Saturday, April 01, 2006

I am not really a jazz fan, but this Taiwan-native jazz album has occupied my CD player (CD Portable System RC-QW33 by JVC) for more then two weeks. It is the first personal album of a Japanese jazz pianist, 烏野薰, also known as Uno, who has been living in Taiwan from 1997 and a regular performer in a famous jazz pub, Blue Note, in downtown Taipei.
The first song in the album, It Could Happen To You, is nine minutes long, which makes me wonder whether Linda, a student of Uno's, played the song with the same length in her debut performance.
In the CD pamphlet, Uno wrote brief introductions for each of the songs. I am not sure whether she wrote them in Chinese or in Japanese and then translated later into Chinese, but I try to translate the introduction of the first song into English here:

It Could Happen To You 9'00"
This is the title song of the movie, And the Angels Sing. In fact, I didn't know it until recording this song, because I am not really a moviegoer. But I love this song very much, for its beautiful main melody and free-flowing chords. I want to dedicate this song to my teacher, however there is no way for him to hear it. When I was learning jazz from him in Japan, he played this song all the time. So it's really a classic jazz song that is also full of memories for me. I hope the audience of this CD will hear my feeling about this song.

Uno in The Jazz Piano Trio Creations
Uno in The Jazz Piano Trio Creations

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I also asked Uno where the song came from, and she told me about "And the Angels Sing". I did not time my performance, but my wild guess is that mine was a bit less than 9 minutes. My version and Uno's is similar in structure, intro - melody - solo(2 times) - trading - melody - solo (n times) - and ending. Uno took a bit longer with the trading and the n times solo.

You must share with me about your jazz teacher next time.

Allen Hsu said...

Actually, it's Uno's teacher, 藤沢清十郎. Me having a jazz piano teacher is beyond my imagination, although, strange enough, we do have a piano in our old apartment.