Talking of the harp as a second-class intrument, I posted a Japanese mouthorgan in the desert-island thread. I was actually looking for the Guo brothers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Yue_(musician) ,but it seems that the flute player made it big and the mouthorgan (sheng) player Guo Yi got forgotten about.
I used to watch the Guo brothers busking in Covent Garden in the Eighties, and I bought their cassette, but I gave it to my girlfriend, and then we split up in 1991. Towards the end of the Eighties they looked more ragged than in 1986 when I moved to London, and the flute player often played just with the cembalo player, so I thought they had split up. We had a thread about the timbre of the bamboo flute a while back, so check out the Guo Brothers on YouTube and you'll mostly hear the flute as played by a master.
Anyway, I hadn't heard anything about them or seen them since then, but I've got their CD Yuan arriving in the mail any day. The date 1990 is interesting, given what I've just said about them in the Eighties. Judging by YouTube the album sounds a bit over-produced - I hope Peter Gabriel didn't have a finger in the pie. And I will be very disappointed if Guo Yi is not even on it. The sheng he used to play was a lot smaller than this one:
Last Edited by on Jul 07, 2009 2:35 AM
