Album Notes

TRAN MANH TUAN AND HIS MAGICAL SAXOPHONE

There are life stories which are so miraculous that they resemble legends, like the life story of Tran Manh Tuan and his saxophone.

Born into a family steeped in the tradition of reformed theatre, his karma has tied him to the saxophone, an instrument of western music. And Tuan accepts his karma with zeal, pride, and an infinite passion.

What seems to be a capricious adversity turned out to be a blessing when Tuan found his own genre of music which combined eastern and western cultures, tradition and modernity, and produced what is called World Music.

Tran Manh Tuan and his saxophone venture into the balanced and soft tradition of pentatonic-scale music of the East with a violent passion of extemporaneously inspirational Jazz music. He creates a music that expresses the miraculous complexity of the soul through which all listeners –westerners as well as easterners--can find their common voice.

This combination is not only a theoretical proposition. In fact, Tran Manh Tuan and a number of performers of traditional folk music from Vietnam have been warmly received during their tours abroad. The contemporary character of the music Tuan explores is, after all, a manifestation of the nature and inevitability the globalization process.

But Tran Manh Tuan’s music is more than that. With his spiritual Jazz Tuan has gone beyond World Music. He applies the tradition of Buddhist chants and hymns to Jazz and transforms Jazz into the voice of the human spirit. Tuan’s kind of Jazz not only reflects the agony of man over his condition, but also his supernatural yearning toward a final liberation from the fleeting nature of the human condition and its merging into the infiniteness and oneness of the universe.