Music runs in their veins

The Zhou Family Band has been performing for the past seven generations and is still going strong, Chen Nan reports.

Eight members of the Zhou Family Band are currently on a one-month tour of the United States. The tour, which features 17 shows, began on Sept 18 at the Global Roots Festival in Minneapolis. American audiences will get a rare chance to hear centuries-old Chinese wind and percussion instruments, which the family has been performing for over seven generations.

At home, the band is part of weddings, births, funerals and rituals involving the worship of ancestors in Lingbi, East China's Anhui province.

The band's performances blend the suona (a double-reed Chinese horn), flutes, the sheng (one of the oldest Chinese wind instruments), mouth organs, drums and cymbals.

The suona, also known as the Bolin laba, was designated as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2014.

The band's US tour includes two shows at the World Music Festival in Chicago, two workshops at the University of Michigan and a performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Before the performers began their US tour, the band did two shows at Beijing's 300-year-old Zhengyici Theater.

At the shows, the band opened the night with the Fanzi Tune-Prosper for Ten Thousand Years, which indicates wealth, prosperity and happiness.

The other pieces were all old tunes passed down from earlier generations, including a celebratory tune-New Life, which is performed when there is a birth in a family, and Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix Marriage, which is a standard fixture at weddings.

The oldest among the eight musicians, Zhou Benxiang, 70, imitates human voices using five instruments and embellishes his one-man act with stunts.

"What you see onstage is more than just music. It is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese folk culture," says the band's leader Zhou Benming, who is a fifth-generation musician.