5. (Movies or) Recordings

My uncle Phillip was born in Vietnam in the '50s, and grew up in Saigon. I know he learned to play guitar in this period (and possibly some piano, though they didn't own one). While being familiar with Vietnamese music, his favorite genre of music when he was a youth was rock and roll. He cited several English-language bands familiar to me: The Eagles, Wham!, and ABBA (being careful to point out the second "B" as being spelled backwards in the logo).

From the Eagles, he said "Hotel California" as a particular favorite. (Incidentally, also one of my dad's absolute favorite songs, which he says he always played on the jukebox when he was a student and new immigrant to the US.) From ABBA, he admired "The Winner Takes it All", and from Wham! he named "Careless Whisper". He said he and his friends listened to these artists on cassette tapes (and he's curious now to some of the more obscure lyrics). (Though I suspect my uncle picked particularly well-known artists throughout to be more accessible to me.)

He got more interested in more instrumental music in his thirties. Around the early nineties, he worked some years on the weekends as a wedding musician, on the guitar and the keyboard. Growing up, I frequently remember him editing music (and special effects) into wedding and family videos (this being a time when everyone took home videos frequently on their straight-to-VHS Panasonics). I also remember it was a great extended family activity to watch Paris By Night videos (a Vietnamese-American traveling music/variety show).

Later he part-time taught piano one-on-one. I was one of his students, and while he occasionally taught from a book ("In the Hall of the Mountain King"), he mostly arranged pieces to teach. A few of them were the traditional classical pieces, like "Greensleeves". But they were outnumbered by American folk songs (well-known as "The Star Spangled Banner" or children's songs taken from one of my CDs as "), Vietnamese folk songs (patriotic or traditional) , movie music (the themes of The Godfather and Love Story), and other modern Vietnamese compositions.

He says nowadays he's become more interested in softer intrumental melodies. And I've seen his giant CD collection which he takes pride in. His favorite composer is Trịnh Công Sơn, a prolific modern Vietnamese composer. His favorite composition is "Tuổi đá buồn", a melancholy song that is oft translated roughly as "It's Still Raining". Another famous Vietnamese composer my uncle mentioned is Phạm Duy (his "Cây Đàn Bỏ Quên", "the forgotten guitar").