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‘On a Gentle Island Breeze’
Daniel Ho
(Wind Music)
Daniel Ho explores a new genre of cross-cultural island music with an imaginative and impressively packaged album, "On a Gentle Island Breeze," which was nominated for a 2013 Grammy Award in the regional roots music album category.
Ho teamed up with a Taiwanese-based record label to record aboriginal Taiwanese melodies using ukulele, slack-key guitar or piano. Seven singers based in Taiwan add their voices to Ho’s instrumental arrangements on various selections. The contrast between the vocal performance of male singer Hao-en Wu and the familiar sound of slack-key guitar on a song titled "Call of Passage" is particularly vivid.
Most of the Taiwanese melodies are from songs about traditional activities such as hunting and traveling. Others speak of romance. The one nontraditional song is of relatively recent origin. "The Warship Song" dates from the era when Japan replaced China as the colonial occupier of Taiwan; Ho describes it in his liner notes booklet as a song indigenous musicians performed when they "greeted Japanese warships" that were returning to harbor.
The album includes instrumentals Ho composed after visiting Taiwan in 2012. Ho’s final composition, "Indigenous Echos," brings together motifs from the Taiwanese melodies heard earlier.
A five-time Grammy winner in the defunct Hawaiian music album category, Ho completes this precedent-setting project with a booklet that contains his slack-key and ukulele tunings, detailed descriptions of the arrangements, cultural information on Taiwan’s indigenous people, and notes on the career accomplishments of the singers.
It should be mentioned that Teresa Bright released an album that combined Hawaiian musical traditions with indigenous Okinawan music several years ago. Ho’s work here with the music of a different island people serves as another reminder to Hawaii musicians that many musical opportunities remain for creative exploration acrosss the full spectrum of "island music."
www.danielho.com
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