Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (
www.lcsd.gov.hk
) regularly stages free
arts and entertainment shows at its venues throughout the territory.
Jazz
The best times to experience world-class jazz in the city are during the
Hong Kong Interna-
tional Jazz Festival
(
www.hkijf.com
), which takes place in the final quarter of the year, and
the Hong Kong Arts Festival in February/March. Hong Kong also has a small but zealous
circle of local musicians, including the 17-piece
Saturday Night Jazz Orchestra
(
www.saturdaynight-jazz.com
)
, which plays big-band sounds every month. Other names to
watch out for include guitarist Eugene Pao, the first local jazz artist to sign with an interna-
tional label, and pianist Ted Lo, who has played with Astrud Gilberto and Herbie Hancock.
Traditional Chinese
You won't hear much traditional Chinese music on the streets of Hong Kong, except per-
haps the sound of the doleful
dì-daa
, a clarinet-like instrument played in funeral proces-
sions; the hollow-sounding
gú
(drums) and crashing
luó
(gongs) and
bat
(cymbals) at lion
dances; the
èrhú
, a two-stringed fiddle favoured by beggars for its plaintive sound; or strains
of Cantonese opera wafting from the radio of a minibus driver. You can sample this kind of
music, albeit in a form adapted to a symphony-orchestra model, at concerts given by the
Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra
(
www.hkco.org
). For more authentic fare, catch a Chinese
opera or check out the Temple Street Night Market, where street performers deliver operatic
excerpts.
Canto-Pop
Hong Kong's home-grown popular-music scene is dominated by 'Canto-pop' - composi-
tions that often blend Western rock, pop and R&B with Chinese melodies and lyrics. Rarely
radical, the songs invariably deal with such teenage concerns as unrequited love and loneli-
ness; to many they sound like the American pop songs of the 1950s. The music is slick and
eminently singable - thus the explosion of karaoke bars throughout the territory. Attending a
Canto-pop concert is to see the city at its sweetest and most over the top, with screaming,
silly dancing, day-glo wigs and enough floral tributes to set up a flower market.
Canto-pop scaled new heights from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s and turned singers like
Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam, Priscilla Chan and Danny Chan into household names
in Hong Kong and among Chinese communities around the world. The peak of this Canto-
