Louder Voices
by Cathy Barbash
In a lovely coincidence of timing, just as Carnegie’s “Mostly Huaqiao” Ancient Paths Modern Voices festival celebrating Chinese culture is nearing its climax this fall in Manhattan, a Chinese horse of a much different color gallops into Brooklyn. What may be the first major tour of China underground rock arrives on the U.S. college/indie/alternative circuit in November. Chinese headliners P.K. 14, Carsick Cars, Xiao He, and White begin their three-week national tour on November 5 as part of the monthly Dumbo Art Walk, and head mostly south and west from there.
The tour is the brainchild of Beijing-based business partners Charles Saliba and Nevin Domer, to promote bands they present at their hot Beijing club, D-22, and record on their Maybe Mars label. Savvy at cross-promotion, Saliba has also placed the bands on college radio specials, book launches, university panels, and the like. No surprise that presenters confirmed tend to the more independent-spirited, including Hampshire and Bard Colleges, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Saliba’s alma mater Columbia University. The great irony is that this low-budget scrappy tour will likely prove more effective in exposing impressionable young American future leaders to the creative ferment and volcanic energy of today’s China than any more conventional China festival, be it presented by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China or a pillar of the American cultural establishment.
For more details on the tour, see http://www.maybemars.com/index.php/usa-tour-2009/
Louder Voices P.S. 9/25/09
Club D-22 Owner Michael Pettis, who in his other life is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, adds his two cents to my last post:
“The cultural change taking place in China is so rapid that it is sometimes hard for outsiders to grasp it. There is a huge generation gap dividing young urban Chinese from the stereotypes most of us have of China. For Beijing artists New York is the center of the world and these aggressive young musicians are as familiar with what their friends and contemporaries are doing in New York as they are with traditional Chinese notions of melodic structure and musical texture. In this tour, the first time Beijing’s leading young musicians have come as a group to the US, we wanted to show that Beijing has suddenly emerged as one of the most important international centers for new music.”