Billy Bang – VIETNAM the aftermath
Posted on | June 15, 2009 | No Comments
This is the most powerful and haunting album in my collection. I’ll go months or a year without putting it on because it is so far beyond the “music as entertainment” notion. The time and place have to be just right, because this is something that you want to slowly absorb and reflect upon. It will transform you.
Jazz violinist Billy Bang has created this courageous and emotional soundscape that reinterprets the sounds and experiences of his time in Vietnam while exposing and confronting the demons he brought home and carried with him for 30+ years.
Rather than try to tell you where Bang is coming from, I’ll share with you some excerpts from his introduction to the album in the liner notes.
“My inability to bravely confront my personal demons, my experiences in Vietnam, has been a continuous struggle. For decades, I’ve lived constantly with my unwillingness to deliberately conjure up the pain of these experiences.”
“By allowing these awkward and unfathomable feelings to lie dormant in some deep dark place, I was somehow able to tolerate my frankly vegetative way of living. It was preferable somehow – and safer to let these monstrous thoughts imbedded in my unconscious to remain in that state – inactive.”
“The possibility of getting rid of the dark side that forever haunted me outweighed the pessimistic thoughts I had carried with me all those years. I knew I was faced with the monumental task of transforming my Vietnam experience, and all it’s attendant emotions, into a solid body of music.”
“To write eloquently of my trials and tribulations…has been a supreme challenge.”
Somehow Bang, in confronting his own demons, has made an album that is filled with breathtaking beauty, incredible pain, innocence, confusion, fear and… I’ll say it again – breathtaking beauty.
I sincerely hope that Billy Bang and his band found some peace through this project, and that it continues to ripple out and be a source of strength and healing. It is such a massive, emotional undertaking that he willingly and lovingly took on. This under-the-radar masterpiece is a gesture of healing and an acknowledgment of the sweet fragility and utter magnificence and resilience of the human experience.
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