Looking down the promenade in the drizzle of Friday night toward the open-air plaza at the southern end of the new Bitan (碧潭) riverside development, my first impression was a slight sense of disappointment at the small cluster of people gathered around the stage. Umbrellas were out, the staff were handing out plastic raincoats, and it seemed that the Migration Music Festival (流浪之歌音樂節) had once again failed to elude the attention of the rain gods.
This free concert was the grand opening of the festival, with five international folk music groups and Taiwan’s own indie-folk celebrity Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥) participating. When I arrived, Oren Fried and Armand Sabach of the Kol Oud Tof Trio from southern Israel were holding the audience rapt. Despite the poor weather, there was clearly a core of supporters who were there to stay. As the concert progressed, the performers, each in their own way, began to draw in the crowd, which grew to a pretty respectable size by the end of the show.
As lovely as the venue on the banks of the Xindian River (新店溪) was, I couldn’t help but speculate that this new location in Taipei County might have kept audiences away, and the performance space at the very end of the promenade certainly reduced the number of passers-by who stopped to take in the music.
Nevertheless, among those who were there, the mood was determinedly celebratory. Lin helped lift the atmosphere with two new numbers from an upcoming album with his own brand of understated intensity. There was clearly a small group in the audience to support Nityalila Band from the Philippines, and Habib Koite from Mali exercised his own special magic, delighting the audience by coming off the stage to sing without a microphone. The concert came to a rousing conclusion with Lo Cor de la Plana from Marseilles, whose simple mix of vocals, clapping and percussion, which seemed to reach back to the minstrelsy of the Middle Ages, with hints of North African and Middle Eastern influences, brought the concert to a close on a high note.
Trees Music & Art (大大樹音樂圖像) had, as always, provided commendable production values, and disruption from the weather was kept at a minimum. The mix of musical styles was well thought out, ranging from the protest rock of Nityalila Band with anthems about supporting local communities and fighting for freedom, to the lilting chants of Lo Cor de la Plana with their songs in the ancient Occitan language, to Lin’s songs in Hakka about family life in southern Taiwan. It was an enormous pity that more people were not on hand to enjoy this rich selection.
The free outdoor concert was followed by two days of indoor concerts by the visiting groups. Having criticized Lin’s most recent album Growing Up Wild (野生) as being self-involved and anemic (reviewed in the Taipei Times on May 27, 2009), it seemed only just to hear him perform these tracks live, so I was among the painfully small crowd inside the Guangfu Hall (光復廳) of Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall (台北中山堂) on Saturday.
Most of the numbers performed were taken from Growing Up Wild, but in this live performance there seemed to be a much better balance between Lin’s earnestness and stark performance style and regular collaborator Ken Ohtake’s subtle accompanying guitar, which proved vital in providing an undercurrent of humor and melodic elements. The songs I had found bland and unappealing on the CD came alive, literally. Lin is never very talkative on stage, but his occasional comments about his family, and particularly the serious consideration recently given to taking up the family business of pig farming, helped create an easy intimacy that made it possible to forget about all those empty seats.
At the free concert the night before, Lin had performed two numbers from an upcoming album currently being developed with Ohtake and longtime collaborator Zhong Yong-feng (鍾永豐). He performed both again at Zhongshan Hall, and they proved the highlight of the concert, suggesting that working with material less intimately related to his own life freed Lin up musically, diverting some of his earnestness from a sometimes cloying sentimentality to areas of musical invention. The two days of music, if nothing else, should certainly whet the appetite for Lin’s next album.
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