LIVE: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll at City Winery, NYC (4/24/15)
“This is my dream come true.” Two musicians, Baksey Cham Krong’s Samley Hong and Dengue Fever’s Chhom Nimol, both opened their respective sets at Friday’s night’s concert at City Winery with this statement. They, along with several other Cambodian musicians, were there to honor the forgotten golden age of Khmer pop music in the ’50s and ’60s, as documented by the new film Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (now playing at the Film Forum in NYC).
And while the phrase “dream come true” is often vacuously bandied about by the likes of American Idol contestants and “Best New Artist” Grammy winners, it has a very real meaning for the performers at Friday’s show. Many of these musicians were persecuted by notorious dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s, under which approximately one-quarter of Cambodians were murdered by their government; the rest were forced to slave away on collective farms under brutal conditions. For these Cambodian musicians, the “dream come true” isn’t just the fulfillment of a personal ambition — it’s the dream of an entire nation, whose cultural potential was snuffed out just as it was beginning to flower.
Little of the horror behind the music was on display at the concert, however. Instead, the musicians — including some of the original rock ‘n’ rollers, as well as younger musicians paying tribute to pop stars murdered by the Khmer Rouge — focused on happier times: the Cambodia of the ’50s and ’60s, emerging from its status as a French protectorate into a bright, modern future. With the support of ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk, himself an amateur musician and filmmaker, Cambodia’s culture flourished, taking in foreign influences and adding a distinctively native spin. French chanson ballads, Afro-Cuban jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll combined with traditional Khmer musical styles to create a type of pop music unlike anything else on Earth.
Friday night’s early show at City Winery opened with a set by Baksey Cham Krong, who emerged in the late ’50s as Cambodia’s first guitar group. Three of the band’s original members, singer Mol Kamach, lead guitarist Mol Kagnol, and singer/rhythm guitarist Samley Hong (also of Bayon Band, whose songs were included in this set), performed moddish rock ‘n’ roll flecked with country and western, surf rock, and even ska-like rhythms. In addition, the band paid tribute to an earlier era of Cambodian pop, performing also a couple of softer ballads dating from the Mol family’s pre-rock outfit of the same name. (One of these songs, whose title Mol Kagnol translated as “Adios, Mama and Papa,” was written by one of their brothers en route to school in Paris.) In their well-tailored suits with pops of salmon and red, the band looked just as sharp as the images of their younger selves projected next to them onstage.
Baksey Cham Krong’s set was followed by a tribute to Sinn Sisamouth, the undisputed king of Cambodian pop and a victim of the killing fields. Filling in for the departed legend was his grandson Sinn Sethakol, whose magnetism and effortlessly versatile voice gave a glimpse of what made the elder Sinn the country’s biggest pop star. While Sinn Sisamouth took on a variety of styles throughout his career, from tender romantic ballads to frenetic psych-rock, the two songs performed at the concert were on the swanky, jazzy side of the spectrum. With a change of language, they could have easily served as the theme song to a ’60s Hollywood thriller or Japanese gangster movie.
Chhom Nimol, the lead singer of American Khmer-rock band Dengue Fever, next interpreted songs by the two biggest female Cambodian singers of the ’60s: the elegant Ros Serey Sothea, whom Prince Sihanouk dubbed “the golden voice of the royal capital,” and the spikier, youthful Pen Ran, both of whom also perished under the Khmer Rouge. In her sparkling gold-sequinned dress and haunting, uncannily fluid vocals, Chhom channeled the glamorous, cocktail-rock flavor of Cambodian pop, which always retained a level of poise and sophistication above and beyond most Western rockers. She later returned to the stage for the closing song of the concert alongside Sinn Sethakol, movingly recreating “Kom Sman Bong Plech (Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten)” in the style of one of the many romantic duets between Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea that were so popular in the ’60s.
The third of the night’s tributes honored Yol Aularong, whose subversive, satirical style and distorted psych guitar makes him the joker/rebel of the Cambodian rock scene. Two of his songs, “Navany” and “Jeas Cyclo,” were sung by Minh Sothiwan, who also served as the guitarist for the show’s house band. Yol’s insistent weirdness and aggressive sound arguably make him the Cambodian musician best suited to current American tastes, which is perhaps why Minh so successfully led the mostly non-Khmer-speaking audience in a group singalong.
The last of the acts to take the stage was singer/songwriter Touch Sieng Tana, who, as a member of the late ’60s band Drakkar, translated the harder sound of Santana, Deep Purple, and the Rolling Stones picked up from US Armed Forces radio across the border in Vietnam. Even though Drakkar became famous for introducing hard rock to Cambodia, Touch’s set demonstrated the loose genre boundaries common to his homeland’s version of pop. One song injected a darkly romantic, Roy Orbison-style ballad with heavy metal guitars; another, an uptempo, rockabilly-like number, was underlined with a ska beat. These Cambodian pop acts were clearly influenced by American, Caribbean, and European artists, yet there’s never the sense that they merely replicated what they heard. Instead, the Western sounds are so wildly blended and assimilated into Cambodian styles that the result is entirely sui generis.
In the film Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, Prince Norodom Sirivudh, half-brother of former ruler Prince Sihanouk, states that, “Cambodian songs are often sad. There’s a lot of tragedy.” Seeing these acts perform in concert, however, is to be bowled over by the almost palpable sense of joy coursing through these sets. The original rockers seemed remarkably youthful, as if revitalized by the opportunity to do something they never could have imagined, especially in their homeland’s darkest hours. Likewise, the younger performers eagerly seized the chance to spread the music of their fallen heroes to a new audience. The Cambodian musicians may not have talked much about their country’s horrific past, but their sheer optimism and enthusiasm at being able to perform again said it all.
The Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten concert tour continues April 28 at Monty Hall in Jersey City, NJ, and April 29 at American Film Institute in Silver Spring, MD. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/CambodianRock.
(Cover photo by Josh Lewis; all images via Facebook.)
