Now Comes The Dragon's Hour

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2002-10-18

Label: Redgold Records

CD made from recordings at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 5 April 1999 and Sadler's Wells Theatre in London on 27 May 2000.

Imagine you’re travelling in Asia today, and you have to stay overnight in one of the expensive, characterless multinational hotels you find these days near airports anywhere between London and Shanghai. In the basement is the Dragon Bar, the cabaret is beginning, and the club’s singer is just coming on for her nightly spot.

But this is no ordinary night in an ordinary club in an ordinary hotel: the singer is expecting a baby, and this evening all her thoughts are on the child about to be born. She imagines the child asking her about the world it will be born into, so she conjures up a series of songs about life along the Great Silk Road past and present. As it happens, the club band contains some very fine jazz players to help her; and passing through the hotel that night are a number of distinguished musicians from different parts of the continent. She enlists their help in evoking the voices and instruments of a myriad different musical worlds, to help tell her stories and draw some poignant moral lessons...

These stories include: the explorer Marco Polo’s description of the seductive sounds of the desert which lure unwary travellers away from the caravan; a couple from Bangladesh affirming their love and loyalty, and despite the pain of separation, looking forward to building a new life in London; refuges from a bloody civil war or political revolution gathering at an airport, revising past horrors, and anxiously waiting to fly off to an uncertain future; the capture of a mysterious bird whose eventual release will bring freedom to the people of Tibet; and a female dragon searching for her own identity and individuality. At the end the singer imagines – or maybe it actually happens? – the birth.

But of course this is more than just the singer’s personal obsession. The Silk Road is the ancient trade route between East and West, and its history goes back over two thousand years. It passes through countries with a turbulent past, and which are seldom off the front pages of our newspapers today; the migration of its peoples, colonised in the not-so-distant past by Europeans, deeply affect the lives of all of us; and the rise of global corporations has changed irrevocably the economic relationship between East and West. There is also a danger of cultures being diluted, degraded or lost for ever. The Silk Road therefore also takes on a metaphorical significance, which presents a welcome challenge to us as musicians – how the trading of cultures and musical language can create new forms of artistic expression in Britain today.

More Pictures