Van-Anh Vanessa Vo - Three-Mountain Pass (2013)

It took two and a half years, but an album finally came over the transom here that’s so strange and otherworldly and surrealistically captivating that it qualifies as exotic. Van-Anh Vanessa Vo‘s new release Three Mountain Pass mixes and sometimes mashes up traditional Vietnamese sounds along with an opera piece featuring the Kronos Quartet, plus a reinvention of an iconic, macabre classic.
A Vietnamese musician and composer who now resides in the Bay Area, Vo has taken traditional stringed instruments like the dan tranh plucked zither and the single-stringed dan bau to new and intriguing — and even mysterious — depths. In her hands, these Vietnamese instruments become the vessels for wild explorations, whether she is revisiting traditional tunes, playing her own music or reshaping ‘s Gnossienne No.3.

In collaboration with Kronos Quartet (the wonderful chamber music conversation of “Green River Delta”) and fellow Vietnamese trailblazer, guitarist Nguyen Le, in her work with orchestras and Japanese taiko drum ensembles, Vo reveals the great breadth and flexibility of the traditional styles she spent decades perfecting with master musicians and at the conservatory in Hanoi.