dong qin unreal
he ye you chun tian (2006)
What a voice! Who in the world is Dongqin and where can I find some information about her?
Sometimes internet hunts can be frustrating. What I find often is that the people who are doing wild, new things with jazz or poetry thrive in corners of the world I never thought to look at and suddenly they emerge full-formed and I marvel and wonder "where has this person been all my life?"
This is how my discovery of Dongqin began, at 3:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, taking a break from studying for my anatomy class (insomnia and nerves are a terrible combination). I thought, "I wonder what is new in Chinese jazz?" Jazz in Chinese simplified, 爵士乐, is easy to type in but reading the results for me takes a little longer. There are some interesting sites, such as Jazzmonk and the Hong Kong Jazz Association.
However, I soon discovered that there was this new CD I had never heard of before, Ye Bai He Ye You Chun Tian (a rough translation is The Savage Lily's Spring) through Lala.com. Here is a sample from an earlier album of hers, Xu Ni Hen Mei Li (Unreal):
But after that all information on her seems to dry up. My ability to read Chinese is very, very, very bad so it has been taking me a while to do research. None of the music websites that sell her music have any information on her. She appears to be lumped into the almost universal category "Word Music," making almost any search for her impossible. Her record company is Guangdong Tlike, but that isn't very helpful either. The website ECD Hong Kong Limited gives us the following profile glimpse, though:
Dong Qin was a great talented singer-songwriter of T-Like Record. Jazz arrangement was getting more and more popular in modern pop production, Dong Qin's talent in Jazz-Pop music was a crown jewel of new Chinese pop and has served as a guidepost for other Chinese singers. 《Conjecture Beauty》 was Dong's second album, it has fully displayed Dong's unique and enjoyable voice, and outstandingly demonstrated her characteristics with the exploitation of new Chinese Jazz style. The song “I Fell In Love” attends BBC Music Line (UK) in 2005, as representative music track for China , and it successfully hit the Top 10 Chart.
Does anyone have any useful information about this jazz singer? I hope she gets more exposure in the West; I find her voice amazing and her music worthy of any English speaking torch singer. Regardless of what anyone may know, thank you very much for reading.