Showing posts with label Kong Nay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kong Nay. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Kong Nay and Ouch Savy tour documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIpJDcisVc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95gjSKfZqw&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMhx6_2WZZw&feature=related
Sounds from the past suggest a bright future
Traditional instruments create a modern sensibility in this Khmer master's work
15/03/2011
Bangkok Post
In 2003, I wrote about the Cambodian Master Performers' Program, which was set up by a young trdo ui (upright fiddle) player Arn Chorn to document and preserve traditional Khmer music.
Chorn had escaped the killing fields of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime to the refugee camps on the Thai border and eventually made his way to Lowell, Massachusetts, in the USA.
Many of his peers and teachers, however, were not so lucky: Some 90% of the country's traditional and popular musicians were either killed or left for exile in a new country.
The master chappei dong vang (long-neck, two-string lute) player and singer Kong Nay was one of the few to survive. There were many times he thought he and his family would perish but perhaps because of his musical ability he survived. The programme, now renamed Cambodian Living Arts and based in the US, England and Phnom Penh, brought Nay and nineteen other surviving traditional musicians in to teach young students, thereby passing on their skills and experience to a new generation. A studio, sponsored by Peter Gabriel's hugely successful global Womad festival circuit and the related Real World record label, was set up to record the master teachers and their students.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Kong Nay asks that “Chapey” be included as a world heritage
Kong Nay (Photo: Lyda, RFI)24 May 2010
By Chan Lyda
Radio France Internationale
Translated from Khmer by Socheata
បទយកការណ៍របស់ ចាន់ លីដា
After surviving the Pol pot regime, currently, traditional Khmer art is facing with the flood of modern music. Kong Nay, a famous musician and Chapey singer from the 60s, is concerned about the loss of this unique ancient art. He asks that “Chapey” be quickly included as a world heritage treasure.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Blind master the last link to Cambodia's classical musical legacy
Cambodian Chapey Dorng Veng (Khmer guitar) Kong Nai plays music as his wife listens at his house in Phnom Penh, in this May 11, 2007, photo. Over the blast of an electric guitar shuddering out of a karaoke machine nearby, Kong Nai was trying to speak of a time when Cambodian music could reach back through the millennia. AFPBy Ros Sothea
PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Over the blast of an electric guitar blaring out of a karaoke machine nearby, Kong Nai is trying to make himself heard as he talks of a time when Cambodian music reached back through millennia.
It could channel those things that defined his country, both simple and ornate, he says - from the shimmer of a green rice field to the gilded royal courts of the great builder kings.
But he stops his story, perhaps unable to think over the howl of the karaoke's tortured speakers.
Or perhaps he is simply unwilling to contemplate the future of his older, gentler craft, under assault from modern tastes with little consideration for old men and their music.
For many younger people, fed with a steady diet of glossy Thai and Chinese-style pop, Kong Nai is an anachronism and his chapey - a boxy instrument with a long, graceful neck that is strummed like a banjo to create a repetitive, droning counterpoint to chanted poems or improvised songs - is uncool.
"I have no hope," he finally said, sitting on the porch of his tumbledown one-room house in one of the capital's slums.
"The chapey cannot compare to this hip-hop," Kong Nai adds, gesturing towards the nearby house from which the karaoke accompanying dancing at a young people's party is blaring.
"Only a few of the old masters are still alive to play the ancient music - what of it when we pass away?" he said. "I am sure the music could easily die."
Officials acknowledge that Cambodia is in danger of losing a piece of its rich artistic legacy.
"People don't understand the value" of the old master musicians, of Cambodia's brightly costumed morality tales and epic dramas, played out through complicated dances and heavily nuanced songs, said Hang Suth, director of the culture ministry's art department.
Kong Nai, like the other few survivors of Cambodia's cultural upheavals, are the last links to a quickly fading past, say officials who also warn that when they die Cambodia will lose part of its soul
Blinded by smallpox at the age of four, Kong Nai had, by the time he was seven, allowed the darkness that defined his world to also poison his heart.
His disability kept him from school and for years made him the constant victim of small cruelties inflicted by the other children in his village in Kampot province, in southern Cambodia.
"I found life meaningless and wanted to kill myself sometimes. I worried for my future, how I would survive because I couldn't even walk without someone helping me," he said. "I felt useless."
But one evening, as he prepared to sleep, an unfamiliar sound pierced Kong Nai's gloom, carried across the fields from a nearby village where itinerant minstrels had been hired to perform at a ceremony. It was the sound of the chapey.
"I immediately called my mother to take me there," he said, recalling that inspirational flash that would change his life.
For the next several years he memorised poetry at a nearby Buddhist temple, and spent weeks during Cambodian holiday seasons traveling through villages chanting poems in return for small amounts of rice or money.
He first picked up the chapey when he was 13 years old, after struggling to make his voice sound like the instrument.
Surrounded by a musical family - Kong Nai's relatives were masters of traditional Cambodian instruments, as well as chanting Buddhist texts and composing poetry - he quickly excelled.
By 15, Kong Nai had taken up the chapey professionally. His reputation spread among the villages in his province and other parts of the country, where he was invited to sing. His popularity earned him the nickname "Handsome Kong Nai".
"I would never have expected that a blind man like me could earn so much money," he said, a broad, toothy smile spreading across his face beneath the dark glasses that, almost as much as his music, have become a trademark.
The 1960s passed for Kong Nai in a blur of celebrity, wealth and romantic intrigue.
He courted and then married a young woman, Tat Chen, whom he had last set eyes on 14 years earlier when they were both four years old.
She sang beautifully, he said, and her voice helped him visualise what she might look like as an 18-year-old.
"I thought I'd be alone forever - I never expected that she would marry me," he said.
But his relationship was not without drama - a rival for her affections threatened to kill Kong Nai, but by 1963 the couple had settled into an easy domestic routine as his fame grew.
As the war in neighbouring Vietnam escalated, Cambodia enjoyed unprecedented peace and underwent a cultural renaissance, with the chapey's popularity reaching its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s as newly-minted recordings of famous musicians spread across Cambodia.
Kong Nai was among the tradition's superstars and by far the richest in his home province, renowned for his free-style improvisational skills that helped the art form evolve beyond simple poetic recitals.
But Cambodia's drift into the inferno that was consuming the region was inevitable. In 1970 Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's leader and a patron of the arts, was ousted in a coup by his top military advisor, General Lon Nol.
"We weren't happy for long after that," Kong Nai said. The country was collapsing in on itself, its corrupt disorganised government battling an increasingly emboldened communist insurgency.
Kong Nai could still work, walking between villages that remained untouched by war, but the crowds were evaporating, and with them the money.
"The country had changed - people didn't care about good music. They cared only for their security," he said.
"What I earned from the chapey was just enough to feed myself from day-to-day."
Like tens of thousands of rural Cambodians, Kong Nai was quickly absorbed into the "liberated zones" controlled by the communist guerillas, known by then as the Khmer Rouge.
Under their rule, he was ordered to only perform songs that described the suffering of farmers under Lon Nol.
"I couldn't sing what I wanted or I would be killed," he said, but Cambodia's misery, and his own, were only to deepen.
Kong Nai was, miraculously, allowed to keep his chapey after the Khmer Rouge wrestled control of the country from Lon Nol and began implementing their draconian vision of an agrarian utopia in 1975.
The arts, music included, had no role in the revolution and like the educated classes performers were slaughtered by the hundreds. An entire cultural legacy was being extinguished.
Kong Nai's role in this new Cambodia was to inspire those toiling on a vast collective farm in southern Cambodia with a brief recital of revolutionary songs once a day to which, he says, "people were forced to listen".
Within a few months it was decided that "there will be no more chapey", the musician recalled, and he was assigned first to harvest corn and beans, and then to making palm rope.
"I worked as hard as the others, but was not given the same amount of food because the Khmer Rouge felt that a blind man could not do the same amount of labour," he said. "A scoop of porridge was my food."
His family was assigned to a remote area of the country, and Kong Nai, alone and without his music, was more isolated and vulnerable than most. "No song, no music and no chapey. We only heard the voice of Khmer Rouge soldiers," he said.
In its final years, the regime's paranoid leadership had begun to turn on itself and increasing numbers of people were disappearing in purges.
Kong Nai's family came under suspicion after being accused by another villager of being American spies and he was imprisoned for three months.
Later, he said, he was sure to be marked for death when a regime cadre ordered the disabled and elderly to prepare to leave for somewhere else.
"I knew my family and I would die," he said.
Instead, he was left overnight in the forest after one of his children was wounded in a landmine blast. The following day, invading Vietnamese troops overran the area.
It was early 1979 and Kong Nai, and his long-suffering country, were free of the Khmer Rouge.
It could channel those things that defined his country, both simple and ornate, he says - from the shimmer of a green rice field to the gilded royal courts of the great builder kings.
But he stops his story, perhaps unable to think over the howl of the karaoke's tortured speakers.
Or perhaps he is simply unwilling to contemplate the future of his older, gentler craft, under assault from modern tastes with little consideration for old men and their music.
For many younger people, fed with a steady diet of glossy Thai and Chinese-style pop, Kong Nai is an anachronism and his chapey - a boxy instrument with a long, graceful neck that is strummed like a banjo to create a repetitive, droning counterpoint to chanted poems or improvised songs - is uncool.
"I have no hope," he finally said, sitting on the porch of his tumbledown one-room house in one of the capital's slums.
"The chapey cannot compare to this hip-hop," Kong Nai adds, gesturing towards the nearby house from which the karaoke accompanying dancing at a young people's party is blaring.
"Only a few of the old masters are still alive to play the ancient music - what of it when we pass away?" he said. "I am sure the music could easily die."
Officials acknowledge that Cambodia is in danger of losing a piece of its rich artistic legacy.
"People don't understand the value" of the old master musicians, of Cambodia's brightly costumed morality tales and epic dramas, played out through complicated dances and heavily nuanced songs, said Hang Suth, director of the culture ministry's art department.
Kong Nai, like the other few survivors of Cambodia's cultural upheavals, are the last links to a quickly fading past, say officials who also warn that when they die Cambodia will lose part of its soul
Blinded by smallpox at the age of four, Kong Nai had, by the time he was seven, allowed the darkness that defined his world to also poison his heart.
His disability kept him from school and for years made him the constant victim of small cruelties inflicted by the other children in his village in Kampot province, in southern Cambodia.
"I found life meaningless and wanted to kill myself sometimes. I worried for my future, how I would survive because I couldn't even walk without someone helping me," he said. "I felt useless."
But one evening, as he prepared to sleep, an unfamiliar sound pierced Kong Nai's gloom, carried across the fields from a nearby village where itinerant minstrels had been hired to perform at a ceremony. It was the sound of the chapey.
"I immediately called my mother to take me there," he said, recalling that inspirational flash that would change his life.
For the next several years he memorised poetry at a nearby Buddhist temple, and spent weeks during Cambodian holiday seasons traveling through villages chanting poems in return for small amounts of rice or money.
He first picked up the chapey when he was 13 years old, after struggling to make his voice sound like the instrument.
Surrounded by a musical family - Kong Nai's relatives were masters of traditional Cambodian instruments, as well as chanting Buddhist texts and composing poetry - he quickly excelled.
By 15, Kong Nai had taken up the chapey professionally. His reputation spread among the villages in his province and other parts of the country, where he was invited to sing. His popularity earned him the nickname "Handsome Kong Nai".
"I would never have expected that a blind man like me could earn so much money," he said, a broad, toothy smile spreading across his face beneath the dark glasses that, almost as much as his music, have become a trademark.
The 1960s passed for Kong Nai in a blur of celebrity, wealth and romantic intrigue.
He courted and then married a young woman, Tat Chen, whom he had last set eyes on 14 years earlier when they were both four years old.
She sang beautifully, he said, and her voice helped him visualise what she might look like as an 18-year-old.
"I thought I'd be alone forever - I never expected that she would marry me," he said.
But his relationship was not without drama - a rival for her affections threatened to kill Kong Nai, but by 1963 the couple had settled into an easy domestic routine as his fame grew.
As the war in neighbouring Vietnam escalated, Cambodia enjoyed unprecedented peace and underwent a cultural renaissance, with the chapey's popularity reaching its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s as newly-minted recordings of famous musicians spread across Cambodia.
Kong Nai was among the tradition's superstars and by far the richest in his home province, renowned for his free-style improvisational skills that helped the art form evolve beyond simple poetic recitals.
But Cambodia's drift into the inferno that was consuming the region was inevitable. In 1970 Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's leader and a patron of the arts, was ousted in a coup by his top military advisor, General Lon Nol.
"We weren't happy for long after that," Kong Nai said. The country was collapsing in on itself, its corrupt disorganised government battling an increasingly emboldened communist insurgency.
Kong Nai could still work, walking between villages that remained untouched by war, but the crowds were evaporating, and with them the money.
"The country had changed - people didn't care about good music. They cared only for their security," he said.
"What I earned from the chapey was just enough to feed myself from day-to-day."
Like tens of thousands of rural Cambodians, Kong Nai was quickly absorbed into the "liberated zones" controlled by the communist guerillas, known by then as the Khmer Rouge.
Under their rule, he was ordered to only perform songs that described the suffering of farmers under Lon Nol.
"I couldn't sing what I wanted or I would be killed," he said, but Cambodia's misery, and his own, were only to deepen.
Kong Nai was, miraculously, allowed to keep his chapey after the Khmer Rouge wrestled control of the country from Lon Nol and began implementing their draconian vision of an agrarian utopia in 1975.
The arts, music included, had no role in the revolution and like the educated classes performers were slaughtered by the hundreds. An entire cultural legacy was being extinguished.
Kong Nai's role in this new Cambodia was to inspire those toiling on a vast collective farm in southern Cambodia with a brief recital of revolutionary songs once a day to which, he says, "people were forced to listen".
Within a few months it was decided that "there will be no more chapey", the musician recalled, and he was assigned first to harvest corn and beans, and then to making palm rope.
"I worked as hard as the others, but was not given the same amount of food because the Khmer Rouge felt that a blind man could not do the same amount of labour," he said. "A scoop of porridge was my food."
His family was assigned to a remote area of the country, and Kong Nai, alone and without his music, was more isolated and vulnerable than most. "No song, no music and no chapey. We only heard the voice of Khmer Rouge soldiers," he said.
In its final years, the regime's paranoid leadership had begun to turn on itself and increasing numbers of people were disappearing in purges.
Kong Nai's family came under suspicion after being accused by another villager of being American spies and he was imprisoned for three months.
Later, he said, he was sure to be marked for death when a regime cadre ordered the disabled and elderly to prepare to leave for somewhere else.
"I knew my family and I would die," he said.
Instead, he was left overnight in the forest after one of his children was wounded in a landmine blast. The following day, invading Vietnamese troops overran the area.
It was early 1979 and Kong Nai, and his long-suffering country, were free of the Khmer Rouge.
Friday, July 27, 2007
'They planned to kill me - but I survived'
Cambodia's Ray Charles lookalike endured serious hardships. Jon Lusk on the man who escaped the Khmer Rouge Friday July 27, 2007
The Guardian (UK)
With his legs folded under him as he sits on the floor, Kong Nay seems a frail figure, dwarfed by the large banjo-like instrument he holds. There's a flash of gold fillings in his smile, and when he sings, the voice of a much stronger man jumps out, answering the call of his strings.
This 61-year-old Cambodian is a master of the chapei dong veng, an ancient long-necked guitar with two strings thought to have arrived in Cambodia with the Buddhist faith nearly two millennia ago. Kong's penetrating, nasal wail closely follows or spars with the simple and often melancholic tunes he plunks out on the nylon strings of the instrument. The dark glasses that mask his heavily pock-marked face and sightless eyes have earned him the nickname of "the Ray Charles of Cambodia", but the two artists have rather different stories.
"I'm so excited and honoured that they compare me to him. But at the same time I'm not very happy with myself because the American Ray Charles was so rich and I'm so poor," he chuckles.
I meet Kong on his first day in the UK, where he is touring with his 21-year-old protege Ouch Savy to promote their joint debut album, Mekong Delta Blues. Kong admits he doesn't really know what the blues are - not the musical kind, anyway. But the superficial resemblance of his music to the African-American form, and the tough life he's lived do more than justify the title.
Born in the southern Cambodian province of Kampot, Kong was blinded by smallpox at the age of four, and as a boy fell in love with the sound of the chapei. "I felt it was something that I should learn, something that would give me a good life in the future," he recalls.
His family was too poor to afford one, though, and for five years he sang and mimicked the chapei vocally, until his father finally bought him an old one. At 13, he began to take lessons from an uncle, mastering the basic repertoire within only two years. He then began playing professionally, improvising on traditional folk songs by spontaneously spinning stories like a hip-hopper, tailoring them to each audience.
"At 18 I met my wife [Tat Chhan] and we started our life together, depending on chapei. We managed to earn a good living. Not too rich, not too poor, but just good enough to survive, like other people. But when the Khmer Rouge took over, that was a big turning point in my life," he says with characteristic understatement.
In 1975, like millions of other Cambodians, his entire family was deported to a forced labour camp by Pol Pot's genocidal regime. Despite the Khmer Rouge's dislike of artists in particular, they found a use for Kong. "I was forbidden from singing folk tales, or songs that touched on social issues. Instead they told me to sing something that served their propaganda. So during the lunch break, I would sing and play to entertain people."
While most prisoners were given three large spoons of rice per day, Kong and anyone else who was sick or disabled got only one, and starved more rapidly. After two years, they stopped Kong's music altogether and forced him to work. "They planned to kill me. I was on their list. But then the Vietnamese [army] invaded and so I survived." During the bombing that ended the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, Kong and his wife each lost a brother. Another of Kong's brothers had been executed, but all seven of their children - three born in the camp - miraculously survived.
In 1979, the family returned to their village, where Kong resumed his life as a chapei artist, and they had three more children. In 1991, Kong won a national chapei singing contest in Phnom Penh, and the following year moved there at the invitation of the Cambodian ministry of culture. The salary was poor, but his family - and those of a few other artists who had survived the genocide - were allowed to build homes in the city's Tonle Bassac squatters' community.
Then in 1998, Kong received a young visitor called Arn Chorn-Pond, a former refugee who now lived in the US. He was another survivor of the killing fields, who had been forced take part in atrocities from the age of nine and had returned to Cambodia periodically over the previous decade, trying to make peace with his past. Cambodia had lost around 90% of its artists in the genocide, and Chorn-Pond's family, which had run an opera company, had been particularly hard hit.
"When I came back to Cambodia in 1989, I found nobody here, except one of my sisters," he explains from Phnom Penh, his voice still raw with anguish. "They were all starved to death or killed by the Khmer Rouge - my dad, my mum, my cousin, my nephew, my uncle ... 35 in my family had disappeared."
With Kong Nay and several others, Chorn-Pond founded the Cambodia Master Performers Programme, which soon became Cambodian Living Arts, a charity dedicated to reviving the country's performing arts by helping to lift surviving artists out of poverty and employing them to pass on their skills to the next generation. "It was for me an urgent thing to start this, because I knew that my culture was going down in the next 10, 20, 30 years, if no one did anything about it," he says.
In 2003, Kong began teaching four young students, including Ouch Savy. That same year both he and Chorn-Pond appeared in the harrowing Emmy-nominated film The Flute Player, now being shown before each of his UK performances. When Peter Gabriel saw it, he was so moved that he began donating equipment and expertise to CLA, which led to the recording of Mekong Delta Blues.
Chorn-Pond's vision is of a Cambodian artistic renaissance by 2020, but it won't be easy. The loss of so many artists created a cultural vacuum that has been filled by foreign music, leaving most Cambodian youth hooked on western rap and rock or Chinese pop, and scornful of their own traditions. Government arts funding has been very limited during Cambodia's slow economic recovery, but ironically, Kong and his neighbours are now under pressure to move 20km away as developers eye their inner-city land. He relates this in the song My Life - as close as he's prepared to get to singing about politics these days. Apart from wanting to stay put, what else does he wish for?
"I hope that peace will prevail. There should be no more fighting, no more civil wars, no more conflicts. I am sick and tired of it."
· Kong Nay is playing at Womad, Charlton Park (0845 1461735), until Sunday, then touring.
· You've read the piece, now have your say. Email your comments to
film&music@guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Rare visit by 'Cambodian Ray Charles' [in the UK]
By Charley MorganThis is Wiltshire (UK)
A CAMBODIAN artist whose music was banned under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime is making a rare visit to Wiltshire to perform songs that have been saved from extinction.
Kong Nay, the 'Ray Charles of Cambodia', will be performing the Chapei in Bradford on Avon on August 2 as part of a tour to mark his first ever visit to the UK.
A film called The Flute Player is being shown before the concert about fellow Cambodian, Arn Chorn-Pond, who survived Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s to set up the charity Cambodian Living Arts, which supports traditional artists like Kong Nay in teaching future generations so the music lives on.
The tour is thanks to former Genesis front man and WOMAD organiser, Peter Gabriel, who saw the film and sent his sound engineer out to Cambodia to find Kong Nay and bring him back to play in the UK.
Speaking at his Real World Recording Studios in Box, Gabriel said: "At the end of the Khmer Rouge one of the things Arn Chorn-Pond did was to try and save some of the great arts that Cambodia had had.
"Artists had been targeted by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot - 90 per cent of them were eliminated.
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"For us, to be a rock musician we get rewarded handsomely in many ways, but to be a rock musician in Cambodia may well have cost you your life."
Although Kong Nay's music seems very different and is thousands of years old, Gabriel believes it has many similarities to the Delta Blues, hence the nickname the 'Ray Charles of Cambodia'.
Nay is a master of the Chapei Dang Weng, a long-necked two-stringed guitar, which he plays while singing with his young student, Ouch Savy.
Speaking through a translator, Nay, whose instrument was confiscated during the regime, said: "During the Khmer Rouge time it was completely banned but in my heart the art was always there and I would try to remember the notes, the tones and the music by humming to myself.
"I have been waiting for this day for so long and have always been excited by it.
"The Chapei is uniquely Cambodian and it is very important that our young people know about these forms of art. If it dies we are going to lose it forever."
Gabriel added: "I think it's a wonderful thing to have a visit from Kong Nay to this country for the very first time and to be able to sample some of this extraordinary music."
Kong Nay with Ouch Savy and The Flute Player film is on at Bristol's Arnolfini on Wednesday, the WOMAD festival on July 26-29 and Wiltshire Music Centre in Bradford on Avon on August 2.
For Bradford tickets call (01225) 860100.
Kong Nay, the 'Ray Charles of Cambodia', will be performing the Chapei in Bradford on Avon on August 2 as part of a tour to mark his first ever visit to the UK.
A film called The Flute Player is being shown before the concert about fellow Cambodian, Arn Chorn-Pond, who survived Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s to set up the charity Cambodian Living Arts, which supports traditional artists like Kong Nay in teaching future generations so the music lives on.
The tour is thanks to former Genesis front man and WOMAD organiser, Peter Gabriel, who saw the film and sent his sound engineer out to Cambodia to find Kong Nay and bring him back to play in the UK.
Speaking at his Real World Recording Studios in Box, Gabriel said: "At the end of the Khmer Rouge one of the things Arn Chorn-Pond did was to try and save some of the great arts that Cambodia had had.
"Artists had been targeted by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot - 90 per cent of them were eliminated.
advertisement
"For us, to be a rock musician we get rewarded handsomely in many ways, but to be a rock musician in Cambodia may well have cost you your life."
Although Kong Nay's music seems very different and is thousands of years old, Gabriel believes it has many similarities to the Delta Blues, hence the nickname the 'Ray Charles of Cambodia'.
Nay is a master of the Chapei Dang Weng, a long-necked two-stringed guitar, which he plays while singing with his young student, Ouch Savy.
Speaking through a translator, Nay, whose instrument was confiscated during the regime, said: "During the Khmer Rouge time it was completely banned but in my heart the art was always there and I would try to remember the notes, the tones and the music by humming to myself.
"I have been waiting for this day for so long and have always been excited by it.
"The Chapei is uniquely Cambodian and it is very important that our young people know about these forms of art. If it dies we are going to lose it forever."
Gabriel added: "I think it's a wonderful thing to have a visit from Kong Nay to this country for the very first time and to be able to sample some of this extraordinary music."
Kong Nay with Ouch Savy and The Flute Player film is on at Bristol's Arnolfini on Wednesday, the WOMAD festival on July 26-29 and Wiltshire Music Centre in Bradford on Avon on August 2.
For Bradford tickets call (01225) 860100.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Kong Nay on Hello VOA program
Renowned Chapei Dong Veng musician Kong Nay performs for an audience at the National Mall in Washington Friday. (Photo: VOA)Cambodian Blues Man Guest on 'Hello VOA'
Neou Sarem, VOA Khmer
Washington
02/07/2007
Click here to listen Neou Sarem hosts 'Hello VOA' in Khmer
Click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports from the Smithsonian Festival
(Real Media Player required)
Click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports from the Smithsonian Festival
(Real Media Player required)
Kong Nay, the nearest thing Cambodia has to a Blues man, stopped by "Hello VOA" Monday, answering questions about his art and improvising several Chapei Dong Vey songs.
Kong Nay, a blind singer who plays the long-necked, two-string guitar while singing heartwarming love songs or comedic improves, is in Washington as part of the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival.
The festival is an international exhibition of "living cultural heritage" that takes place each year in July on the National Mall in Washington.
This year's festival saw a special dedication to the cultures of the Mekong River.
"The Mekong region has been a cradle and crossroads of cultures for many centuries and more recently has become closely connected to the United States through the more than two million Americans who trace their ancestry to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Chinese province of Yunnan," Folklife festival organizers said.
"Visitors will experience the region's diversity firsthand through the presentations of artists, performers, craftspeople, cooks, ritual specialists and presenters," organizers said.
"The Mekong has many different meanings to the peoples of the region as well as to Americans who may know little of its complexity," organizers said.
The Mekong program of the festival included Vietnamese opera, Thai shadow puppetry, Cambodian classical dance, and Chinese gourd flute music. Lao textiles, Naxi calligraphy and mural paintings were also on display.
The festival also showcases the musical stylings of Kong Nay.
Kong Nay's Chapei Dong Veng music, which includes ballads, stories and comedic improvisation, is dying as a tradition thanks to the invasion of karaoke into rural Cambodia.
One "Hello VOA" listener noted that many of the practitioners of the art were blind like Kong Nay, and wondered aloud if the art made a person so.
Kong Nay said he'd been blind before he started to play.
Kong Nay, a blind singer who plays the long-necked, two-string guitar while singing heartwarming love songs or comedic improves, is in Washington as part of the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival.
The festival is an international exhibition of "living cultural heritage" that takes place each year in July on the National Mall in Washington.
This year's festival saw a special dedication to the cultures of the Mekong River.
"The Mekong region has been a cradle and crossroads of cultures for many centuries and more recently has become closely connected to the United States through the more than two million Americans who trace their ancestry to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Chinese province of Yunnan," Folklife festival organizers said.
"Visitors will experience the region's diversity firsthand through the presentations of artists, performers, craftspeople, cooks, ritual specialists and presenters," organizers said.
"The Mekong has many different meanings to the peoples of the region as well as to Americans who may know little of its complexity," organizers said.
The Mekong program of the festival included Vietnamese opera, Thai shadow puppetry, Cambodian classical dance, and Chinese gourd flute music. Lao textiles, Naxi calligraphy and mural paintings were also on display.
The festival also showcases the musical stylings of Kong Nay.
Kong Nay's Chapei Dong Veng music, which includes ballads, stories and comedic improvisation, is dying as a tradition thanks to the invasion of karaoke into rural Cambodia.
One "Hello VOA" listener noted that many of the practitioners of the art were blind like Kong Nay, and wondered aloud if the art made a person so.
Kong Nay said he'd been blind before he started to play.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
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