Duan Yaocai – Fu’s Mother Died. Dabenqu Blues from the Bai in Yunnan (Pan Records, 2022)
The “Anthology of Music in China #12: Duan Yaocai – Fu’s Mother Died: Dabenqu Blues from the Bai in Yunnan” is a profound, meticulously curated window into a musical world that, despite globalization’s eroding tides, continues to thrive in the highlands of Yunnan Province. Field recorded over two decades by Bernard Kleikamp, this release captures the artistry of a singular musician as well as the very ethos of a people whose historical, spiritual, and musical lives are inseparable.
Duan Yaocai (b. 1957) is a master of his tradition, a blind musician whose music transcends technical proficiency to achieve something elemental and timeless. Having lost his sight at three months of age due to measles, Duan embodies a lineage of Bai musical practice where memory, intuition, and communal transmission replace written notation. His command of voice and instrument, particularly the sanxian, suona, dizi, and erhu, is nothing short of astonishing, each performance charged with both technical finesse and deep emotion.
Indeed, the Bai people’s dabenqu genre, central to this album, presents a remarkable analog to African-American blues traditions. Although separated by geography and history, both traditions are narrative, improvisational, and deeply invested in conveying communal sorrow, resilience, and hope. As Kleikamp astutely observes, the phrasing and expressive inflections of dabenqu bear an uncanny, intuitive resemblance to blues, a convergence that deserves further ethnomusicological study.
Yet, dabenqu is not merely an aesthetic enterprise. It is, historically, a vessel for social memory and a conduit for communal emotion. Duan’s performance on “Fu Luo Bai Xun Mu” (“Fu’s Mother Died and Turned into a White Dog”) epitomizes this. In this haunting work, personal grief intertwines with folkloric transformation: a mother’s death, a son’s sorrow, and the supernatural embodiment of loss in the form of a white dog. Through his plaintive sanxian and grainy, resonant voice, Duan animates the raw edges of Bai cosmology, where life, death, and the spirit world coexist without rigid separation.
Furthermore, the album’s tripartite structure shows Duan’s versatility across the Bai ritual environment. Following the vocal dabenqu tracks, he shifts to vibrant funeral and wedding music played on the suona, breathing life into communal rites where sound mediates between the earthly and the divine. Then, with the dizi and erhu, he conjures instrumentals tied to festival and ancestral worship contexts. Each suite reveals a different facet of Bai musical identity, at once regional, spiritual, and deeply personal.
To fully appreciate this album, one must understand the Bai historical context. The Bai, descendants of the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms, have long maintained cultural distinctiveness despite centuries of Han influence and modernization pressures. Their music, religion, and social practices, shaped by mountainous isolation and a syncretic blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and local deity worship, inform every note Duan plays. In a time when minority cultures face homogenizing forces, this recording stands as an act of cultural preservation and resistance.
Kleikamp’s liner notes, exhaustive and invaluable, not only document Duan’s life and repertoire but situate his relevance within a nuanced portrait of Bai society. His patient fieldwork across 1995, 1998, 2011, and 2016 gives the album a temporal depth, capturing both the constancy and subtle evolutions in Duan’s performance style. The fact that this release is digital-only is a bittersweet reminder of the shifting music economy, even as it democratizes access to such rare material.
Buy Fu’s Mother Died: Dabenqu Blues from the Bai in Yunnan.
Author: Tyler Bennet
