Like many blues fans, David Chen vividly remembers when he first heard Muddy Waters, the Mississippi guitar man whose raw and gritty sound paved the way for rock 'n' roll.
"I'd never heard anything like it," Chen says. "I didn't know what to make of it. I just liked it."
The song that got him was Long Distance Call. It took him a while to understand the reference to a "mule kickin' in your stall," but he was mesmerized.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MUDDY BASIN RAMBLERS
"It was his delivery. I could feel the tone of every word he sang and spoke," Chen says. "It was the way he carried emotion in the song. It has this force to it. It's not aggressive. But it's this big voice."
Chen came to Waters backwards, through rock bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Recently he's gone back even further, to the ragtime sounds of jug music with his band the Muddy Basin Ramblers, who play tomorrow evening at Huashan Culture Park (華山文化園).
The Muddy Basin Ramblers - "Muddy Basin" is for Taipei, which formerly was a muddy basin - formed from a group of friends who used to hang out and jam on a mountain between Muzha and Sindian.
Says Rambler Sandy Murray, who plays the saxophone, ukulele, guitar and mandolin: "David got us together as a band rather than just a bunch of semi-drunk foreigners."
Jug music, which has influenced artists like the Grateful Dead, started in the 1920s as "spasm" jazz in the American south. It was played by people who couldn't always afford real instruments. Guitars and mandolins were made from discarded guitar necks and gourds, combs and wax paper made kazoos, and the beat came from a washtub with a wooden neck.
The washtub bass usually has a single string and is played by standing on one foot with the other on the tub's rim. (Rambler T.C. Lin uses a plastic orange tub, a wooden stick from a hardware store and camping rope.) To get different notes, the staff is pulled back, changing the tension on the string.
At it's essence, jug music is street music, which is one of the attractions for the Ramblers.
In 2002, the Ramblers played one of their first live performances at Taipei's Migration Music Festival. They're regulars at the Hoping for Hoping peace concert and blues festivals in Taipei and Taichung and have a repertoire of more than 70 originals and covers. Seventeen songs are on their eponymous CD, which can be purchased at Bobwundaye (26, Ln 38 Chongde St, Taipei, 台北市崇德街38巷26號).
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
The Ministry of Education last month proposed a nationwide ban on mobile devices in schools, aiming to curb concerns over student phone addiction. Under the revised regulation, which will take effect in August, teachers and schools will be required to collect mobile devices — including phones, laptops and wearables devices — for safekeeping during school hours, unless they are being used for educational purposes. For Chang Fong-ching (張鳳琴), the ban will have a positive impact. “It’s a good move,” says the professor in the department of
Toward the outside edge of Taichung City, in Wufeng District (霧峰去), sits a sprawling collection of single-story buildings with tiled roofs belonging to the Wufeng Lin (霧峰林家) family, who rose to prominence through success in military, commercial, and artistic endeavors in the 19th century. Most of these buildings have brick walls and tiled roofs in the traditional reddish-brown color, but in the middle is one incongruous property with bright white walls and a black tiled roof: Yipu Garden (頤圃). Purists may scoff at the Japanese-style exterior and its radical departure from the Fujianese architectural style of the surrounding buildings. However, the property
RSS