“Why am I recording ethnic minorities music?” asks Laurent Jeanneau hypothetically. “I won’t pretend that I m doing it for saving endangered cultures, I let the UNESCO and various organizations or NGOs use big words like “preserving indigenous cultures” and actually not doing much about it . “I’ve contacted quite a few of those organizations in the past, without any results.”
Passionate about the world’s minority peoples and their music, the Frenchman has spent ten years engaged in a “rather non lucrative activity” going to remote parts of India, Tanzania, southeast Asia and China to record traditional music. He’s now taking his mini disk recorder through China to record local minority folk music, before the music is lost to cultural assimilation.
“China is huge, it would take me so many years to explore and find the remaining musical traditions of the 400 ethnic minorities, A “Stalinian” approach by anthropologists of the 1950 s ensured the country’s ethnic groups squeezed into 55 official ethnic groupings but there are in fact as many as 400 ethnic groups as well as the Han majority, which accounts for 95 percent of China’s population.
In Autumn 2006, with his girlfriend Shi Tanding (herself a Han from China’s Muslim western region Xinjiang who has written about ethnic minorities) Jeanneau did a series of recordings of minorities around Lugu lake in northern Yunnan province and in Da Liangshan in southern Sichuan, both regions in China’s southwest. Centuries of intermingling between minority groups has made for an interesting musical mix. “Pumi and Moshuo are following Tibetan buddhism, and have been in contact with Han or Mongolian during past centuries.”
Elsewhere, China’s small community of Miaos carries the influence of the group’s movements between China and Laos and Vietnam, where they’re known as Hmong. A June 2007 trip to the southern province of Guizhou was a breakthrough. “Guizhou is the starting point of all Hmong people and I am now able to compare their different musical developments.”
The Nuosus, officially the Yi in China, are like the Miao less influenced by the outside world. The Yi, based in Yunnan and Sichuan encompass six different ethnic groups each with their own language and all together they are more than eight millions people.” In Yunnan, the duo recorded “beautiful” songs among two different Yi groups, the Nuosu and the Laluo.
While China, proud and enthusiastic about its past is encouraging the revival of styles of Chinese opera ethnic minorities have suffered from a recent “standardization” approach to folklore, says Jeanneau. “Old cultures need to be recorded before it s too late, something has been done by Chinese and foreign anthropologists…” Otherwise the remnants of minority culture will be replaced by television mass culture… “Within the ethnic groups, the new generations have already integrated mainstream musical taste and few of them see any value in the singing techniques of their ancestors.”
The extent to which ethnic minority music survives or gets swallowed up by KTV will depend on local efforts. “As far as I know some Chinese anthropologist might have recorded interesting stuff, I know of one university teacher in Kunming who has documented ethnic minorities in Yunnan, the problem is they bring people in studios to have it super clean, I love the sound environment that goes with it and anyway never had the money to bring people to a studio.”
Recordings are often driven by China’s booming tourism industry, which has lowered tastes. “They don t want to listen, they want to see, there are hardly no CDs to be purchased but VCDs and DVDs with sexy ethnic girls and synthesizers to make it acceptable to the masses. I’ve focused on getting old people sing old tunes , you cannot purchase that kind of recordings in China. Are ethnic minorities going to continue perform for real purposes and not tourism? I guess so, let s hope China is big enough to avoid commercial influence.”
Jeanneau gives RMB50 to each performer he records. “Many times they are more than one person, like five or seven singers, I wish I could give more but financially with low income I cannot.” China’s minorities have welcomed his attention. “They are so surprised that someone is interested by a totally non commercial music, it s a matter of recognition, some people even don t want my money, replying that I’ve come a long way to discover them.”
Several dozen CDs sell for RMB30 each at the Sugarjar music store in Beijing’s Dashanzi art district as well as other stores in Shenzhen, Chengdu and Kunming. He’s unsure who’s buying the CDs but of the people who buy directly from me half are foreigners. “Of that I’m getting 15 (I euro 50), which is more than what I get from American label who sells his products US$15!”
Outside China the CDs sell for 5 euros but profits are small. “When I record a musician anywhere in the world he gets $5 from me, so just count how many people u hear on those CDs.” To keep himself on the road, Jeanneau takes turns as an electronic musician, DJ in clubs and a sound recorder for film crews. “I live in Dali, Yunnan in a very cheap appartment, the list of all the jobs i ve done to survive is rather long!”
Negotiations with a major Chinese record label for the release of a double CD of recordings from Yunnan and Sichuan eventually ended in frustration. Honest record labels “simply don’t exist,” says Jeanneau. “I am now willing to release things by myself, less CDs and more income!”
“I invest my time, money and energy on music that move me, in many cases I seem to be the first one to record those musicians, I am aware of this exclusive dimension, but this is not essential… I love the rawness and uncompromising emotion that most ethnic musicians express, regardless of the main ethnic groups taste, and western and local cultural decision makers, not to mention tourists and expats who are usually just looking for western music to go along with their western meals!”
China’s minorities face similar fates to those of minority groups elsewhere, says the Frenchman, who released a double CD in 2003 on the french label Musiques du Monde of recordings of the Tanzanian Hadzas bushmen, the Hadzas, “who are in a very precarious situation” because of industrialization and tourism on their land. In 2000 he sold recordings to Discovery Channel, then shooting a documentary on James Stephenson, an American living with the Hadzas. “The result is a cliche film about friendly savages , the way safari tourists wish to see the bushmen.”
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