Though the title and artwork of this disc might suggest otherwise, Distant Wind is not escapist, romantic or (at times) even particularly Chinese sounding. Though the familiar timbre of the zheng is present, the tunings, melodies and motifs that pervade are blessedly from the land of No Cliche. At a time when some labels are actually including colored sticks of incense in the jewel cases of their Chinese CDs (you know who you are) these zheng duets seem almost radical.

The rowdy finish on "Dragon Dogs," for example, features some aggressive speed plucking not suitable for bubble bath use. The recording's deep connection to the history of Chinese music can be found in moments like this--it's a sort of musical onomatopoeia representing a clash of energies, reminiscent of the pipa battle pieces of the past. In many of the pair's experiments, calm or kinetic, a representative connection to nature is palpable. This Taoist intent is clear in the liner notes, but making such a connection clear in the playing requires great skill. "Forest Rain," "Clouds" and "Tokyo Crows" truly conjure their subjects in ways sometimes lovely, sometimes haunting.

Perhaps this disc's best asset is the experience of its creators. Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch are adventurous as composers, but it is their command and confidence as players that bring their ideas into fruition. Each note, planned or improvised, subtle or stentorian, is played with power and commitment.  Mack Hagood, Far Eastern Audio Review

Distant Wind - One Final Note.com
Distant Wind is the effort of Vancouver instrumentalists Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch to establish a hard link between modern jazz improvisation and Chinese music thousands of years old. In their approach using traditional Chinese techniques they have succeeded in adding new, brilliant color to improvisational music. Han has almost single-handedly brought the Zheng, a 25-string zither, into more contemporary light, with over thirty years of experience with the instrument behind her. Her partner, Raine-Reusch, is an internationally renowned musician, having performed with a wide range of stylists, from Mats Gustafsson to Aerosmith. Together, their playing is nothing short of extraordinary, whether casually experimenting with dissonance or improving upon the ethereal, characteristically Eastern timbre of their instruments.

The record, speckled with transcendent, beautiful music, serves as a primer for those of us unfamiliar with Asian stringed instruments - they brought a small arsenal of obscure devices to the recording. The bulk of the compositions are written, sometimes using only one or two modes, and interlaced with poetic improvisations, single stringed runs and hypnotic tremolo patterns embellished by brushes and mallets, among other tools. The title track, a zheng duet, speaks for itself with Raine-Reusch imaginatively soloing over Han's minimalist, carefully structured melody. Where "Distant Wind" is attractive for its lucidity, "Nokoto" is the intermingling of various approaches, from Chinese voicings to traditional Western jazz improvisation. Laurence Mollerup provides a thick tonal center on acoustic bass for several of the tracks, allowing more freedom for the instrumentalists. Many of the tunes are built from a spiritual platform, calling to philosophical mysticism or tangible elements of nature, as with Raine-Reusch's mimicry of crows with the guanzi, a reeded bamboo instrument. Whatever the approach, Distant Wind is a linear program of captivating music that succeeds on its own. Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch remind us that the best conditions for improvisation begin first with the soul and then with intuition.
Alan Jones, One Final Note.com

Distant Wind - The Georgia Straight
This is strong stuff...what we have here is not so much a cross-cultural fusion (though it is that too) as a collection of first rate compositions that just happen to be played on instruments unfamiliar to most North American ears.
Alexander Varty, The Georgia Straight August 25-30, 2001

Distant Wind - The Vancouver Courier
Han and Raine-Reusch both contribute distinct approaches to music that harmonize well together.  As well, they share an adventurous spirit that challenges each other to explore new techniques and achieve a profound depth of feeling...you don't need to be an ethnomusicologist to enjoy Distant Wind.  The album simply has deep soul.
CHRIS WONG, The Vancouver Courier, August 19, 2001

Distant Wind - Jazz Review.com
Distant Wind contains sounds intriguingly different from what the Western ear may be accustomed to. All seven selections on the CD are originals by Mei Han influenced by Chinese music, and feature her and Randy Raine-Reusch on a Chinese instrument called the zheng. Distant Wind provides some interesting alternatives to the music lover. If you love music in general, and are wide open to, and yearn for different sounds you very well may enjoy Distant Wind....it would be a fine addition to the CD collection of someone possessing a wide range of music tastes and the desire to have a sonic alternative to the usual fare in their collection. 
Craig W. Hurst - Jazzreview.com

Distant Wind - The Wire
"A highly accessible and attractive album of zheng duets. Their mission is to rescue the zheng from the highly hysterical sentimentality that pervades much Chinese music, and then gently propel it down paths, such as improvising over riffs, that a Western mind might naturally explore. Skillful and forceful playing."
Clive Bell, The Wire, Dec. 2001

Distant Wind - Global Rhythm
Mei Han is a Chinese virtuoso and scholar while Vancouver-based Raine-Reusch is a multi-instrumentalist and collector of world instruments who has worked with a wide range of artists. The two of them have combined their knowledge and technical ability to come up with a new direction for Chinese zheng music, the zheng being the parent instrument of the Asian long zither family. While China's music has had a long and considerable influence on much of the orient, the last century has seen much of it cut off from its ancient roots. Han and Raine-Reusch return to the essence of the music while bringing in new elements that don't compromise the music's integrity. The result is an original and quite remarkable set of compositions that find the common ground between the old and the new. Some tracks feature other oriental instruments, as well as acoustic bass, which is sometimes bowed. Notes on the music, the pieces, the artists, and the instruments are in English and Chinese.
Paul-Emile Comeau, Global Rhythm, Aug. 2002

CONCERTS

Musical Duo Strike the Right Chord with Zheng
"The Concerto for Zheng and Orchestra" ("When Cranes Fly Home") in the second half of the Sunday concert at the Poly Theatre by the China Philharmonic Orchestra will present an innovative experience of zheng, the traditional Chinese plucked instrument with 21 or 25 strings.

With four movements, the concerto conducted by John Sharpley of the United States is cyclic and bustling with complex texture. There are fundamental, and generally submerged, musical materials that permeate through the work. The orchestra and the zheng's tuning are delicately intertwined.  Sharpley scored the 25-minute concerto for the Canadian-Chinese zheng player Han Mei, soloist at the concert.

The concerto's origin came about a few years ago, when Sharpley first met Han and her husband Randy Raine-Reusch at a music festival in Sarawak, Malaysia.  "I was deeply inspired by the couple's extraordinary music-making," said Sharpley.

Recognized internationally, a virtuoso on the zheng, Han presents music deeply rooted in over 2,000 years of Chinese culture mixed with ground breaking contemporary styles.  After learning ballet and violin briefly in her younger years, Han turned to the zheng when she was 10.  "Before my first zheng teacher, renowned zheng master Gao Zicheng showed me the instrument, I had never seen it. But after listening to him play the piece 'Lofty Mountains and Flowing Rivers,' I was fascinated by the sound and immediately asked Gao to teach me," she recalled.

That began Han's exploration of the zheng, which spanned more than 20 years in China. She studied with a number of famous zheng masters including Gao and Zhang Yan. From the age of 16, she began playing as a featured soloist with her performances broadcast on national radio in China.  "Though my technique was improving quickly during those years, I gradually sensed I was lacking a deeper understanding of the music," she said. "I couldn't shake this feeling of emptiness and asked myself if I would just play these several zheng pieces for the rest of my life."  So she enrolled in a master's degree of Ethnomusicology at the Chinese Academy of Arts in 1993.  Her dedication took her to some 28 remote ethnic nationalities in Southwest China to collect folk songs.

In 1996, Han went to Canada for an ethnic music programme in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a teaching assistant while performing Chinese music to Westerners.  "In Vancouver, I gradually found it a home for various people, languages and cultures. I could hear a fusion of music types and I realized how shallow my knowledge about music was," she said.

What is most meaningful to her music and life is that in Vancouver, she met Randy Raine-Reusch Randy, the composer and multi-instrumentalist, who became her husband in 2001.  An improvisational based composer, Raine-Reusch, 50, shows great interest in extending the boundaries of music. He has created distinct new performance styles on a number of instruments including Chinese zheng, Japanese ichigenkin (one-string zither) and the Thai khaen (16-reed bamboo mouth organ).

Raine-Reusch has also been heralded as a "dexterous multi-instrumentalist" due to his ability to play about 50 of his collected 600 world instruments.  The co-operation and romance blossomed one day in 1998. After hearing that Raine-Reusch was good at playing zheng, Han called him out of curiosity.  At first, he politely rejected her. Han later learned that Raine-Reusch had been eager to co-operate with some Chinese zheng players but was always met with a negative response. The players he asked could not fathom his musical style and preferred to only play "Lofty Mountains and Flowing Rivers" or "Three Variations on the Theme of Plum Blossoms."  But Han was determined. Raine-Reusch finally invited Han to his home, where he played a CD of his jazz for her.

He had never expected that the Chinese woman would take to the music, "but she immediately understood and enjoyed it," said Raine-Reusch.  Then he asked her to play the zheng. "Don't use your mind and forget the melody, just play with your feelings," he inspired her and she played for more than 15 minutes.  The amazing result was "I felt the wall which had stood in front of me suddenly crumble," she described the sensation, "I inhaled the fresh air and saw a bright broad world which I had never seen before."  They appreciated each other's talents.

Since their meeting, Han and Raine-Reusch have redefined the zheng, and challenged the world of traditional Chinese music in general.  Together they have invented new tunings, developed new fingering techniques, expanded old structures and created radical new forms of expression on this ancient instrument.  They have created a new repertoire, attempting to combine the Chinese musical traditions with those of world music and jazz.  Their first CD of zheng "Distant Wind" reached the top of the charts on the Canadian College Radio Charts, and was nominated for a Juno Award (Canadian Grammy) and two West Coast Music Awards.  They also often performed improvisational works with other artists at major international jazz festivals and concerts.

They have stepped from the past to the future, trying to construct exciting new forms of expression for the new millennium.  China Daily Feb. 28th 2003 by CHEN JIE

Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch - A Willamette University Concert

I went to the concert tonight put on by this husband and wife duo, a Canadian man and a Chinese woman who immigrated to Vancouver several years ago, knowing that I could have nothing worthy to say about it in an essay. I knew I would have nothing to say because I was relatively unfamiliar with the history of Chinese music and the role of the zheng, Mei Han's instrument, in it. But upon listening to them play for 90 minutes, with Ms. Han on the zheng and Mr. Raine-Reusch on a variety of South and East Asian instruments, including the zheng, I was utterly stunned and captivated by their precision, passion, and intimately intense musical interdependence. Each brings to his/her performance such virtuoso gifts in their respective areas, whether it is Han's lithe, strong and rippling fingers or Raine-Reusch's versatility with a variety of little-known instruments that I felt that I was seeing not only the Chinese court tradition of music affirmed but the tradition transformed right before me. But what was most striking to me was the way that their fierce musical cooperation emerged from polar opposite temperaments and musical inclinations. This was especially evident in their finale, Dragon Dogs, but was also clear in Tokyo Crows and Hulufunk. In the remainder of this review I will retell one story Randy told, and then comment briefly on Tokyo Crows and Dragon Days.

A Brief Story

A few of their pieces emerged from the culture of South or Southwest China, with the most interesting being the "Dance of the Yao People (1950)." The Yao are a minority group from Yunnan Province. The song presents the Yao people celebrating with songs and dances, and was played by Han on the zheng and Randy on the bawu, a flute-like instrument. Randy told the story of adolescent pre-courting rituals among the Yao boys and girls. If the boy is able to impress the girl with his behavior, she offers him her hand. He, instead of caressing or kissing it, as in our culture, is to bite it. If the bite is too firm and hard, the girl knows that this is a male that will be harsh and unfit for her; if the bite too weak, he will become a man without strength of convictions and interest in caring for her. What is necessary is a bite that is just right. This puts a whole different spin on male-female relationships. Rather than looking for a gentle boy, and having to infer that gentleness from conduct and words, a girl can actually "feel" his gentleness by letting him unleash it by perfectly controlling the source of his greatest strength: his teeth. Maybe the Yao girls have a slogan, or even a t-shirt saying something to the effect: "Mine bites just right." Maybe not.

Tokyo Crows and the Ichigenkin

Randy's most amazing story, however, was the one he told us about the ichegenkin, a Japanese one-stringed zither. He said he learned it from the Hawaiian master, Issui Minegishi, the 2nd Iemoto of Seikyodo Ichigenkin. What he learned was not simply the technique of playing this instrument by sliding the left hand up and down the string while plucking it with the right but also the Taoist philosophy that underlay its harmonies and plucks. But then his teacher died, and he went to Japan to study the ichigenkin further. He discovered, to his dismay, that the philosophy of the instrument had been lost in its homeland, and thus he found himself in the unique position as a non-Japanese person (and he thinks he may be the only non-Japanese player, of about 500 players worldwide, of this instrument) of teaching the philosophy of the instrument to the "natives." It would be as if a Sri Lankan pizza lover had to show the Floretines a true pizza recipe.

But then he and Mei Han played a duet, entitled Tokyo Crows, with her on her beloved zheng and he on the ichigenkin. She told the story of being amazed at seeing such huge crows when she visited Tokyo for the first time. It seemed ironic that in a city where there wasn't a spare square inch of land for a human there were such huge crows. And so they played, with the screeching and receding pluck of the ichigenkin alternately drowning out and being overcome by the steady playing of the zheng. We could almost feel the bulk of the birds and then hear them take wing and fly off in freedom to a destiny unknown.

Dragon Dog

They concluded with this utterly fascinating piece, the Asian equivalent to "dueling banjos" in the West. Randy was born in the year of the dragon, and so he is aloof, otherworldy, "scaly," intolerant, short-tempered and moody. She, on the other hand, was born in the year of the dog, and so is faithful, loyal, gracious, forgiving, and passionate. All the Chinese astrological books he consulted warned about trying to "mix" these two types. Nevertheless, they fell in love and were married, and this last piece shows the "conversation" of the Dragon with the Dog on a pair of zhengs. We hear the competitive, cooperative, assertive, deferential, strong, yielding tones of the zhengs as the two speak to one another. It was a remarkable conversation, where he would say, figuratively, "I am the Dragon; I am right here, in your face. Take me or leave me!" And she would intone, "I am the dog; I am no less than you, nor am I intimidated by you. I am faithfully here, trying to match and respond to your sound. I can take what you can give to me." To which he would respond, "You don't know what you are saying. I am, after all, the Dragon!" And then she responded, "I will try. The dog and the dragon will lie down together, and there shall be peace."

A whole world opens up for you when you listen to Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch. At least it did for me.

Bill Long