Scott Prairie considers himself a spiritually oriented person — and maybe for good reason.
Fifteen years ago in New York, he took an electric Fender Precision bass, removed one string, and tuned the remaining three strings to GDG. He used the instrument to write songs and try to get signed by a record label. What he didn't realize at the time was that his modified P-bass sounded a lot like some traditional Asian instruments he would encounter after he bumped into Mia Hsieh (謝韻雅), married her, moved to Taiwan, and started a world music group with her called A Moving Sound.
"It's like there's some element of fate," said Prairie, as he described the similarities between his three-stringed bass and the zhongruan (中阮), or "moon guitar," a four-stringed Chinese lute tuned GDGD. "I was really drawn to this kind of simple, open-tuning system. And then I found this instrument in Taiwan that looked exactly like it."
PHOTO: COURTESY OF A MOVING SOUND
Taiwan has been good to Prairie, whose group plays The Wall next Friday. Both of A Moving Sound's albums — 2004's Pacu's Trip and last year's Songs Beyond Words — have been well-received by local critics. Eslite Reader (誠品好讀雜誌) magazine just named Songs Beyond Words one of the year's best in the world music category, and the album was nominated for a Golden Melody award.
More important, the government has sponsored concerts outside of Taiwan, and the group has been featured on the BBC World Service and National Geographic's Web site. A Moving Sound played the New York City theater where Elvis Costello recently did a concert with Roseanne Cash. Foreign critics have called the group "one of the most original outfits working in the world music arena today" (Nationalgeographic.com); and "delicately balanced between many worlds" ... an "artful expression of the universal human condition" (Globalrhythm.net). With the exception of one-off recordings of traditional Aboriginal music, this is the best attention a world music group from Taiwan has received in recent years.
One of the more interesting pieces on Songs Beyond Words is Ku Chin (東風), which was inspired by the guqin (古琴), an ancient Chinese stringed instrument that sounds a bit like a modern slide guitar or pizzicato cello. Prairie plays the zhonruan on some songs, but he uses his P-bass for Ku Chin.
"The guqin was used originally not for performance but for meditation," Prairie explained, "It's very internal and very spacey, but it's also a deep part of Chinese history." He tries to evoke both elements in the song. "I do a lot of harmonics and tapping and sliding," he said, "because that's what they do when they play the guqin."
"It's a very unique way of using the bass," he noted.
Once Prairie composed his part of Ku Chin, he turned the song over to Hsieh. "What Mia did was really cool," he said, "she totally went outside and ... created a melody based on the classical Chinese opera style called nanguan (南管)."
"That's how we work together. I create something that has a narrative and all these different ways of being inspired, and then I throw it at her and she completely has her own creative experience with it," he said. "Her main influences are not even music. They're theater and dance. She's very into the story and into the movement."
Ku Chin is a good example of what critics mean when they call A Moving Sound a delicate balance of East and West. On one side stands Hsieh's singing, an ancient poem in an old dialect that modern Taiwanese cannot understand, along with an erhu (二胡) that overlaps with her voice and then goes solo. On the other there's Prairie's modified Fender, which plays an Asian melody but with a rock 'n' roll sensibility, as if Lou Barlow were meditating on an electric bass.
It's a mix that, so far, has earned more fans abroad than in Taiwan. Prairie said A Moving Sound's local distributor, Jingo, has sold 150 units of Songs Beyond Words. The group has sold 600 to 700 more CDs at concerts. "We have two lives," Prairie said, "One is Taiwan, and the other is international. They're very different ... . Sometimes it's most difficult to get recognition in your own backyard."
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