Vancouver musicians pay tribute to the late Bic Hoang in White Lotus Calling
The December 13 concert features 13 acts, all of whom were inspired by Hoang’s musicality and personality
Bic Hoang.
Red Chamber Cultural Society and VICO present White Lotus Calling: Hoàng Ngọc Bích Memorial Concert on December 13 at 7:30 pm at the Annex
THE DEPTH OF the late Bic Hoang’s contribution to Vancouver’s cultural scene is impossible to measure, but its breadth is evident in the array of friends and former collaborators who have lined up to pay tribute in White Lotus Calling, a memorial concert scheduled for the Annex on December 13.
There are, of course, many luminaries of our city’s intercultural-music scene, including several key members of the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra. Pioneering Chinese-Canadian musicians Mei Han and Guilian Liu of the Red Chamber ensemble will be there, as will the equally adventurous Orchid Ensemble and Silk Road Trio. Hoang’s own Vietnamese community will be represented by the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society (SEACHS) ensemble, featuring Vi An, a leading performer on the koto-like dan tranh.
In addition there will be guitarist Ed Henderson, avant-jazz luminaries Nikita Carter and Clyde Reed, improvising singer and former Western Front music curator DB Boyko, Celtic multi-instrumentalist Amy Stephen, new-music composer John Oliver, and more: 13 acts in total, all of whom were touched by Hoang’s intense musicality, generous personality, and positive energy.
“Bic was always a bright light,” says concert organizer and performer Randy Raine-Reusch, who was instrumental in helping Hoang and her equally gifted husband Ho Khac Chi settle in Vancouver following a rapturously received performance at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1992. Even during her four-year battle with cancer, which ended on June 26, she remained upbeat, Raine-Reusch adds, noting that White Lotus Calling is an occasion for celebration as much as for sadness. In both Falun Gong, the philosophical movement Hoang followed toward the end of her life, and Vietnamese tradition, the white lotus signifies “a kind of purity of spiritual attainment,” he adds. “The whiteness is about death, but it’s also about that transformation, that passing into the next world—kind of a pure spirt. And I thought that if anybody had a pure spirit, it was Bic. So it seems really appropriate.”
A graduate of and former professor at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music, Hoang was best known as a virtuoso performer on the dan bau, a one-stringed zither with a buffalo-horn “whammy bar” known for its eerie approximation of the human voice. She was also responsible for introducing the ko ni, a tribal instrument from the northern mountains of Vietnam, to the world; it’s a stick fiddle loosely in the same family as the Chinese erhu and Persian kamancheh, but unique in that it uses the performer’s mouth and throat as its resonating chamber. An engaging performer whose ability to hold an audience was shaped by hundreds of school shows, Hoang used the inherently theatrical aspects of both instruments to full advantage.
“Bic was not just the first woman but the only person to bring the ko ni to international recognition, but also she was pretty much that person for the đàn t’rưng, which is the bamboo xylophone, and for the dinh pa, a set of tuned bamboo tubes that you sort of clap in front of,” Raine-Reusch says. “All these mountain instruments that she brought to international attention, most people didn’t know them, and there really weren’t that many Vietnamese ensembles touring. She kept really good ties to Vietnam, so things she couldn’t do, she would offer opportunities to other Vietnamese artists. She was definitely a door-opener for many international Vietnamese artists, as well as for the general public.”
The music that Hoang made with her husband in their Khac Chi Bamboo Music ensemble was largely traditional, but once Ho scaled down his touring she threw herself into more interculturally oriented explorations as an interpreter of modern “world music” scores, as a composer in her own right, and as an improviser—although these roles were not always comfortable for her.
“She hated it, at first!” Raine-Reusch says, laughing. “She thought ‘This is noisy!’ This was not what she was used to, but over a period of time, and after hearing different people doing it—my wife [Mei Han] being one of them, and all the people in VICO being others—she started understanding the musical aspect of it, and where the beauty lay. And she understood also the freedom of expression that lay in those sounds. For her, as a traditionally trained musician, it just gave her a sense of freedom, that she could start doing all these different things—and she just loved that. She really was kind of a youthful explorer: everything was exciting, everything was a joy, and this was part of really who she was, this person that just wanted to explore with glee.
“‘Lets break down the barriers!’” was Hoang’s motto, he adds. “‘I haven’t done that before, so let’s try it!’”
Hoang had other barriers to break, which she did with similar passion and aplomb. For one, she and Ho provided a living bridge between Vancouver’s Vietnamese community, mostly made up of refugees from the fall of Saigon, with their homeland. According to Hung-Truong Nguyen, the artistic director of the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society and a musician himself, “Through their talent, there’s no border anymore. They were able to erase the gap in the mentalities of north and south.” On a more personal level, he adds, Hoang encouraged him to step away from his guitar, piano, and saxophone to study his native country’s traditional music.
Nguyen explains that there was a profound cultural as well as political divide within Vietnam: the capitalist south worshipped American pop and looked down on traditional music, while the communist north held Vietnamese music in high esteem and promoted it in the service of national unification. As a refugee from the south, he’d never paid much attention to tradition until Hoang and Ho adopted him as the third member of their touring ensemble.
“The education that they brought along with their music made us aware that there was a lot more to Vietnamese music than we’d thought,” Nguyen says. “And then there were all of the fantastic instruments they played—over 15 different instruments that I’d never seen in my life before. Everywhere they went they collected instruments and learned from the locals. And what amazed me was Bic’s ability: she’d just have to hear the music one time, and she’d pull out a napkin and write a chart, and the next day we’d practise it and we’d play. I was so amazed—and jealous of that, actually.”
The two were also “the backbone” of the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society, Nguyen adds, and when the ensemble’s current incarnation takes the stage at White Lotus Calling, he’ll bring another layer of memory with him by playing a rare, harp-like tinh ninh that Bic had donated to its collection.
“Before she passed away, I found one of the bamboo instruments that she’d given to SEACHS, so I took it home and fixed it and came to show it to her, and she said ‘Wow!’” Nguyen recalls. “She was very happy that I’d found it and brought it to life. I played it for her, and she was very happy that it had fallen into the right hands. That made me feel really good, so on the concert day, I’m going to play that for her.”
The white lotus that was Hoang may have passed on, but new buds are clearly blossoming.
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