a Vietnamese born musician living in America. Typically the field of Vietnamese traditional music is dominated by men, but she fought to learn and here she demonstrates her skill on three very different instruments.
The first song “Three-Mountain Pass” is played on the Hang. The Hang is like a steel drum with different sounds at all of the flattened indentations. There’s also a tone in the middle which resonates nicely. It is played with the fingers rather than mallets. It’s a cool instrument to be sure. For this song she also sings a Vietnamese song that is very breathy.
For the second song, she has taken Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3 and arranged it for dan Bau, the traditional 9th century Vietnamese monocord. The instrument (“invented by beggers on the street”) has a single string, but by bending it with a kind of whammy bar made from a water buffalo horn. Despite having one string the bar allows her to go 5 steps up and 1 and a n half octaves down. She plays a backing track of a while playing the main melody line on the dan Bau. Watching her play this one string and get ting so many interesting sounds out of it is very cool.
“Go Hunting” is an original composition played on the dan T’rung, a bamboo xylophone from Vietnam’s south highlands. This instrument, which looks a bit like a skeleton, is struck with double-headed mallets. She says on the album she has a taiko drum, but there is no drum here. But she doesn’t need it as the song begins slowly but grows faster and faster with the crowd offering some extra percussion. She plays some amazingly fast melodies as the song reaches its climax.
[READ: March 19, 2016] Moomin Volume 8
Moomin Book 8 and every subsequent book is made entirely of strips written and drawn by Lars Jansson. These stories originally ran in the Evening News, London 1960-1975.
The story is much more reflective of Lars now. His art is slightly different is subtle ways, but you can see him using his sown style rather than trying to exactly mimic Tove’s.
The chapters are “Moomin Family Robinson,” “Artists in Moominvalley,” “Sniff’s Holiday Camp” and “The Inspector Nephew” (more…)
I Just Read About That... 