Maqie gives sage advice, Ma Yulong defies my expectations, and Jiugu sings Paul Simon

Last Friday, Maqie, A Ge's successor in Mountain Eagle, called me up for a pre-dinner chat at a teahouse north of the Forbidden City. He was finishing up an interview with a pudgy, nervous-looking journalist from the "Nationality Pictorial," a glossy periodical with a photo of Wen Jiabao on the inside cover. Their conversation felt like hard labor -- the journalist asked Maqie the same questions that journalists have been asking him since the 90's, and naturally, Maqie answered them by rote. "I want to/I think it's important to/Our appeal lies in that we combine popular music and ethnic minority music." Bam. To wrap things up, the reporter asked Maqie if he had any advice for young, aspiring musicians in Liangshan. "Stop forming boy bands," he said. "Every time I go home, there are thirty or forty new boy bands asking me what to do next. Do something different. Form a real band. Learn to play guitar."

Be more like Ma Yulong.

If Beijing's Liangshan Yi are connected like Beijing's hutong alleyways, then Ma Yulong is the Third Ring Road. He eats the fastest, drinks to get drunk and always foots the bill. His friends call him "Ma Laoshi," or Teacher Ma, though no one can explain how he got the title. In the late 1990's, Teacher Ma got a free ride out of the Sichuanese back country as a founding member of Yirenzhizao, the second most popular band in Yi history. But like A Ge before him, he decided that politi-pop wasn't the be all and end all of his musical existence, and in 2001 he amiably backed out. Unlike A Ge, however, Ma Yulong decided to try his hand at something more extreme, especially in the early 00's. Within a year, his new underground rock band, Sound Fragment, had established a small but loyal following. They've since released three LP's on Modern Sky, Beijing's flagship indie label. They sound like early Radiohead.

Here is Ma Yulong accompanying Maqie at a banquet. Note Maqie's uncanny resemblance to Bono.

The first time I met these guys, I was seated at a dinner between Ma Yulong and Laobai, The current front man of Yirenzhizao. Like any decent Chinese pop star, Lao Bai was wearing a bowler hat and suit jacket. Our conversation quickly fell into ruin. I told him I liked his music. He ran off a list of his government accolades. I asked him about his songwriting process.

"Life. Life is my songwriting process," he said.
"What?"
"Life."

Unlike Maqie, Laobai doesn't look enough like Bono to pull off the immortal rock star shtick, even if his music video features a really expensive looking horse. I couldn't settle on an appropriate response, so instead, I turned and introduced myself to the bearish guy on my left.

"Where are you from?" asked Ma Yulong.
"America."
"Oh, America! Bob Dylan!"

And thus, Ma completely defied my expectations, even if he didn't stray far from the script. For a more common opening exchange in China, replace the icon's name with "NBA!" "Obama!" or "do you have a gun?"

Ever since, my relationship with Ma has been largely defined by conversations that disintegrate into "have you ever heard of band X? what do you think of artist Y?" back-and-forth volleys. I try to disentangle English words from his Sichuanese-inflected Mandarin, which usually ends in a gratifying moment of clarity. For someone who had never heard Western music until his late teens, Ma has extraordinarily sophisticated taste. He's particularly fond of Brad Mehldau, Ali Farka Toure and John Cage. One time, he picked up the guitar at a party and sang through a mumbled, but immediately recognizable piece by the Tuvan experimental singer Sainkho Namtchylak. It was beautiful. But Ma is an island. As I sat and listened, spellbound, Taiyangbuluo (3:00) shrugged and went back to their wine.

Being in a Chinese rock band, even one as successful as Sound Fragment, is far from lucrative, so Ma supplements his income with stints as a hired songwriter and studio musician. Occasionally, he'll fly down to Yunnan to help his synth-pop buddies with side projects that always seem to be underwritten by the Ministry of Something Unintelligible. One time, I spotted Ma as an extra in a song-and-dance video about the pretty people of Liangshan, grinning sheepishly in Yi regalia, arms reaching towards the sun. "If that guy listens to John Cage," I thought to myself, "then anything is possible."

***

Ma told me once that starting Sound Fragment felt "surprisingly natural" given his background in ethnic boy-pop. I'm somehow unsurprised. Rock isn't too far from the blues, which these Yi guys all seem to have a serious knack for, even if they've never heard of Robert Johnson or B.B. King. HERE are Ma Yulong and Taiyangbuluo improvising a very short, and (at one point) very sweet little tune at a band mate's birthday party. That's me on guitar.

And in roughly the same vein, HERE is Jiugu, another former member of Yirenzhizao, singing Scarborough Fair in his local dialect. Try to ignore the background noise.