屋希耶澤 in TAIPEI TIME'S / A passage to India專訪
屋希耶澤 in TAIPEI TIME'S / A passage to India專訪
雖然是英文版
但裡面有許許多多我想說的話
誰說音樂人只如戲子一般
若認真起來
我們也可以用力轉動世界
一起加油啦
[TAIPEI TIME'S / A passage to India]
By Ho Yi / Staff Reporter
Wushi Azer trained as a pop musician,
but after a mystical dream he took up the sitar and embarked
on a spiritual and musical journey of discovery
After playing guitar in bands and with church groups in his youth, Wu Hsin-tse (吳欣澤) changed his name and took up an instrument you don’t often see in Taiwan — the sitar. Now he prefers to be called Wushi Azer (屋希耶澤), a name derived from his Aboriginal roots.
Azer is also a pop musician who has worked with the likes of Tanya Chua (蔡健雅) and Chang Hui-mei (張惠妹, aka A-mei). Among his many identities, the musician is a band member of Siyu Sitar (西尤樂團), which he founded.
“I don’t play sitar to be like an Indian or to become such-and-such a musician. I want to tell my own stories,” said Azer. “Don’t tell me the Ganges is the greatest. To me, the Pacific Ocean is. It gives me more nutrition.”
Sporting long hair, bohemian clothes and sandals, he looks the part. His music, however, is hard to categorize.
In Siyu Sitar, he plays with a drummer and electric bass player, creating sounds that are at times brooding and reminiscent of the sitar’s Indian origin, and at other times full of electronic noises and riffs. Some tunes sound like they are the result of freestyle jazz sessions, while others are carefully arranged around strong melodies.
Azer attributes his unorthodox approach to music to the fact that his first sitar teachers were not classically trained masters, but people who “played the instrument with a bow, or produced electronic sounds with it.”
His first encounter with the sitar was as a high school student, when the then-teenaged rocker obtained a CD by sitar master Shahid Parvez. He didn’t know who Parvez was and thought the music sounded like “an Indian man trying to tune a stringed instrument.” He was more impressed by the concert Ravi Shankar gave in Changhua County in 1997, though he had no clue that Shankar was a legendary virtuoso. A few years later, the young man returned to Parvez’s CD and was enchanted by a sense of tranquility and the vastness it evoked.
Azer bought his first sitar at a craft shop in Tamsui on Christmas Eve in 2003. The following day, the musician and some of his friends jammed in the square outside Eslite Bookstore Dunnan Branch (敦南誠品). The sessions turned into weekly events, and continued for the next four years.
“The security guards wanted to kick us out, but Wu Wu-chang (吳武璋) [head of Eslite’s record store] stood up for us,” the now 30-year-old musician recalls.
Azer says his transformation into a sitar player has something to do with divine intervention. During a tour with a church band in which he played guitar, he heard a voice asking him in his sleep, “Do you want to change?” The 22-year-old Azer replied, “Yes, I guess. Well, I’ll try.”
A year later, he was selected as one of the first participants in the Wanderer program (流浪者計畫), which was initiated by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) to provide funding to young artists. The aspiring musician consequently spent two months studying sitar under the tutelage of a sitar master in Varanasi, India.
Though Azer studies traditional techniques because they are more “efficient,” he says that classical Indian music is too “elegant and royal” for him. “I like music that is born from the ground.”
India is a home away from home, and he regularly returns for sitar lessons. Having grown up near a public cemetery, he feels a sense of belonging in a country where “people don’t pretend that death does not exist.”
The country’s kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and smells is a source of inspiration. Azer came up with India Cow Footstep (印度牛步) when he saw cows roaming the streets with lights attached to their rumps. “Indian traffic very bad,” the cowherd explained. The melody for Liquid Reincarnation (液體輪迴) came to the musician in a dream on a cold night. In the dream, he was a drop of water that after being drunk by an animal and coming out the other end, evaporates.
“I really don’t know if I wrote the song or not. Perhaps it has existed for a very long time, and I dreamt of it,” he said.
With two albums — Heartbeat of Asia (亞洲的心跳) and River of Memories (ㄧ條記憶的河流) — under his belt, Azer said his next music project would be simple and true to himself. He has embarked on a plan to “discover” his roots in the Kavalan (噶瑪蘭) tribe and tell his own Kavalan stories using the sitar.
“People ask me why I don’t use Chinese musical instruments to explore Aboriginal culture. I tell them: ‘I am not Han Chinese, so I don’t want to use Chinese instruments,’” he said. “Some question why, as a Taiwanese musician, I choose to play a foreign instrument. My answer to them is: ‘I like sitar, and I am happy playing it.’”
Azer plays on May 12 at Witch House (女巫店) with Benny Prasad, a traveling guitarist from India who has performed at events such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup. For more information about Azer, visit the musician’s Web site at www.wretch.cc/blog/seeyouband.
Sealed (Nov 14)