A performance video featuring jazz bassist Vincent Hsu (徐崇育) and his ensemble, Soy La Ley Afro-Cuban Jazz Band, premiered on Facebook on Friday.
The performance was the result of a collaboration between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in New York and the Rhode Island-based organizer FirstWorks.
The video is to be available on the FirstWorks Web site (http://first-works.org/events/vincent-hsu-soy-la-ley-afro-cuban-band) until Friday.
Photo: CNA
The performance, titled “Jazz Changed, Jazz Changes, Jazz Changin’,” aims to show that jazz is alive and well beyond its birthplace, and as suggested by the title, shows how the genre is always evolving, the organizer said.
The video also features interviews with prominent musicians and academics, including Hsu’s mentor, bassist Cecil McBee, historian Loren Schoenberg, drummer and educator Jerome Jennings, and poet and writer Naomi Extra.
“Jazz is one of the ultimate fashions of expressing oneself, especially because it is spontaneous. No wonder the world at large loves this music, because it never repeats itself,” McBee said.
The video was shot in four locations: Tianhou Temple (天后宮) in Changhua County’s Lukang Township (鹿港), the Jianguo Market in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店), the Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles in Chiayi County and the Lavender Cottage tourist area in Taichung.
The music changes and shifts in each location, becoming attuned to the local area while maintaining the essence of jazz, organizers said.
“I think the definition of jazz is the tradition, and the tradition is whatever it is you. The second thing is contemporary times and contemporary culture. And you add those two things, and you get what I think is jazz of 2020,” Schoenberg has said.
Hsu has been heavily influenced by New York’s Spanish Harlem, where he launched his music career, and his music brings together elements of New York jazz, Latin music, African polyrhythms and Taiwanese composition.
During a tour in 2019, Hsu told reporters that an Asian man playing jazz in the US was similar to a foreigner performing in gezai opera in Taiwan.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater