ABOUT GEORGE SAPOUNIDIS www.chairmangeorge.com
Ever since the Chinese embassy invited George Sapounidis, a tall lanky Canadian civil servant of Greek descent, to perform at an international folk festival in Shanghai in the fall of 2000, this populous nation has not been able to get enough of him. They have invited him back time and time again since then - the Nanning International Arts Festival of Folksongs the same year, a Beijing tour in May 2002 and again, four months later in September.
Another music tour followed in the fall of 2003, a concert in December and the ten-day Shanghai Baoshan International Folk Arts Festival again in the fall of 2004.
Although he has been performing regularly at all manner of folk festivals, awards ceremonies, multicultural events, variety shows and special events as well as on Canadian radio and television for over 20 years, it's George Sapounidis' concert tours of China that have catapulted him to stardom in that country - famous more for its traditional Chinese opera and astounding acrobats than bouzouki-playing westerners singing Chinese folk songs.
From his first performance in Shanghai, this multilingual civil servant was a hit. Even poker-faced Chinese soldiers broke into smiles. At the Nanning Festival , thousands of excited fans crowded the stage, even followed him in the street. TV stations and newspapers competed for interviews.
Why the special affinity for Chinese culture? You could say it caught him by surprise. George had already been performing in several languages when he founded his multicultural band Ouzo Power in 1988, giving a new spin to Greek music, bringing in jazz elements and translating the songs of Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin into Greek for audiences at folk and multicultural music festivals as well as CBC TV and radio -- even producing two albums. One night, while entertaining friends of different nationalities at his home, he was asked to sing in Mandarin.
Intrigued, and with help from his Chinese girlfriend (herself an acclaimed poet), he learned a traditional Mandarin folk song over the next few weeks, working his way through it phonetically. He was hooked. His repertoire of Chinese folk songs began to grow - as did his Mandarin language skills. Soon he was performing for the Chinese embassy in Ottawa which in turn invited him to perform in China.
Audiences loved him, disarmed and enchanted that a westerner would come into their midst and perform their songs with such depth and emotion.
Upon returning to Ottawa, George formed a new band, the George Sapounidis Trio, with percussionist Ken Easton who plays an impressive variety of exotic instruments from the didgeridoo to the African thumb piano, and Jeremy Moyer, another Sinophile who plays a variety of Chinese stringed instruments. They perform songs, new and old, from around the world.
Yet, by day, this Montreal born folksinger is a Ph.D. bearing statistician who works for Statistics Canada in Ottawa (where he goes by the surname Sampson) employing statistical software and mathematical formulae to design business surveys.
The songs he composes in Chinese, by contrast, are sweet and simple reflecting yearning, friendship, loneliness and love.
Summers spent in Greece when he was a teenager laid the foundation for what would become a lifelong personal and musical odyssey. He remembers Greece as "an incredible world".
"It was a fundamental formative place because of the nomadic artistic lifestyle," he says. "It was a community of expatriate international artists - poets, musicians, writers and painters. I was steeped in this multicultural tea. It laid the ground work for my musical breadth."
In 2000, George introduced a CD of international folk songs and in 2002 he produced a CD called Songs about China and Greece. His latest CD, George from Athens to Beijing, released in the summer of 2005, comprises a variety of traditional Greek and Chinese folks songs along with some personal compositions reflecting the latest twists in his personal and musical quest. Some of the songs were recorded in China with Chinese backup musicians and singers - one was even recorded live on the Great Wall - and others recorded in Canada with Canadian and Greek guest artists using a wide variety of international instruments.
When Beijing won the Olympic bid on July 13, 2001, George felt that the cosmos had come into play - the two musical worlds he straddled were about to converge when the Olympic flag would be passed from Athens to Beijing. It reflected his own artistic life, as he puts it, "building bridges between cultures." And what's more, the announcement was made on his birthday.
"It crystallized what I had been doing for the past three years," George says, "juxtaposing and fusing the music of both cultures".
Now it was larger than him. He felt it was destiny. Who better to perform at the Athens closing ceremonies when the Olympic flag would be handed to Beijing, an event that unites the cultures of the world. And so began a journey - and a documentary, Chairman George, chronicling George's unrelenting pursuit of his dream to perform at the closing ceremonies. The EyeSteelFilm crew follows him across three continents as he tracks down and lobbies Canadian, Greek and Chinese officials, dogging them even onto the Great Wall.
"It was an international chase - across subcontinents, across nations, across borders," says George. "Chasing the Olympic torch. Chasing the unity of mankind."
In the end it was not meant to be. But new unexpected paths appeared. George was an Olympic relay torch-bearer when the torch arrived in Montreal. And he spent the Athens Olympics in the Olympic Village as a National Olympic Committee Assistant capitalizing on his Greek and Chinese language skills to assist the Chinese team. It didn't take long before his impromptu performances again attracted both Greek and Chinese radio and television attention.
This was followed by an invitation from the Humanistic Olympics Studies Centre at Renmin University
to teach a series of classes on Olympic volunteering in Beijing.
In the same way the ancient Greeks' curiosity propelled them to explore the world around them, George sees himself as a "modern ancient Greek" travelling China with his guitar and bouzouki, marrying Chinese lyrics and instruments with Greek songs and unexpected Greek instrumentation with Chinese songs.
The folk songs express the universality of human emotion - the Greek in a passionate extroverted style, the Chinese in a poetic ethereal and far more introverted manner. Yet they complement one another "on stage and within myself" George explains. It's these contradictions he says that feed his soul.
compiled and written by Dee Gibney
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