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Taiwan's fascinating Sizhukong mixes jazz, Chinese tradition for Canadian Music Fest

By John Terauds on March 20, 2012

Sizhukong plays jazz using traditional instruments at Lula Lounge Wednesday, the Courthouse on Friday and the Tranzac on Saturday, as part of 2012 Slacker Canadian Music Festival

A decade ago, Taiwanese pianist Yuwen Peng returned home from her second stint at Boston’s Berklee College of Music full of ideas about jazz, and a growing curiosity about her country’s traditional instruments. Within five years, she had a working, professional group that had managed to successfully straddle two very different musical worlds.

Peng’s five-member band, Sizhukong, makes its Toronto début on Wednesday at 9 p.m., at Lula Lounge, one of the 74 venues that are part of the five-day Slacker Canadian Music Fest, which kicks off spring in Toronto tomorrow.

They follow up with a set at the Courthouse late on Friday night, and a slot at the Tranzac on Saturday. (All the festival details are here.)

Peng says Toronto is the first city to hear tracks from the band’s upcoming third album, its first with a big label, Sony.

“The album is called Spin, because it makes our heads spin,” she admits, smiling.

Like the band’s previous two albums, the two songs Peng shares from the future release not only blend jazz idioms with the textures of traditional Chinese instruments, but each piece also borrows freely from disparate influences like funk guitar, bossa nova and other pop experiments of the 1960s and ’70s.

Spin adds more Chinese folk elements, “as well as synthesizer,” Peng says.

It makes for easy, but never boring, listening.

Peng recalls that her first attempt at jazz-Chinese fusion came in 2003, when a liuqin (Chinese mandolin) player asked her to write a solo for her. The response was so positive, that the experiment took on a life of its own.

The pianist-turned-producer, composer and arranger says she writes down about 50 per cent of any given ccomposition. Then, through jamming and improvising, the band begins turning each song into the finished product. Most of the music is written in Western notation, although Peng says a couple of members prefer numbered Chinese tablature.

Peng says Chinese traditional music borrows its inflections from the spoken word. “The grace notes and ornaments reflect those sounds,” she explains.

As she weaves the scrapey wails of an ehru or the twitter of a dizi into the score, her language becomes part of a compelling chorus of many, distinct voices.

That sounds a lot like Toronto.

Here are the members of Sizhukong with the title track from their 2009 album, Paper Eagle:

John Terauds

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