Rekindle the Fire takes a ceremonial approach to music
Featured guests Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch will be joined by 10 accomplished musicians from various cultural backgrounds as well as by Han’s vocalist daughter in Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra concert celebrating winter solstice
Mei Han (left) and Randy Raine-Reusch
The Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra (VICO) and Red Chamber Cultural Society present Rekindle the Fire at the Annex on December 20 at 8 pm
REKINDLE THE FIRE. It sounds like some kind of seasonal celebration, doesn’t it? And in fact there would be few more festive ways to honour the winter solstice than by checking out the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra’s concert of the same name, taking place at the Annex on the longest night of the year.
Even so, featured guests Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch are somewhat in the dark when it comes to the title of their upcoming performance, in which they’ll be joined by 10 accomplished musicians from various cultural backgrounds, as well as by Han’s vocalist daughter, D’arcy.
“That was Mark’s idea,” says Raine-Reusch, referring to Mark Armanini, VICO’s artistic director and a longtime friend. After a little more thought, the multi-instrumentalist and world traveler recalls that “at the very first VICO performance, we were on-stage.”
“We were founding members of VICO,” his partner in life and music adds. “That was the year 2000.”
It’s not that the two have been absent from VICO and Vancouver for all of that time, but Han’s current position as director of the Center for Chinese Music and Culture at Middle Tennessee State University has been keeping her busy. Raine-Reusch has also been abroad, teaching at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music for a year and supervising several incarnations of the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo. But with a full-time return to Vancouver in the cards, it does seem an appropriate moment to rekindle the flames of collaboration with some Vancouver-based sonic adventurers.
On the program for Wednesday will be several works from Han and Raine-Reusch’s 2001 album Distant Wind, newly arranged for ensemble by Armanini, Moshe Denburg, and Farshid Samandari. NOW Society artistic director and pianist Lisa Cay Miller will contribute a new score, along with one from guitarist and composer John Oliver. It’s a rather stunning array of compositional talent, but just as important, both Raine-Reusch and Han agree, is that improvisation will play a key role in what we’ll hear.
For Raine-Reusch, Rekindle the Fire speaks to “the kind of fire that improvisation gives to a performance”.
“It reawakens that essential creative energy as well,” he adds.
He and Han also concur that their first meeting, which began as a musical collaboration but soon blossomed into something more, marked a change in how they viewed music and life.
“Meeting Mei was the answer to a long-time want, which was to meet a zheng player who had the ears, the ability, the intellect, and the artistic creativity to want to embrace contemporary music,” Raine-Reusch says. “When we first met we had four-hour conversations about Chinese music history and philosophy, and that was really nourishing to me, spiritually and intellectually. And then what happened during that process was that I also taught her to improvise. This was her first time ever to improvise, and that process ended up as the album Distant Wind. We learned to work as a team extremely well.”
Han was already an internationally acclaimed master of the zither-like zheng when the two met, but her musical training had taken place during the Cultural Revolution, when experimentation was comprehensively shunned. So, too, were elements of China’s musical past, especially those relating to the ancient links between music and Taoist philosophy. Han credits Raine-Reusch, a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, with opening her mind to philosophical concepts both new and old.
“Contemporary Chinese music training for performance did not include improvisation,” she says. “Even my first teacher, who was a folk musician, he never told me that part of his music was improvised. So that meeting with Randy, that was the first time I started to improv, and I landed on the most radical kind of improvisation, which is free jazz or free improv.
“I actually learned a lot from Randy and his study of Zen and Zen types of music, like ichigenkin music,” Han adds. “That inspired me to look for the spiritual side, aesthetically and culturally, in Chinese music. So from that perspective I think I learned this older Chinese musical philosophy through this white guy.”
Both Han and Raine-Reusch agree that the growing integration of D’arcy’s pop-honed energy into their shared music has been a very welcome development. A pop star in China, D’arcy’s fame landed them a guest spot on a TV show with a viewership in excess of 55 million, which in turn led to a well-received stadium tour. That level of acclaim wasn’t entirely foreign to Raine-Reusch, whose CV includes guest spots with the rock bands Aerosmith and Yes; more challenging has been D’arcy’s immersion in improvised-music techniques, thanks to her stepfather. The two will collaborate on a structured improvisation as part of Rekindle the Fire, and navigating that level of sonic intimacy, D’arcy says, is far more demanding than singing in front of thousands of eager fans.
“Randy asked me if I was interested in stepping out of my comfort zone to try something new,” the younger Han says. “And usually I would say yes right away, but I actually had to think about this one, because it’s really different from anything I’d ever done before. If we were to do this we would need to do this properly, so we would have a series of lessons to get me up to speed on what improv is expected to be. I was thinking, ‘Well, this is improv; it could be whatever I want it to be, right?’ But no. There are still rules.
“Structure and organization and planning are so instilled in both Chinese and Western culture that to just let go of control and planning is a very new and strange territory to get into,” D’arcy adds. “At first I was’t comfortable, and I had to truly learn to let go and not think about results, not think about consequences, and just really try being in the moment. At the end of the day it’s about really trusting yourself and the people that you’re working with—and trusting the flow itself. So if we’re talking philosophy or Taoism, I guess that’s the essence of it.”
“And because of that,” Raine-Reusch adds, “this concert is not just that we’re going to go and play some new arrangements of old tunes. This is an honouring of us by VICO; it’s an honouring of the music by us and VICO; it’s an honouring of this approach to music. And with that honouring there’s a kind of a ceremonial aspect to this performance. It’s about sound; it’s about silence; it’s about listening; it’s about creativity in the moment. There’s almost a sacred aspect to that, so we’re approaching it vey much with an Asian ceremonial formality, not a Western orchestral formality. It’s not an orchestral performance per se; it’s much more of an older, ceremonial approach to the music.”
In other words, the fire that’s being rekindled here is a sacred blaze, and what could be more appropriate for the solstice?
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