Hong Kong Professional Musicians of Canada share their passion for Chinese pop
The musically diverse group is taking the music online through jam sessions, songwriting workshops, and more
Ken Chan is a founding member of Hong Kong Professional Musicians of Canada.
LOCAL MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST and composer Ken Chan’s love of music goes back to his high-school days at Magee Secondary. Under the direction of luminaries John Trepp and Peter Stigings at the time, the school’s choirs and bands earned scores of awards, many at the national level. Chan, who plays mainly piano but also guitar, bass, drums, and trumpet, later moved to Hong Kong and eventually became a full-time musician under the mentorship of Chan Kwong Wing, better known as Comfort Chan, a veteran producer and composer.
Ken Chan has gone on to compose for the Saat po long (Asia) / Kill Zone (North America) movie franchise and write more than 1,000 works for TV commercials. He has played keyboards live in stadium concerts with prominent Asian performing artists such as Aaron Kwok, one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Cantopop, and singer-actor Ekin Cheng. Most recently, he was bandleader for Cheng’s solo show at the Singapore Indoor Stadium pre-COVID.
He’s also one of eight founding members of Hong Kong Professional Musicians of Canada. The group consists of Hong Kong musicians residing in Canada who are actively working in the Chinese pop-, TV-, and film-music scene—and who hope to become a driving force behind the growth of Chinese music across the country.
“HKPMC was formed from a group of close musicians who have either returned or immigrated to Vancouver from Hong Kong, most of us in the last few years,” Chan tells Stir. “With our diverse background and experience, we felt it would be amazing to connect with fellow Canadians who are just as passionate about Chinese pop music. By bringing together shared knowledge and energy, our mission is to help develop and promote Chinese music in Canada.
“Our members are experienced musicians in the Hong Kong entertainment industry—whether that be as a producer, artist, arranger, or performer—who are now residing in Canada,” says the North Vancouver-based musician. “Our hope is to encourage and nurture newcomers to the industry as well as to bring about more local awareness of Hong Kong's music scene.”
The group has three advisors who are legends in the industry: Tony Arevalo Jr., Peter Kam, and Richard Yuen. Yuen, a record producer and concert-music director, has composed scores to films such as Swordsman (which has become a pinnacle of Chinese martial-arts movie soundtracks), Once Upon a Time in China II, and the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World series.
Arevalo Jr. is a concert-music director, composer, and arranger who, since the 1970s, has composed and arranged more than 1,000 hit songs for the Hong Kong music scene and worked with artists such as Sam Hui, Alan Tam, Teresa Teng, and Leslie Cheung.
Kam, meanwhile, is an 11-time winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Original Film Music and Original Songs. His Silver Bear award for Best Film Music for Isabella at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival was a first for a Chinese composer. Having scored more than 90 films of various genres, he’s one of the most in demand composers in the Chinese-speaking world.
HKPMC formed prior to the pandemic, with COVID-19 meaning a shift online for its planned seminars, concerts, and social gatherings.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the group has hosted jam sessions as well as interviews and game-show type sessions with Hong Kong pop stars via Zoom. In August, its first Music Seen webinar was a demo-songwriting workshop that drew more people from across the country.
“Submissions were picked at random and then we would critique the demo and discuss on how it could be improved,” Chan says. “Demo submission is a key aspect of the Cantopop industry, and we felt that this was the most important issue our subscribers would like to learn more about.
Ken Chan composed scores for the Saat po long (Asia) / Kill Zone (North America) movie franchise.
“As our core members are among the most experienced producers and composers in the industry, we felt that it was a great opportunity to provide feedback to upcoming composers and also a chance for listeners and ourselves to learn from each other,” Chan says. “We received so many entries that we couldn’t go through them all in the scheduled time.”
Based on the success of that first workshop, HKPMC is planning its next, an arrangement seminar where people will learn how to arrange a pop song from scratch.
They’ll discuss the software and hardware used; tips, tricks and shortcuts; and various arrangement and programming techniques.
“People who are already experienced in basic programming of a music DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] software such as Logic or Digital Performer would hopefully also find it helpful to listen to what structures and sounds are now popular in the Hong Kong pop scene,” Chan says.
The date for the next workshop is forthcoming; in the meantime, the group plans on hosting an informal recording of the founders sharing personal experiences in arranging songs—including how to manage and interpret criticism.
The musicians have also produced several “backyard jams”, where a Hong Kong singer performs a live recording to a performance recorded in a Zoom-like setting. One of them, featuring the singer Kay Tse (謝安琪), was a special edition produced in conjunction with B.C. Children’s Hospital in support of frontline workers and children battling illness. HKPMC can be found on Facebook and YouTube.
The eight founders of HKPMC (clockwise from top left) are Ken Chan, Anthony Chue, Allan Lau, Chris Ho, Jerald, Duck Lau, Victor Tse, and Jone Chui.
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