In Taiwan’s folk music scene there are few musicians as storied as Kimbo Hu (胡德夫), who performs at Riverside Live House in Taipei tonight.
The 59-year-old singer will oblige the audience with a few of the songs that cemented his reputation as a political activist and earned him the title “the father of folk music.” Expect to hear his classic tune Standing On My Land, a bluesy number full of rousing Aboriginal chants in the chorus.
Hu, a Puyuma Aboriginal from the Taitung area, got his start singing in Taipei coffeehouses during the 1970s, when Western folk music was all the rage on college campuses. He gained nationwide fame for his rendition of Lee Shuang-tze’s (李雙澤) ballad Formosa (美麗島) but was blacklisted from radio and TV by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which at the time was wary of anything remotely anti-government.
A tireless campaigner for Aboriginal rights throughout the 1980s, Hu retired from the spotlight for much of the 1990s because of illness. He made a comeback in the early noughties, and recorded his first full-length album in 2005, In a Flash, which contained many of his signature songs and garnered several Golden Melody Awards.
But tonight’s show will be more than a mere revisiting of the past. Hu, who usually performs solo on piano, is trying something new: playing with a young backing band.
He has called upon Wild Fire Music (野火樂集), a record label and collective of mostly 30-something Aboriginal musicians, to help out. Hu’s band includes guitarist Gelresai (陳世川), bassist Wang Chi-san (王繼三), and keyboardist and producer Cheng Chieh-ren (鄭捷任), who also serves as band director.
Cheng says the band’s set includes several folk classics chosen by Hu and sung in English, as well as a few songs from one of Hu’s past projects, Blacklist Studio (黑名單工作室).
Even though Hu and members of Wild Fire Music are old friends and have performed together before, tonight’s show is intended to mark the start of a more long-term collaboration, Cheng said.
Following Hu’s set will be a performance from another Wild Fire-affiliated group, Beautiful Haiyan (美麗心民謠), which consists of vocalists Leo Chen (陳永龍), Hsiao Mei (小美), Linnga (小鳳), Tipus (小俐) and Wang Yu-hsiu (汪裕修). Their set will cover a range of songs, from traditional Puyuma numbers to contemporary Aboriginal songs sung in Mandarin.
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
Three big changes have transformed the landscape of Taiwan’s local patronage factions: Increasing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involvement, rising new factions and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) significantly weakened control. GREEN FACTIONS It is said that “south of the Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), there is no blue-green divide,” meaning that from Yunlin County south there is no difference between KMT and DPP politicians. This is not always true, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Traditionally, DPP factions are viewed as national entities, with their primary function to secure plum positions in the party and government. This is not unusual
US President Donald Trump’s bid to take back control of the Panama Canal has put his counterpart Jose Raul Mulino in a difficult position and revived fears in the Central American country that US military bases will return. After Trump vowed to reclaim the interoceanic waterway from Chinese influence, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an agreement with the Mulino administration last week for the US to deploy troops in areas adjacent to the canal. For more than two decades, after handing over control of the strategically vital waterway to Panama in 1999 and dismantling the bases that protected it, Washington has
RSS