The Star Online: Entertainment: Music
The Star Online: Entertainment: Music |
- Winehouse's death lands her back on the charts
- Black teen's unusual talent: Singing Chinese opera
- Namewee cooks up a laugh with Nasi Lemak 2.0
| Winehouse's death lands her back on the charts Posted: 27 Jul 2011 05:09 AM PDT NEW YORK (AP): Death has landed Amy Winehouse back on the charts. The British singer's "Back to Black" album will re-enter the Billboard album chart at No. 9, with 37,000 albums sold in the United States in the past week. Those figures come from Nielsen SoundScan data released late Tuesday. Her debut album "Frank" sold 7,000 copies. All but a fraction of those sales were digital downloads. "Back to Black" hadn't sold that many copies in three years. There were also 111,000 digital tracks of Winehouse's music sold over the past week - a 2,000 percent increase. The most downloaded Winehouse song? Her most famous one, "Rehab." Winehouse died of unknown causes at her London home on Saturday. She was 27, and had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for years. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Black teen's unusual talent: Singing Chinese opera Posted: 27 Jul 2011 05:07 AM PDT OAKLAND, Calif. (AP): Tyler Thompson is an unlikely star in the world of Chinese opera. The black teenager from Oakland has captivated audiences in the U.S. and China with his ability to sing pitch-perfect Mandarin and perform the ancient Chinese art form. "As soon as he opens his mouth and sings in Chinese, the Chinese are very surprised and then feel very proud of him," said his music teacher Sherlyn Chew. "When he puts on the costume, and all the acting, you can see that he's pretty good." Tyler, 15, is a standout student in Chew's Oakland-based Purple Silk Music Education program, which teaches children and youth - mostly from low-income immigrant families - how to sing and play traditional Chinese music. The program's Great Wall Youth Orchestra & Chorus has performed around the country. Tyler has learned to sing several well-known pieces of Chinese opera, a centuries-old form of musical theater known for its elaborate costumes, clanging gongs and cymbals, wide-ranging vocals and highly stylized movements. At the World Children's Festival in Washington in June, Tyler, dressed in a black robe emblazoned with golden dragons, got a standing ovation when he performed as Justice Bao, a famous Song Dynasty judge who fought government corruption, from the Chinese classic "Bao Qing Tian." "The music is very beautiful, and it's very passionate. You can hear it when it's being played," said Tyler, a theater student at the Oakland School for the Arts. "It's made me want to know more about the world outside of America or California or Oakland." David Lei, chairman of the Chinese Performing Arts Foundation in San Francisco, has seen Tyler perform several times and arranged to have him sing at the opening of a Chinese opera exhibit several years ago. "It's very authentic because he hits the tones just right, so you understand everything," Lei said. "People just don't expect an Afro-American kid to be doing it. It's the initial shock. There's a sense of novelty." Tyler, who comes from a music-loving family, began learning how to sing in Chinese a decade ago when he was a kindergartner in Chew's music class at Oakland's Lincoln Elementary School, where about 90 percent of students are Asian. Chew quickly recognized Tyler's talent and recruited him to join her Purple Silk music program, where students learn to sing Chinese songs and play traditional instruments such as a two-string violin called an erhu, a four-stringed lute known as a pipa and a bamboo flute called a dizi. "I really took a liking to him and thought he had quite a large range," said Chew, who started the music program at Oakland's Laney College in 1995. "He hears pitch very well, and his pronunciation of Chinese characters is very accurate." Tyler's mother, Vanessa Ladson, said her son's education at a predominantly Asian elementary school and participation in the Chinese music program have made him more open-minded. "He's grown a lot," she said. "He's learning a different culture, and the Asian children are learning his culture, so it's a plus-plus for everybody." Tyler said friends and classmates sometimes poke fun at him, wondering where a black kid from Oakland learned how to sing Chinese opera. "Sometimes they don't understand it," Tyler said. "It's just joking about the fact that as dark as I am, I'm singing Chinese. What's up with that? If I go to China, I'm going to stick out like a sore thumb. It's just those types of jokes. All in good fun." Since his first solo at age 6, Tyler has performed at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall and Herbst Theater, on television shows such as "Good Morning America" and at the U.S. State Department, where he sang for then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi. Tyler became a sensation in China several years ago after Chinese Central Television broadcast his performance at a Lunar New Year show in San Jose. Tyler, who has learned to speak some basic Chinese, was scheduled to make his debut performance in China in July, but he and his mother ran into trouble getting visas in time, Chew said. In recent years, Tyler has begun studying theater and acting more seriously, but he plans to keep performing traditional Chinese music, which has opened up a world of opportunities to him. "I've been sticking to this to see where else it will take me," he said. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Namewee cooks up a laugh with Nasi Lemak 2.0 Posted: 26 Jul 2011 05:48 PM PDT KUALA LUMPUR: Controversial local musician Wee Meng Chee, better known as Namewee, can now call himself a filmmaker with the completion of his first movie Nasi Lemak 2.0. The comedy, which comprises a multicultural cast of Malaysian stars, tells a story about a chef seeking his identity through the making of nasi lemak. The cast include comedian and singer Adibah Noor, Karen Kong, Afdlin Shauki, Kenny & Chee, Reshmonu, Dennis Lau, Nur Fathia, Nadine Thomas, Pete Teo, Ho Yuhang, Dian Sharlin, and Felixia Yap. "Nasi Lemak 2.0 is my gift to Malaysia in conjunction with the National Day celebrations. "It is about how it should be here," he told a press conference yesterday. With a budget of barely RM1mil, the first-time film-maker admitted that it was tough making the movie which took him two years to complete. "The toughest part of making Nasi Lemak 2.0 was having to take on numerous aspects of film-making like screenwriting, directing, acting, editing, songwriting and post-production," said Wee who plays the main character. The movie is mostly in Mandarin and Cantonese with a smattering of other Chinese dialects, Bahasa Malaysia, English and Tamil. The film's executive producer Fred Chong also said Nasi Lemak 2.0 had the full support of the Minister from Prime Minister's office Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz who had issued an official letter endorsing it as a 1Malaysian film. Nasi Lemak 2.0 will be released on Sept 8. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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