Sha Zi
| Sha Zi | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Genre (s) | Blues , rock |
| founding | 1996 |
| Current occupation | |
| Liu Donghong | |
| Da Chuan | |
| Hey Wenjin | |
| Wang Bin | |
Sha Zi is a Chinese band from Beijing . Sha Zi musically combines Chinese rock music with blues elements of American tradition. The band name Sha Zi is the Chinese word for "sand".
history
If you ask Liu Donghong, singer of the band Sha Zi, when he played guitar for the first time, he can no longer remember it. “I'm told that I was about three years old when I discovered my father's guitar,” he says. "She was completely out of tune, though, and I never saw or heard my father play on it." It would be a few years before Liu Donghong formed his first band. That was in 1996, he was 25 years old, had bought his first used guitar and wrote countless songs.
Sha Zi gave their first concert in the same year at a foreign language university. Liu Donghong recalls, “I think they had a lot of fun with us. All the bands that played there back then were terribly bad. And we weren't better. ”Since that had to change urgently, the band withdrew to the western mountains of Beijing for three summers in the following years - they rented an ancient temple in Badachu cheaply, played together all day and just drove back to town to give concerts.
To this day, all Sha Zi's songs are by singer Liu Donghong and are written in Chinese . Some of his songs are simple love songs, some like the song "Fortune" tell of the social misery China is currently in. With his texts, which he often performs in chant , Liu Donghong ties in with the emergence of Chinese rock music as a culture of protest in the 80s, as well as the tradition of American blues up to Tom Waits , whose texts often revolve around it very concrete stories of little men. It is the human dark side of the Chinese dream that Liu Donghong will always be interested in: for the marginalized, night owls and drinkers, for the humiliated and insulted, the stranded and damaged.
Her concerts in front of mostly exclusively Chinese audiences are usually well attended. In the winter of 2005, with their current line-up with Liu Donghong (vocals, guitar), Da Chuan (guitar), He Wenjin (bass) and Wang Bin (drums), they made a major tour of China as a Chinese band with performances in nine Chinese cities.
In 2005 Sha Zi stood in front of the camera in the documentary Beijing Bubbles and gave the German filmmakers Susanne Messmer and George Lindt an insight into the current punk and rock subculture in China as well as into everyday Chinese life far away from the glittering shopping temples and office buildings. In 2010, the German-Chinese record company Fly Fast Concepts released the album The World is a Fairytale in an extended version with a multilingual booklet (Chinese, German, English) and documentation. Within the cultural exchange project Poptastic Conversation China , a song was released in German. An accompanying book offers extensive information about the band and other bands from China and Germany.
Discography
- The Stars Fall on My Head (2001)
- The World Has Become a Fairytale (2006)