VISIONARY PIPA SOLOIST, VOCALIST AND COMPOSER MIN XIAO-FEN SET TO RELEASE WHITE LOTUS VIA OUTSIDE IN MUSIC
Co-produced by multi-Grammy winning recording engineer Jim Anderson, original soundtrack features acclaimed guitarist Rez Abbasi
White Lotus is multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Min Xiao-Fen’s original soundtrack to The Goddess, a 1934 silent film from China’s cinematic golden age. Best known for her genre-breaking performances on the four-string pipa, Min has collaborated with artists like Wadada Leo Smith, Randy Weston, John Zorn and Bjork. White Lotus also features the work of acclaimed guitarist Rez Abbasi, co-producer and multi-Grammy winning recording engineer Jim Anderson, and Grammy-nominated immersive sound producer Ulrike Schwarz.
Min Xiao-Fen arrived in the United States in 1992 feeling a “need for something new.” She had grown up in Nanjing, where her father was a pipa master. He taught her his instrument, and also to sing Beijing Opera. The family also knew the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Min’s sister became a prominent erhu virtuoso and her brother a symphonic conductor. When Min graduated from high school in 1977, the Cultural Revolution had not quite subsided – music conservatories remained closed. Min successfully auditioned for Nanjing’s leading traditional music ensemble and wound up playing eighty concerts a year, including European tours. Meanwhile, Min began singing in Chinese clubs, backed by saxophone, electric guitar, and drums. Min’s voice proved adaptable to cooler Western styles. Some of her father’s colleagues were not pleased.
A turning point came in New York City when John Zorn invited Min to improvise – which she had never attempted. That led to performing Thelonious Monk tunes for Jazz at Lincoln Center. She thought Thelonious Monk “was actually a monk. My contact with his music felt physical,” she recalls. Her transformational Monk renditions remain a Min Xiao-Fen signature.
This Chinese-American fusion is one of the highest achievements in present-day world music. It is wondrously explicable. China’s seismic political and cultural upheavals produced an earthquake of creativity. Conservatory-bound composers wound up in the countryside, absorbing folk music styles exploring timbre in ways they had never imagined. And – following Chinese speech, in which tonal infections impart meaning – Chinese folk tunes subtly manipulate pitch, sliding between notes that are separately voiced by keyed Western instruments. A generation of important Chinese composers, paradoxical beneficiaries of enforced rural relocation, wound up studying in the West. For many, Bela Bartok became a lodestar for his way of retaining the spontaneity and savage beauty of folk elements. And so Chinese composers discovered a middle ground between Chinese and Western instrumental performance – a musical kaleidoscope sounding “Asian” to American ears for its sighing speech-song and taut percussion patterns, yet equally foreign, in harmonic idiom, to Chinese audiences.
This new music spawned a virtuosity of which Min is a peak exemplar. Her musical adventures have led in many directions. The present collaboration with Rez Abbasi, whose virtuosity is as protean as Min’s, is special. Born in Karachi, raised in Southern California, Rez is a keen student of jazz, ethnic, and classical music. The resulting combination of pipa, guqin, ruan, and sanxian – all plucked instruments – with acoustic and electric guitars produces a limitless range of juxtaposition: of similarity and imitation; of dialogue and contradiction. The strumming physicality, the skittish passagework, the delicacy of inflection accessible to both players yields a veritable lexicon of East/West fusion. To this are added the complex melismas, shifting vibratos, and rapid-fire ornamentation of Min’s vocalism, as rooted in scat as in timeless Chinese tradition.
The ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman once remarked that “musical borders can be crossed, but the value of crossing them depends on the degree to which you respect them.” Some hybrids are slapdash. The intermingling of styles in White Lotus is complete and comprehensive.
From the liner notes by author, concert producer, and teacher Joseph Horowitz
