CULTURE: So is ReOrientate flamenco?

All of our tracks grow from some flamenco seed.  But for us, music is conversation, and we want to encourage conversation between many cultures.  So we stretch the boundaries to bring in other musical traditions.  For example, flamenco conventions are full of call-response dialogues, and we extend this by doing a lot of call-response play between different musical traditions.  In Listen (To Each Other) the vocals form a multilingual English, Chinese, and Hindi conversation. Flamenco, Chinese, Indian, Latin, African, Arabic, Turkish, blues, soul, funk, electronica... we don’t play by the rules of only one tradition.

CULTURE:  Blues, soul — where does that fit in?

It’s a natural fit. In a lot of the musical traditions we draw from, the songs express longing, love, laments...   Just as flamenco was an outlet for the oppressed underclass of Spanish gypsies, blues was an outlet for the oppressed underclass of African Americans.  Sufi love poems like those in Wiggle and A Mi Pascale express longing with verses (roughly translated) like Come my healer, forsaken, I am sad / Your love has made me dance like mad—which echo exactly the sentiments of both the flamenco soléa and the blues that track is built on.  There’s a universality to cathartic song traditions like these.  They heal the spirit; they transform existential pain into joy, strength, and dance.

Both flamenco and blues are full of highly syncopated rhythms and non-Western European scales and harmonies.  People don’t usually notice that the Chinese pentatonic scale is actually a subset of the blues scale.  Incorporating a blues base alongside flamenco builds a bridge for many people to hear that Eastern scales like Phrygian and Chinese scales can be just as universally accessible as blues scales have become.

CULTURE:  How do people react to your unusual sound?

One happy thing we’ve discovered is that everyone, whatever their background, seems to find some familiar anchor point in our songs, which creates a bridge for them to hear the other elements.  So our songs are often heard quite differently by different individuals.

CULTURE:  How did ReOrientate happen?

We love that ReOrientate could only have happened in Hong Kong.  The make-up of the group reflects the diversity that is Hong Kong. Award-winning erhu player Rupert and zheng player King Chi both hail from the HK Academy of Performing Arts.  Our French-Italian flamenco dancer Ingrid teaches at HKAPA as well.  Vocalist and duff player Seema—who burst on the Indipop scene when she won India's first-ever reality TV talent hunt Popstars on Channel V to form the band Viva!—was born and raised in Nigeria.  Flamenco guitarist Serge is French-Greek.  Flamenco percussionist, keyboardist and electronic music composer
De Kai—myself—was born and raised in the US.  But music is a natural language that lets us celebrate what is universal among all of us.

ReOrientate performs Saturday, 5 March 2011 at 10:30pm, at the Hong Kong Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong. Tickets including one drink are $150 at the door, or $125 with advance booking at +852 2521-7251 or boxoffice@hkfringeclub.com. 

Keep up with ReOrientate at www.reorientate.info and www.facebook.com/reorientate.