What Has Chiyan Wong Done With Old Hong Kong Fishing Songs?

Chiyan Wong had no idea that stopping for a cup of coffee could change his life. Taking time out at Kubrick, the café and bookshop neighbouring the Broadway Cinematheque in Yau Ma Tei, he found himself leafing through a newly published book documenting the songs sung at sea by Hong Kong’s ageing fishing communities. These simple folk melodies did more than inspire his first set of original compositions. They didn’t just fuel the pianist to completely rethink his musical practice. They inspired this long-term emigree to rediscover, rethink and ultimately reconnect to his home city.

The tunes notated in Kenneth Yip Chee-Kwong’s Search of the Songs of the Hong Kong Fisherman (尋找香港漁歌) struck a chord with a musician perhaps subconsciously looking for links to home. “I was like, whoa, these heads [melodies] are really catchy!” says Wong, who left the city more than two decades ago, but was passing through Hong Kong in April 2024 on his way to perform a Mozart concerto in Inner Mongolia.

“I mean, my Chinese is really bad, I can’t really read very well, but the book was packed full of pictures and tunes written down,” he says. “Basically some ethnomusicologists went into these fishermen’s villages and taped octogenarian aunties and uncles singing, in the 1980s and 90s. And now they’re basically all gone — the original thing is really hard to find now, like a proper fisher lady or fisherman, really singing these tunes.”

In a further moment of serendipity, on the same visit Wong found the topic came up when talking with celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, who recommended Ma Chi-hang’s 2017 documentary of Tap Mum’s fishermen, Ballad on the Shore. Heading home to Berlin with both artefacts in his suitcase, ideas began to swirl like the liquid oceans he was flying over.

“I’d always felt homesick. Leaving Hong Kong has helped me see Hong Kong in a really different way — some may say distorted,” adds the 37-year-old. “I mean, before I left, I’d never seen a Stephen Chow movie. I never learned how to play Dai Di [Big Two], which is a very quintessential Hong Kong card game. And I never knew that I would actually miss this place.

“But I’ve been away for so long. So whenever I come back, I’m always searching for what excites me about Hong Kong. And I still feel that I’m very much a Hongkonger.”

Songs of the sea

Returning home once more to perform at Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF), from 14 to 16 March, Wong will debut Reflections on a Sampan, a sea-inspired programme for a jazz quartet of piano, guitar, bass and drums. It pairs five self-composed pieces inspired by the melodies he found in Yip’s book with interpretations of nautical-inspired classical works by Debussy, as well as two pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, the maestro of Brazilian bossa nova. A seafaring sense is what unites these three contrasting musical sources.

“It’s funny, because when I think about Herbie Hancock, [his classic album] Maiden Voyage — you know he was fascinated with the sea as well,” muses Wong, “Brazilian music has all this to do with the sea and water. And the narrative of how Hong Kong became what it is really all because of the sea. Hong Kong people, we’re very amphibious. We live on land that was built on sea.

“So existentially, where are we?” he asks. “It’s a place where time feels different. We measure how Hong Kong changes by the distance between two points. I think the water around us reminds us that countries and nations change all the time, but the sea is something that connects us.”

The process of harmonising simple Chinese folk melodies with rich South American chord voicings, and injecting them with North American improvisatory flair, was entirely uncontrived, with zero intention of creating a single piece, let alone a suite. “Each piece just sort of came along,” adds Wong. “[Despite] coming from playing a lot of classical repertoire, it felt almost natural. I just didn’t question it. I just basically went with the flow.

“I often ask myself: what am I? Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I even play the piano? And I don’t answer in words. I’m a musician. My expression is musical. So I guess in the end, this [programme] is the manifestation of my answer.”

Changing streams

These rediscovered fisher songs also served a missing connection between Wong’s Chinese roots and the Western musical fascinations that pulled him away from them. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Wong left for the UK at age 11 after winning a scholarship to study at Manchester’s Chetham’s School of Music. He excelled, and went on to enjoy a feted career as a star soloist: his debut album, Liszt Transfigured: Operatic Fantasies for Piano (2017), was awarded the 40th Franz Liszt International Grand Prix du Disque by Hungary’s Franz Liszt Society. Its follow up Bach – Busoni: Goldberg Variations & Other Works (2021), another solo piano recording, boldly paired Busoni’s rearrangement with a straight recital of Bach’s landmark piece.

Improvisation played no part in this studious classical career, and composition was never something Wong had been trained in, or pursued seriously. It was simply another world: learning jazz is to equip yourself to improvise on the spot in a constant state of spontaneous invention; the classical calling is to diligently recreate the nuance of every note on a score.

“What really got me into jazz was when I was playing a lot of Mozart,” recalls Wong, who became bewitched by the vocabulary of bebop in his early thirties. “Basically, in Mozart’s time, and also Bach’s time, the [accompanying] continuo — that was the rhythm section, and everything was to do with [chord] changes, bass lines, that sort of move. There are things that point towards jazz.”

After jamming with musicians on Berlin’s vibrant jazz scene, he eventually assembled his own ensemble — the titular “friends” he is bringing to Hong Kong. But Wong hasn’t retired from the concert hall, and on 3 March, just 11 days before Reflections on a Sampan is debuted, he also performed Richard Strauss’ Burleske in D at HKAF alongside the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, on a double bill with organ superstar Cameron Carpenter. 

The incongruence of this dual programming cannot be easily overstated: while both genres command scholarly reverence and analysis, they exist in completely different conceptual, institutional and educational frameworks. For all jazz’s talk of freedom, its gatekeepers are notorious, and it’s incredibly rare to find individuals equally comfortable in both idioms. Notably, the first figures Wong namechecks are Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau — jazz piano titans who later turned to classical, the opposite direction as Wong.

“Although my heart sort of does agree with [Jarrett] that you almost can’t really do both [disciplines] in quick succession, I have to see if I can, at this point of my life,” reasons Wong. “I really believe that if I dig deep enough, and give enough of myself, and prepare myself on this journey the right way, I will get to the point where both [styles] connect, and it will be almost unprecedented.”

This isn’t idle talk: Wong is betting his hand on an ability to balance both callings. While his third album, Swing!: Piano Concertos by Ravel and Tsfasman (2023), offered a hint of sorts with the latter composer’s “Jazz Suite”, it was still a conventional classical programme recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. However Wong’s forthcoming fourth album will capture the same repertoire and arrangements debuted in Hong Kong, when his jazz quartet enters the studio in May. 

More than just an expansion of his own musical universe, Wong believes his genre-strafing approach reflects both the unrestrained worldview of yesteryears’ greats, and offers a manifesto for the future. “I ask myself what will music sound like in 200 years? How will people behave? How will people listen to music? How will we connect to one another?” he says. 

“One thing that really got imparted to me by these great keyboard virtuosi. Liszt and Busoni were always looking to the future. They were writing music that people thought was freaking insane. People said, ‘This is not music. This is like a cat scratching on a tin roof.’ But they kept going, because they thought, ‘No, man, I’m writing music for 500 years later.’ I have that [same] feeling. I feel like the piano is some sort of crystal ball for a certain type of people, tuned into certain frequencies.

That’s why he opened himself up to “this sort of creative vulnerability,” as he puts it. “I have to be maybe the first 22nd century musician. I have to hear the 22nd century’s music,” he says. “I teach sometimes, and I can see students being inhibited, but they are looking for something. Like they are looking for that breakthrough. I feel like maybe, deep down in me, even if I’m going to completely ruin myself. At least there [will be] some reference for them to surpass, or whatever.”

Chiyan Wong and Friends – Reflections on a Sampan will be performed at East Kowloon Culture Centre on 14 March, and the Champagne Bar at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, on 15 and 16 March. Click here for more information.