Abigail Washburn: The original blend of Americana and Chinese folk

If old-time Americana and traditional Chinese music were to meld and produce a flesh-and-blood child, the result would be Abigail Washburn. Combining the two musical genres with her ethereal writing and clawhammer banjo style, Washburn has established herself as one of the most unusual and otherworldly players to hail from Nashville, Tenn.

Washburn spent the first five years of her musical career touring with the all-girl American old-time music group Uncle Earl. She went on to focus on her first solo album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, in 2005. During the making of this album, Washburn met and developed a friendship with premier banjo player Bela Fleck of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

Together with Fleck, Washburn helped form the Sparrow Quartet, which blended East and West sounds. In 2006 — at the request of the U.S. government, the Sparrow Quartet toured Tibet, and went on to perform at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Her sound has captured the ears of Robyn Hitchcock and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. More recently, she was a guest performer at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration.

In 2009, Washburn and Fleck married and set the stage for a banjo-playing heir that, if ever conceived, will surely be the grand ruler of all things banjo.

Her first songs were written in Mandarin, a language that rolls off her lips as fluently as her native English. You won’t find any songs written in Chinese on her latest album, City of Refuge. What you will find is a collaboration of a diverse “village” of players and contributors, catchy grooves, electronic loops and, of course, that old-time sound.

Sue Zalokar: How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard you play before?

Abigail Washburn: Whew. That’s a hard one. I sit next to people on planes all the time and they say what do you do? And I say, “Well, I make music.” And they say, “What does it sound like?”  I usually say that I play the banjo and I sing. And then I say that I speak Chinese and I sing in Chinese. And I write lots of songs in both English and Chinese, and all of my music is very much inspired by traditional music. There is also an indie, folk, pop quality to what I’m doing these days and maybe a little bit of experimentation with sounds outside of the acoustic realm.

S.Z.: You were heading to study law in Beijing and had not considered a musical career. How did your musical journey begin?

A.W.: One huge turning point was hearing Doc Watson singing and playing “Shady Grove” at a party one time near the end of college. I had been so obsessed with China. The stuff of Roman traditions that we long forgot about in our modern culture are not long forgotten there. The inertia, the sheer energy of that history and the ancestral line of tradition and culture, it is insuppressible. It is in everything, and it’s everywhere there. Even though the economy and the big city rush for wealth would try to make you think otherwise, it’s there still in a major, major way. I didn’t really know what was special about America. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, and I couldn’t find my touchstone of American greatness.

When I heard Doc Watson coming out of that record player, I was like, what is that sound?  Who is that? Doc Watson was from the hills of North Carolina and he played what we call “traditional American music.” I thought, this is the soul of the sound of America. This is it right here. It’s hard to tell (by listening to his music) if he’s black or if he’s white. It was so groovy because of the syncopation of the banjo and it being, actually, an African instrument.  And the words that come from probably Scotland or Ireland and then found their way into Kentucky and North Carolina and started taking on different word replacements and the melodies became more mountain. It was this phenomenal fusion of the heart of American immigrant culture and the beginnings of it’s own culture.  So I decided I had to take a banjo to China.

The second thing is that before I left, I wanted to do some things in America that I wouldn’t be able to do because I was going to be living in China for so long.  So I took my banjo and went to West Virginia and North Carolina in my little red truck. I ended up in Kentucky at the National Bluegrass Music Association Convention. Out of the blue, as I was sitting there participating in one of my very first jams ever with a couple of girls that I had met at the convention, and this record executive comes up and invited me to come to Nashville to cut a record. So my whole life shifted. Talk about having a little slice of Americana before I go to China, I mean, heck yeah, I’ll go to Nashville and make a record! And so I did. I went to Nashville and I’ve lived here ever since. It’s nine years later. I’ve made my home in Nashville and obviously never went back to China — to do law, at least. That highlight had a huge impact on my life, too. Now I tour China, so that’s a wonderful thing.

S.Z.: You speak fluent Mandarin, which is a tonal language with emotive expression, as is music, what was the process like for you to combine the two in your work?

A.W.: The interplay between the banjo and Chinese.  I like to write music.  I like to write songs in Chinese. And one of the things I noticed very quickly when I was writing my very first song in Chinese, “Song of the Traveling Daughter,” was that the pluck of a banjo string mimics the sound of a Chinese word because there are the consonants – which you can think of as the way the nail hits the string – and then  there’s the resonance of the string which could be compared to the vowel – the open vowel sound at the end of most Chinese words. It’s incredibly easy to write these words over banjo plucks. (laughs) Really natural. Anybody who cares about linguistics and language could see that that’s really exciting.  So there is a relationship there.

S.Z.: Can you talk a bit about recording the album Afterquake? It was in response to the massive 8.0 earthquake in China.

A.W.: That was so special, Afterquake. The idea was conceived when I went back to China to teach American traditional music at Sichuan University in 2008. I really did that because I knew about the earthquake. I was pretty heartbroken by what I was seeing in the magazines and on TV. I wanted to go see for myself how the few friends that I had left in Sichuan were doing. So that’s what I did. My ticket there was going to be teaching American traditional music. And when I went back, I was reunited with some good friends, ex-patriots who lived in Chengdu and they quickly asked me if I would want to go into a disaster zone and try to help kids. They had an organization called Sichuan Quake Relief, and immediately I thought, that’s why I’m here. So we started planning these dates to go play for kids in relocation schools in the disaster zone.

At the end of my shows, I’d have all these kids come up to me and express how sad they were to be so far away from home, and they often wanted to share songs with me from their home. I was struck so many times by these incredible interactions I’d have with kids and I kept thinking, I wonder if there is something more I could do for them. There was a lot of post traumatic stress disorder that the kids were dealing with. I saw a lot of it when I was hanging out with kids playing basketball or soccer before the shows, I’d see that there was like rage in these Chinese kids that I had never seen in Chinese students before. We are very used to violence in schools in America, but it does not happen in China. It was just such a surprise to see that happening. It was so obviously PTSD, so that was heavy on my mind.

When I came back to the states after that six weeks, I just had the thought that it would be really cool to make a record of these kids voices and their stories. But I wanted to make a record that they would like — not necessarily one that I would like. I’d love to hear just a spare field recording of just a child with an instrument singing an old folk song. But those kids are totally not interested in that. They want to sound like the Asian pop star. I knew if I was really going to do a record in honor of them, their stories, I needed it to sound like Asia pop. So luckily I had recently worked on some remixes of my own music with (DJ producer) Dave Liang of The Shanghai Restoration Project, and he had done such a good job, and he had been so easy to work with even though I’d never met him in person. I called him and I said, “Hey, I’m coming through New York and I’d love to have lunch and I’ve got an idea to discuss with you.” We met and I asked him to invest money to make a CD to help the kids in Sichuan with me. A month later, we were on a plane back to Sichuan and we spent the month there together and made a record with the kids. We came up conceptually with what we thought music and story-wise was going to be an important tale to tell in terms of selling this music back in the states and in terms of what we thought would be the most healing aspect of making music with these kids. So we ended up choosing traditional songs and stories that the children had learned from their parents or from loved ones that they had lost. We spent day in, day out with them for a week and recorded their voices, and then Dave set it to Asian pop grooves. We came up with Afterquake. Probably the highlight of the whole thing was the making of “Song for Mama” which is a track that a young boy sings. He was singing, “I’m going to give my heart to the moon because I know the moon can see you even though I can’t. And I’m going to ask the moon to shine down on you all the love that I feel for you.” We were just so touched by this. He’s crying, we’re crying. My god, he missed his mom so much. As soon as we recorded it, we knew it was so special, and we immediately tried to figure out where his mom was because we were thinking, “God if I was his mom, I’d want to hear this and I’d want to know he was doing okay.” We were quite surprised, but it only took about a seven hour van ride to find his mom. We ended up finding all the childrens’ parents throughout our time there and sharing photos of their children and also the recording of their voices singing with the parents. And then, in return, of course, they would give us a cup of tea and we would record them telling some stories about their time during the earthquake.

S.Z.: “Dreams of Nectar” is a song from your latest album, City of Refuge. To listen to it is beautiful, to watch you and Kai Welch perform it, is magical. Did the experience of recording Afterquake fell into influencing you on City of Refuge at all?

A.W.: That’s totally accurate. I really had been purely an acoustic, folk-related musician up until working with Dave Liang.  After working with Dave and seeing how he did electronica, I know that my heart and mind were opened up to the idea that this could be a cool way to make music. And I hadn’t thought that before, honestly, because I thought, well, that’s not my world. And then it became my world. So when I started envisioning (my next project), I think the making of Afterquake had a huge part to do with how I envisioned my future. I can’t say that I wanted to work with somebody who looped, but I was definitely much, much more open minded about what kind of collaboratives I might be working with. By Sue Zalokar

If you are interested in the article, please go to streetroots to read the whole piece.

Penguin China: interview with Jo Lusby

In 2005, when Penguin opened their first China office, there were no other foreign trade publishers in the country. Books had never been branded, good literary translators were scarce, and the government maintained a tight control on the publishing industry. This was unfamiliar territory for a Western publisher, and those seeking to get a foothold would need a careful and unconventional approach.

Jo Lusby was Penguin’s appointed scout, employed initially for a scoping mission and later to run the Penguin China office. Lusby’s first move was to publish the Chinese bestseller, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong in English, a book that went on to win the Man Asia Literary Prize and earn Penguin China a reputation both within China and internationally.

Since then, Lusby has made Penguin China an integral part of China’s publishing industry, building the relationships and making the investments necessary to make joint-publishing with China viable. While last week’s post looked at the globalisation of Chinese literature, this week’s looks at the globalisation of its publishing industry, in an interview with a pioneer.

Christen Cornell: When did the Penguin set up the China office, and what was your mission statement at the time?

Jo Lusby: I started working in Beijing March 2005 but the office was formerly established in August. It was actually a nice situation in that they didn’t have a strategy in place when I was hired. The job was to set up something in China, a legal company that could just look at what we could be doing in the area. It was definitely the best way to do it because I think any strategy written about of London would have probably failed.

CC: And were there any other international publishers in China at the time?
JL: We were the first of the trade publishers. Harper and Random set up the year after us, and Hachette set up last year. So we were just one year ahead of them. The educational publishers were all here and established already, and very big, so the job really overall was to see in what ways could we be using and developing the Penguin brand in China. That was my overall job. And very quickly we realised we would be doing three things.

We would be buying books from China: and that was the first piece of work I did was to buy a book, was to buy Wolf Totem. We didn’t know at the time that this was actually such a closely held government priority. It’s a big concern of the Central Government now, getting stuff out of China, but that hadn’t really taken off when we started. Translating a Chinese title was much more a gestural move of courtesy on our part, to show we’re not only here to publish our own books, but also to take on new and interesting Chinese books as well. It was the same model that had been used to set up the Penguin India office.

CC: I’ve always wondered if Penguin had used the same model in India.
JL: Yes we had. In India what happened was the original head of the company signed up – I think it was something like six authors, one of whom was Vikram Seth – and essentially ended up launching Indian literature in the English language for Western markets. This was very much a model that had worked for Penguin in the past.

So my three objectives were to: buy some books that we could take out into English; look at ways of developing our English language book imports into China; and look at Chinese language publishing partnerships.

CC: Has the balance of importance between those three objectives changed over time?
JL: In terms of importance, no. They are all equally important to us I would say. I think in revenue terms we earn more money from our English language imports. In the long term we expect to earn more money from Chinese language publishing.

The third area, taking Chinese literature into English, is extremely high profile; it does take up a lot of our time and it does generate quite a lot of income for us. It’s much easier to talk about, and is much quicker in terms of getting it turned around. But in terms of the mix of what we do, the primary gain is the books we are doing in China, in Chinese and English. So that’s selling our big important books from around the world into China in the two different languages: English and Chinese. The translation work, although it is still very important to us, we definitely need time to grow.

CC: And I guess in order to do that translation work you have to invest a lot of resources. You have to build up a network of translators, which is what you’ve been doing through the Chinese English Literary Translation Course.
JL: Right, exactly. The translation workshop exists for a few reasons.
It was partly a government relations exercise, in fact its origins were with this. We were under a lot of pressure from the Chinese government to take books out of Chinese into English, and to pull our weight on that front. However they were not very nuanced in how they approached the subject, particularly in the first year or two of the project, so it was a bit of a blunt instrument for a while. They were just pushing us to take more and more books into English.

Our line was that we didn’t offer vanity publishing services for the Chinese government. We would only take books that we believed were commercially viable, for two reasons: one was that we were a business and we need to make money; and two being that there’s actually no point in taking books that don’t work commercially because in the end all it would do is damage the reputation of Chinese writing. Some of this stuff is unreadable, and it represents a very different kind of writing that’s going on.

So we were very firm, and I think almost alone among foreign publishers; but we were very firm in not taking books that we didn’t believe were commercial for the sake of government relations. What we then started doing was looking at ways that we could do our part and contribute to this for the development of Chinese fiction outside of China, while sticking to our own moral line.

In the course of this conversation with ourselves we met a woman called Kate Griffin from the Arts Council of England who was very keen to support literary translators working into English. She had a project and some funding to support publication in the UK of Chinese works into English. And so she already knew very well the British Centre for Literary Translation, and their translation course at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. She talked to us about how that works and we realised that this is the perfect model for China.

Apart from it being a government relations exercise the other thing that we became aware of through buying Wolf Totem was that … Well, we used Howard Goldblatt to translate that book, and he is of course the preeminent translator of contemporary Chinese literature into English, but there is only one of him. And I was very conscious of my colleagues in America who were extremely nervous about using translators that didn’t have prominence, didn’t have a proven published background. So we became aware that there was an extremely small and shallow pool of translators that we were trying to recruit from. And in order to do anything, and for the sake of the long-term viability of Chinese translation, what was really needed was investment in the early stage development of translation skills. So we just became very proud to do it, and it became something we were extremely happy to support.

CC: This is straying from the traditional job of the publisher, isn’t it?
JL: It is and it isn’t. The traditional role of the publisher is ultimately to find the people to be able to do what you want to do, and China’s a non-traditional market. As I say, it was partly for PR reasons, and you can’t underestimate the amount of government good will we got out of this, because ultimately they now see us as a supportive player. It cost us a bit of time, but it didn’t cost us very much money.

Penguin actually held the same course in Abu Dhabi recently, in Arabic. We have a new Penguin office in Abu Dhabi for Arabia, and again we decided this was a good approach. It’s a good way for us to get to know people, get to work within literature, a good way to get to know authors. In a way it’s a non-traditional thing for a publisher to do but in a way it’s entirely in our skill set.

And now, partly as a result of the translation course, we are able to publish our own list of between five and eight books a year – books in English, from and about China. Most of these books are Chinese literature in translation, and small numbers are books about China written in English. Participants from the translation course have been signed up to translate two of them so far [The Civil Servant's Notebook by Wang Xiaofang, which will be translated by Eric Abrahamsen, and Blood Crimes by He Jiahong]. So this really is also putting us in the forefront of the minds of the writers and the translators. It actually gives us extremely good access to future works, and the translators of those works.

CC: Do you find you have much competition when you’re trying to buy translation rights from China or are you usually at the head of the queue?

JL: Typically I find most of the books that we end up buying are un-agented, mainly because China is not a traditionally agented market. So typically I think if the book is agented we’re not necessarily at the front of the queue. But I’d say if the author manages the rights themselves then we’re very much at the front of the queue.

CC: And are you personally still looking for the books? I know you were the one who found Wolf Totem but do you still scout for the books?
JL: Yes I do. We’re working on five or six books at the moment all of which I bought for the company. I still look very aggressively. I’ve got a whole stack of [laughs] … a pile of four books that I stupidly asked for last week that I’m interested in doing for the classics. I’ve got a nice, really cool idea that I’d quite like to do something on, but now I’ve got a whole load of big hefty old things to try to get through.

CC: Do you already do Chinese classics into English?
JL: We do. We have a lot. But since we started the guys in classics in London asked us, if there was one classic that we haven’t done from China what should we do? And I said Lu Xun. They had already been thinking about Lu Xun but didn’t really know whether or not it was an absolute ‘must do or else’ situation, and then they got Julia Lovell to do it. It’s taking quite a long while to get the translation in because it’s such a big work.
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CC: I’d like to talk a bit about reading habits in China, which I guess come from purchasing habits. What are the genres that are the bestsellers in China? Are they the same as in Western markets?
JL: They’re similar. But there’s a big difference between the Chinese language and foreign language markets here. I would say in the Chinese language market you see a lot of the typical publishing of developing nations: a lot of books that allow you to become a better person, a richer person, a more successful person. Those books tend to do extremely well. We do very very well with business books in Chinese. Chinese literature is a bigger market however than foreign literature in translation.

But the big shift recently has been in book prices and formats. People are now willing to pay more for a good book if you like, for a hardback book. Typically in the West, a book will come out in hardback and then a year later in paperback, but in China it’s the other way round. It comes out in paperback and then if it does well, it comes out in hardback in a high-end edition. And that’s a very new thing.

CC: Do you think that the growth of the middle class in China will mean a growth in the number of readers, and so a growth in the publishing market?
JL: Yes and no. Actually book reading has been a very established part of Chinese culture and tradition for a very, very long time. It’s more that books are only recently being promoted as a lifestyle choice. That ‘reading this book says this about me.’ That’s a very new thing.

Books just haven’t been branded in China. But with a lot of the branding exercises we do around the Black Classics we’re beginning to see these types of things happen now with Chinese readers. In the past, book publishing was just a state enterprise of the state department, and they look like, to be honest, books that were published by the state: with no pictures on the jacket, no strong branding of one publishing house or another publishing house, no strong author branding particularly. You would never see a bus stop ad’ for a book or an author for example. They are not branded as consumer objects. But that’s just beginning to happen now.

So I mean the way books are being published is changing, I think. Actually, the number of books being published, if anything, is falling, but the books are being sold for more money, and the actual finances of book publishing are definitely growing. So you can earn more money from publishing now than you could before, but I think the actual number of books being published is going down.

It’s partly about having nice formats, good print values, production values, being brave to price your product slightly higher than the market, not being afraid to be criticised on price. It’s easy to make the race to the bottom on price but all you end up doing is making less money.
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CC: Just lastly, do you feel that there’s more of a hunger in China for knowledge about the West than vice versa? Based on book sales and translations.
JL: I don’t think it’s as easy to summarise it as that. I just think it’s … I think the English language is a very dominant language and I think other languages tend to look to the English language, much more than the English language looks to others. French publishing sees far more books published from English into French than French into English. So I think it’s the tyranny of the English language more than anything else, more than being specifically China. /interviewed by Christen Cornell

Want to learn more about Chinese culture discussion, please go to Artspace China at The University of Syndey.

Amy Tan Q&A: China Then and Now, and How to Bridge the Gap

Novelist Amy Tan has spent most of her life examining the divide between China and America through novels that examine the emotional minefields of families and the clashes that come from cultural misunderstandings.

Now the writer — whose novels “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” all tackle the conundrum of Chinese-American identity — is applying her perspective on that divide to this week’s U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture.

The four-day event in Beijing, which begins Wednesday, is sponsored by the Asia Society and the Aspen Institute and will bring together cultural luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, actress Meryl Streep, chef Alice Waters and film director Joel Coen to “advance cultural understanding” between the United States and China through performances, screenings and panel discussions.

The writer sat down with China Real Time Report to reflect on what she hopes will come of the forum, and what it means to be an American with emotional connections to China. Further detail pls read WSJ's report.

The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online

Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of Ghost Blows Out the Light, an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print.
"It's only when I am at work that I can write; when I'm at home, I can't," says Zhang. His novel, which narrates the travails of a gravedigger plagued by ghosts, has been acclaimed across China for its creativity, if not for its critical value. Zhang began writing Ghost to relax and kill time during slow mornings at his office. "I don't think of it as literature," Zhang says. "For me it's just a game."
It's a particularly lucrative game. Zhang is far from unique in China, where writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.
"Novel," the top search term on China's biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.
And it's not just print. Companies from almost every entertainment field, including films and video games, are joining forces, heralding the next generation of Chinese entertainment empires. The creative content of one internet novel can be sold to various national entertainment companies up to five times. A film version of Ghost Blows Out the Light is in pre-production and many popular internet novels have spawned TV series and online games.
"The multi-dimensional utilization of copyright in China has just begun," says Kong Yi, the CEO of Magic Sword, a literary website whose hit series, Killing Immortals, has sold over a million copies. Yi and a few friends first hoisted Magic Sword onto the web in 2001 as a literary hobby, using a few shaky borrowed servers. By 2002, it was ranked in the top 100 websites worldwide on Alexa.com. The borrowed servers threatened to keel over under the weight of the traffic.
In 2003, Magic Sword became a commercial endeavor. It raised $10,000 from investors, got new servers and finally became its creators' day job. Then the leading Chinese portal Tom.com bought Magic Sword, making Yi a millionaire. Magic Sword now has its own halogen-lit offices in a sprawling forest of glassed buildings just outside Beijing.
Magic Sword is now losing a few thousand dollars every year. Confident of future success, Kong Yi compensates for this loss with the money from the acquisition by Tom.com, supplemented by income from ads, fees paid by readers and a string of copyright sales. (As with other Chinese literature sites, anyone can publish stories and most of the content is free, but there is a fee to read the most popular novels.)
Yi's ambitions don't stop there. "I would like to make the company into an entertainment corporation, one that would include a publishing, movie production and video game company," with internet novels at its nucleus, Kong Yi says. By Aventurina King for Wired 08.17.07

Michael Crichton Goes to China

HarperCollins is bringing Michael Crichton to readers in China. The publisher has teamed with the Jilin Publishing Group to release a number of Chinese-language editions of Crichton's books, the first of which, Next, is being released in trade paperback there. Following Next Jilin and HC will release Chinese- language editions of The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery and Airframe.

HC president worldwide, Brian Murray, who made the Crichton announcement in Beijing, also said the publisher is acquiring two titles in a series from local bestseller, Hongying Yang. (The publisher bought world rights to eight books by the author at the Beijing Book Fair in 2007.) The series, Diary of a Smiling Cat (笑猫日记) for readers 7-9, was acquired from Tomorrow Publishing House and will be published by HC simultaneously in English worldwide. According to HC, the books, which follow a talking cat that communicates with its owner and were published in China in 2006, have already sold over 3 million copies in the country.

The moves are part of the house's growing expansion into China, which began back in 2006.


Written by Rachel Deahl