Clocked Out - The Wide Alley

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The Wide Alley: Chinese Culture in Flux

The rich musical traditions of China's Sichuan Province meet the Australian avant-garde creations of Clocked Out in an innovative fusion of Chinese and Western sounds. Featuring street songs and jazz along with opera and folk, this cross-cultural collaboration draws focus from Chengdu's oldest neighbourhood The Wide Alley.

Pulsating gongs blend with jazz harmonies, clouds of delicate bells envelop soulful melodies, and brash fragments of Sichuan percussion collide with wild free improvisations. The multi-cultural ensemble of voice, erhu, bamboo flute, trumpet, trombone, prepared piano and percussion features performers with diverse expertise in traditional, folk, jazz, and experimental styles. Together they create unexpected new worlds of sound, bringing disappearing traditions back to life.

The Wide Alley is the culmination of eight years of collaboration between musicians Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold and composer Zou Xiangping, and builds on their ongoing studies of Sichuan street music, folk music, and opera percussion. Their previous production, Sichuan Fantasy, was performed in Chengdu Arts Centre and at the Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth. A live performance with moving and still images projected onto hand painted screens, The Wide Alley was developed with the generous support of Asialink and the Queensland Music Festival, where it was premiered in 2007.

"The course of the performance...is an incredible pastiche of genres, and the breadth of dynamics is astonishing." - Scott Spark, www.abc.net.au

On Clocked Out's Sichuan Fantasy (2002):
"When the audience went out into the bright city they were already commenting: 'These foreigners really dare to dream!'" - Chengdu Commercial Daily (China)

"a surprisingly seamless mixture of eras and cultures." (RealTime)

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