Paul Zetter – Some Wedding

Our jazz reviewer went to the Rooftop bar to enjoy Nguyen Le’s Que Nha concert and came home inspired to write some musings on the future of Vietnamese jazz.

To many, an electric guitar is a collection of pieces of wood, plastic and metal glued and bolted together with steel strings that you plug into a box that makes it sound louder. To Nguyen Le it is a Samurai archer’s bow – fine-tuned to the millimeter, worthy of deep respect and to be handled with the utmost care and precision.

Watching Nguyen Le play guitar is like being in the presence of a master craftsman at the top of his game where accuracy is everything and legacy is something felt through generation after generation.

He doesn’t so much pluck the strings as stroke them into life with fingers moving over the fret board like a ballet dancer.  He is able to invoke musical Vietnamese spirits in the way he caresses the strings, his guitar sounding at one moment like the Dan Bau monochord, the other like the Dan Nguyet Moon Guitar.

I was lucky enough to get a standing room only place at Hanoi’s elite Rooftop Bar last week to catch the second night of Nguyen Le’s Que Nha two night engagement. I’d seen the band in rehearsals the previous week and wrote a preview of the concert.

The band were sounding good then but nothing quite prepared me for what I was about to hear. 

With a hand-picked Vietnamese band featuring Tuan Nam, piano, Khac Quan, violin, Quoc Binh drums, Hong Kien, sax and Vu Ha, bass, Nguyen Le headlined the bill with traditional Vietnamese music luminary, Van Anh. The two met and played together in America and their collaboration was at the heart of this visit to Vietnam in terms of concept and repertoire. In many ways they are similar; they both share a prodigious technique on their respective instruments, both compose and arrange exceptionally well and most importantly both have thrown off the straight jackets of any kind of musical genre they may have otherwise been beholden too. Two liberated musicians finding common ground by mixing jazz, folk and rock with traditional Vietnamese music – now there’s a recipe for some high voltage musical electricity. At the end of his last piece, his barnstorming signature tune, Black Horse, Nguyen professed that the evening had been the marriage between Jazz and Vietnamese traditional music. Others will claim that this wedding has already happened in other manifestations but maybe not at this level of musicianship and sense of purpose.

Launching into Van Anh’s piece, Overture, the band had a chance to loosen up with solos from Nam on piano and Kien on sax that were fiery and focused. Nam has an engaging stage presence and that strong right hand has now thankfully joined forces with his left. I reviewed his recent Opera House concert here.

The unison lines of the piece dazzled as the extended arpeggios unfolded at tempo with Van Anh and Nguyen Le locked into a course with only precision, not collision as its end.

These exciting unison passages became a feature of the evening played with pinpoint accuracy but never robotically. If this was the opening number to help the band find its stride what was in store for us when they’d warmed up?

The next track, Azur, took the tempo and mood down to a bluesy Japanese inspired piece by Nguyen Le. The melody revolved around a restless cadenza that transcribed perfectly to Van Anh’s Dan Tranh. The mood deepened and intensified with the next piece, Van Anh’s beautiful Daisy Flowers which can only be described as a Vietnamese blues in which Nguyen explored the pentatonic common ground of eastern and blues music.

Nguyen Le is one of those few musicians who always has an extra gear in his fingers that doesn’t depend on pure vigour and pyrotechnics to impress like many a heavy metal guitar god does.

His solos intensify through the momentum he creates as his fingers glide up and down the fret board pushing the limit of the harmony to its furthest point – it’s reminiscent of the fiery solos Larry Carlton used to play in his live acts back in the 80s. While on the subject of other guitarists Nguyen Le isn’t the only jazz guitarist to explore world rhythms – John McLaughlin was an early pioneer who I’m sure has influenced him, but I would like to bet that Nguyen is one of the only ones to experiment with jazz influenced by H’Mong music as he did in the next piece Ting Ning. Switching to the bamboo xylophone, Dan T’rung, Van Anh led the angular melody while Nguyen Le harmonized at great speed.

Both their solos reached dizzying improvisational heights as if celebrating this fertile union of Vietnamese tradition and jazz.

Van Anh’s constant smile while playing is infectious and many other jazz musicians can learn from her stage presence and body language – attentive, communicative, engaged and joyful. Nguyen Le showed us that he can indeed combine influences from many different musical forms into one original voice as his guitar solo drew inspiration from Wes Montgomery through to Jimmy Page to the mountain villages of Ha Giang.

With the next song, The Wind Blew It Away, from his CD Tales From Vietnam, Nguyen shared with us that his mum used to sing him the song as a lullaby when he was a child.

With Van Anh singing the transient melody, what unfolded was a heart stopping rendition of a piece of Vietnamese music that was as near perfect as any I’ve ever heard.

Its crystalline beauty was underpinned by Nguyen’s lightly stroked rubato chords that illuminated yet another strand to his great musicality.

For me, the concert could have ended there and I would have gone home happy and content that the combined future of Vietnamese jazz and contemporary traditional music (if there is such a term) was safe. But there was more to come…a lot more.

Next up was a Bulgarian inspired piece called Kokopanitsa by Nguyen Le. Utilizing a time meter of 19/8, (no, that’s not a typo) the band took it on as if it was a simple two step polka. By this time some of the glitterati in the crowd were up on their feet overtaken by the excitement of the music. The solos unfolded with drama as the band started cooking to the unusual beat with an infectious hook that sounded more like a hop and a skip than a jump.

Singer Tung Duong came to the stage next and he took the concert to yet another level of intensity and energy. It was so refreshing to see his raw talents away from the well worn TV variety shows as he performed barefoot next to Nguyen Le.

Launching into Que Nha, the audience, which included a fair percentage of Vietnam’s top divas, went into raptures.

As if unaware of the power of his voice he delivered a heartfelt rendition of the song that almost distorted the microphone and could well have resonated in many a homeland beyond the Red River. The positive chemistry between him, Nguyen and Van Anh was palpable as the song drew to an end.

The next song was from Nguyen Le’s new album, Songs of Freedom. An old Janis Joplin tune with lyrics by poets Michael McClure and Bob Neuwirth, Mercedes Benz is a well known cynical commentary on the materialistic world of late sixties America and the praying to false gods. I was suddenly overcome with a deep sense of irony as Tung Duong put his heart and soul into the song. Here I was, in one of the most expensive bars in Vietnam rubbing shoulders with the Vietnamese elite who were rocking out to a song with the opening line of

‘Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz, my friends all drive Porches, I must make amends.’

It’s early days for Vietnam’s emerging elite classes to divert some of their wealth to patronage of the arts in Vietnam but there are early positive signs and this was one of them. As Nguyen Le’s raw blues solo intensified I began to reflect that if only one person in the audience would repay some of the enjoyment they had in dollars and cents for Nguyen Le to return to Vietnam to play a more accessible venue that ordinary people could enjoy, I’d be optimistic about the future of Vietnamese Jazz.

Nguyen Le and Van Anh could be just the people to consolidate and arrange music for the great jazz talents in this country to put them on the global jazz map.

And maybe in that future audience a boy or girl from the other side of the tracks in Gia Lam or Soc Son without a Mercedes or even an iPhone but with a dream about playing the guitar, will be inspired by Nguyen Le’s beautiful music and a spark in their imagination will be lit. Now that really would be something. I dare to guess that that’s what Nguyen Le would want too.

Please see our giveaway competition here – you can make comments in the preview or review.

Look out for my forthcoming in-depth interview with Van Anh who featured in this concert.

Words and photographs ⓒ Paul Zetter 2011