It's time to write about his beloved apprentice Li Jianqing without Li Zongsheng as the protagonist.
Musician Li Jianqing is 40 years old this year, a native of Guangxi, a violinist, thin and fleshy, and a white shirt that looks like a teenager.
The pair of masters and apprentices standing on the stage are all stylish, the old support glasses smile sincerely and cunningly, the small one does not sing or play the piano when the hand is inserted into the trouser pocket, and the small action includes spitting out the tongue. The apprentice has been the master's assistant for more than ten years, composing, arranging, and learning to make, because the master commented that "your melody is much better than the words", but the itchy hands have not yet composed their own lyrics.
After "doing more than ten years of follow-up", this summer Li Jianqing finally released an EP called "Still a Foreigner". The violinist at Rene Liu's concert, the young man who sang "Hurry" at Li Zongsheng's concert, vaguely converged into 7 songs, and many people found the voice they had been looking for, and they hated each other and hated each other.
In this work, Li Jianqing is in charge of the music part, Li Zongsheng catches a part of the pen for him, and the co-lyricists also include poets LanLan, Yan Bin, and Highway. It is a collection of works for ordinary foreigners, and I hope that the little sister of the ramen shop or the little brother who delivers the courier can be moved when he hears it.
Here is the master's personal experience: "When a person reaches a certain position, life will be boring and repetitive, what can he write?" He must care about the lives of others. Therefore, Li Zongsheng, who had lived in a foreign country and finally returned to his hometown with his old mother, abandoned himself and set his sights on the ordinary people he had met. The faces in "Still a Stranger", each story is really true, and Li Jianqing, who composes and sings music, really sees the living second landlord Shuangxi and Furong when filming the MV, and sees a warm and dry room near the chimney from their mouths.
The fate of Li Jianqing, a young man in the North Drift, also overlapped with these figures. "I'm just one of many of them, and it's the same thing to sing from another urban-rural junction." Some stories are not his, but for example, in the poem "Grandma", Li Jianqing said, "satisfied all my imagination of a grandmother I had never met."
Li Zongsheng sent Lanlan's original poem to him in WeChat and said that he was "moved", and he directly wrote the song without a sound. Premiered in Bluenote on July 27 this year, Li Jianqing's music and the emotions he bet on have far exceeded the original poem. At the scene, he sang the lame leg of his grandmother repeatedly, trying to open the passage where there was light and grandmother, and the grandmother who had never met was his eternal peer.
Bluenote, Beijing, On July 27 this year, Li Jianqing (right) and Li Zongsheng
1
Chatting with Li Jianqing in the café, he is the kind of person who can talk and make friends with his bare heart.
Before facing the media, Li Zongsheng mentioned one or two to him, "There will definitely be reporters who ask questions about folk songs, about Li Zhi, Zhao Lei and the like." They asked, dug a pit for you to jump, how you wanted to answer. ”
Li Jianqing honestly said the standard answer he thought about, which was roughly: "I haven't heard much, and I am willing to go back and listen carefully." "This is actually true, he never went to Live House, and his understanding of domestic independent music is still in a very primitive stage." What is not in the standard answer is that listening to Zhao Lei is a music festival they have come on stage, "Listening carefully to a song may be "Chengdu", many people below sing together, I can't understand." ”
The name "Xue Zhiqian" was only heard for the first time last month. Li Jianqing is more or less alive in his own world, recently listened to a lot of Indian music, usually listen to the graduation music of Berkeley College of Music students, "This percussionist is from India, that guitarist is British, very British rock." I'll listen to them as these people come together and make something advanced. ”
But he's not that weird and withdrawn musician. Asked what he thought of Gao Xiaosong's new song "Over the Hill" in tribute to Li Zongsheng, he first said that he had talked to Gao Xiaosong (although Gao should not know who he was), and that he was very broad and intelligent and had a unique perspective on things... Then the song, "I've only heard a few bars, I don't know what he thinks." Don't put a beak on it, hide Zang No.
Discussing with him the quality and value of music, he also has a gentle attitude towards music that cannot understand why it is sought after, "so that migrant workers can roar a few voices after work, have resonance and touch, it is valuable." It can't be said to be bad. ”
He said, "I have to protect myself, I still want to play a little residual heat in this industry, and I can't live up to the cultivation of my eldest brother (Li Zongsheng) for more than ten years." But he's actually a guy who watches the news first every morning, and cares more than just the stories that brush his ears.
Li Jianqing is well aware of his role, and he is willing to match the right music for the stories of Li Zongsheng or others, so that the stories of others (or part of themselves) can be told in the right tone and in the right context.
Sometimes after drinking (he loves to drink), there will be music in his head and sentences. But I felt that "there are so many people's stories to tell, what is my own little impression", so I don't remember or mention it.
He is like the kind of little apprentice who always trusts the master, and even if there are different opinions on the cooperation with Li Zongsheng, "in the end, he basically makes a decision of 7 and 3". Before Li Zongsheng was discovered by Li Zongsheng, Li Jianqing, a violinist with hundreds of yuan a month from the Guangxi Symphony Orchestra, had traveled to two cities. Until the eldest brother said: "Follow me, wrap up food and housing, and return two thousand yuan a month", and began more than ten years of mentoring and apprenticeship.
The first few years were a little confused, "It's not common to see him, when he's not in Beijing, he left me a machine and a room, you can play with it yourself." ”
Li Zongsheng is a master of time grinding, unable to break the window paper for his clever hand and teach the peerless divine skills. Li Jianqing's greatest skill is to be serious, and in these songs, only "Grandma" was passed after writing and editing, and the rest were revised. He wrote eight versions of "The Unchanging Thing", which for a long time tortured each other with the piano, "the strings are always broken".
The pair are not together more often than they are together, and the two places exchange music and articles (a bit of chicken soup text). The old ones have begun to think about death, and in a lecture at the Shanghai Book Fair in August, they said, "I want to write about death." The little one never thought about it, but when he recently drank, he often listened to Ryuichi Sakamoto's "Async" in the face of death and illness. They may not be on a step (obviously no two individuals can be in perfect harmony), but they do complement each other and are tacitly agreeable.
2
"Still a Stranger" has a long-term view, a narrative lyric, empathy and a personal perspective. Music is still inexhaustible to them, so whether it is chanting, sighing, singing or whistling, it is born of language and words. But this time it's the other way around, and not every song's lyrics are "worthy" of Li Jianqing's song. Some are "separated", some are overweight, and some are slightly biased towards the latter between timeless simplicity and clichés.
But there are good passages, there are wonderful musical passages. The tune of Dong Song and Su Sanqi is added to the music, and the passage that Li Jianqing sings alone is like an ancient song. If others do this, they always have to make a big splash. Li Jianqing is not, these passages are more like thoughts flowing out of nature. His music is fluid, and listening to it a few more times becomes an aftertaste.
It is very likely that the people who will appreciate this album are not the people they want to sing, but the Wenqing peers who are with them. But after the birth of the work, it will grow its own feet and will go to the right person on its own.
Because he felt that the master was very powerful, there were many things to learn and learn, and the master really regarded him as a junior in his family, so Li Jianqing was determined to stay by the master's side so far.
This was originally a common master-apprentice relationship in the past, a pair of master-apprentices who had no ambition and worked seriously, but after Li Zongsheng became the darling of the public again in recent years, his apprentices were content with "a life of going to work and getting a salary" instead became a rare case.
For Li Jianqing, working for a salary and singing harmony as a musician to earn extra money is fine, but he has not been able to afford to buy a house in Beijing.
He had an old mother who was not easy to live, and cooking for his son who came home for a few days a year was the most relaxed and happy time. Once Li Jianqing was very stubborn, "only willing to see three relatives when he came home for the New Year, including the dinner bureau", now he finally made up his mind to find a daughter-in-law approved by his mother to have a child and bring her to Beijing, so that she could be a satisfying grandmother with a baby.
It has only been a few short years since Li Jianqing sang "Hurry" at Li Zongsheng's concert for the first time, "The singing is completely different, how childish it was before." ”
He never wanted to sell miserably, but his childhood was difficult and poor, and the breakdown of his original family was indeed the reason for his "entanglement of many things". In recent years, these have gradually become the answer to many things. "I used to complain so much and didn't understand, but looking back now, I would miss the best time when a family of four sat at a table and ate."
It seems that the time has come, and suddenly you can see the world from a new perspective, and people grow up overnight.
3
Across this distance, Li Jianqing described his hometown this way: street trees replaced street lamps, and the smell of dirt was in his nose. It is Guilin, Yangshuo, Liupanshui, Changping to the suburbs and then go... Lao Wang (Wang Feng) has a staff tuner in the hometown is also like this, after the demolition everyone is very rich, some people drive a Mercedes-Benz every day on the tertiary highway upside down, but also go to Macau to gamble money. That's it.
If he himself goes back, the only person who can seriously interact with him is a classmate who plays the guqin. "I was there to watch him write with a brush, and I didn't write well. But I don't know how to calculate well. "After three months of doing nothing, I still have to go back to Beijing."
"Beijing is not home. But sometimes after ten days of European touring as a musician come back, order a bowl of ramen on the side of the road and listen to the old ladies sit there and talk about the world, which is called a comfortable. ”
The matter of nostalgia will come to an end with this album. What the next album wants to say has not yet taken shape, "Big Brother said to discuss in detail the next time we meet." No matter what you say, there must be you and me in it, made by an old Li who loves to tell stories and catch the gaps in time, a little Li who can really write a very enduring melody when singing.