Season of Cambodia Kong Nay playing the chapei dang weng during this festival concert at the Asia Society.
Kong Nay at the Season of Cambodia Festival
By JON PARELES
Th New York Times
Published: April 21, 2013
The troubadour wielding a stringed instrument and singing praises, dance
tunes, love songs, histories or wry comments is a nearly universal
figure in traditional music, from Appalachian banjo pickers to Moroccan
gnawa musicians to West African griots to Japanese minyo singers. Kong Nay,
who performed at the Asia Society on Saturday night, is one of them,
playing the Cambodian style called chapei: singing in a hearty voice and
playing the chapei dang weng, a long-necked, two-stringed lute.
Chapei is a sparse, open, toe-tapping style. Mr. Kong sang forthright
modal melodies, propelled from the downbeat and embellished with quavers
and slides. He plucked a steady rhythm, meanwhile, with a repeating
note on one string while the other carried a melody line: sharing it
with the voice and sometimes answering a vocal line with an instrumental
refrain. The modes and inflections were Southeast Asian, but the folky
tunes were homey and direct.
The Asia Society projected some of the lyrics overhead; in various songs
Mr. Kong invoked Buddhist deities, praised a mother’s sacrifices,
celebrated dancing and hoped to find a “new soul mate” on the dance
floor; “My old one should not have jilted me,” he sang in “Rom Vong.”
Mr. Kong also improvised some verses that drew laughter from Cambodians
in the audience.
His upbeat music is an ancient tradition — one endangered by the
cultural genocide of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, who starved and
executed an estimated 90 percent of Cambodia’s artists and
intellectuals. Mr. Kong,
who is in his late 60s and has been blind since childhood, is one of
the rare survivors among his generation of master musicians. He appeared
as part of the citywide Season of Cambodia series, which is celebrating the preservation and progress of Cambodian culture.
Mr. Kong played the first part of the concert solo. Then he was joined
by a jazz group, the Ben Allison trio, with Mr. Allison on bass, Marc
Ribot on guitar and Rudy Royston on drums. Mr. Allison remarked that
when he first heard Mr. Kong’s music he thought, “It just feels like the
blues to me” — another troubadour tradition. In one song Mr. Kong
declaimed, “Though we can’t speak a common language, our music does for
us.”
It was a congenial fusion. The trio added a jovial bustle to the songs
while respecting Mr. Kong’s clear beat; at one point Mr. Ribot tried to
add some lead-guitar counterpoint to Mr. Kong’s pithy melodies, but
wisely backed off. And in “Arapiya” the group heard compatible chords
that fit Mr. Kong’s melody and unchanging bass note; the Cambodian tune
tilted toward hand-clapping country, hinting at “You Are My Sunshine.”
The song was about dancing “to the rocking music” on a Saturday night;
it was a neat cross-cultural fit.
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