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Your guide to gigs, concerts and music festivals in Hong Kong
Mimi Lo is a multi-faceted artist. She’s an actress for theatre and television, a radio show host and, most of all, a singer with passion. After three successful albums, Lo has entered the world of Canto-jazz with the release of Very Personal (see Review). When not singing pop or jazz, Lo is also an active voice in Canto-gospel. You can listen to Mimi Lo on RTHK 2’s Made in Hong Kong show, every Monday and Thursday at 1pm.
Actually, it was me who approached him through my manager Allan Ip. Allan had produced my last three albums, so he allowed me to pick my producer this time. I said I just wanted some genuine input and guidance during the recording sessions, as I was always confused [and] followed my own gut feelings. I needed a producer who would generate some chemistry with me. So Allan suggested Clarence. Through Clarence, I learned many new insights, as I followed the whole project through from ground zero.
Yes, Sylvain is a fantastic musician and arranger. He and I selected the keys for the songs. Sylvain was very experimental. Even though he had no background in ’80s Cantopop, he was always eager to try new things and go in different directions. For instance, he would transform some totally sad songs into joyous melodies with a samba backbeat. Groovy!
I chose the majority of them, and Clarence hand-picked the rest. I especially picked Lowell Lo’s Leaning Beside You for Thousands of Centuries because when that song came out, I was a form five student studying for the HKCEE exam. I was a hopeless romantic then. I also chose Jacky Cheung’s In Love with Each Other because I loved the early stuff from Jacky. But I did it in a less reserved manner. I wanted to shout out “I love you” loud and clear.
Music-wise, it was definitely jazzy because it was backed up by Hong Kong’s best jazz musicians, such as Sylvain, Eugene Pao, Yoyong Aquino, and Australian drummer Nick McBride. But the root of the tunes themselves is straight Cantopop. From a vocal standpoint, I didn’t do anything too drastically different. I only applied Clarence’s concepts and used a lot of feelings to sing instead of focusing on precision alone. Further, the microphone we used was a very “dry” microphone. It was so sensitive that it picked up a lot of hissy noises. So I had to really focus to make it work. That was a lesson in itself.
How else did the recording differ from your previous ones?
It might’ve been a first in Cantopop. Usually in pop, you record a demo, then you sing on top of it, and then you throw in the real music. For this project, I would sing a guide first, and then the live musicians came in and jammed the songs until perfection. The last step was to overdub my voice on top of it. It was almost like a live recording, but not quite. In Hong Kong, you can’t really do live studio recordings due to limited studio space and limited equipment. It’s kind of backwards in a way; you can’t have a live big band in the studio like the good old days of Yao Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, or even Barbra Streisand, who is famous for yelling at band members in the studio.
I think the trend is really there for musically mature people who long for and desire good music, while the younger generation is listening to pop singers who can’t sing. The Cantopop scene is peeling off quickly, so there’s a demand for that type of adult contemporary music. My type.
Of course I want to. But as you know, the Hong Kong music industry is limited. The reality is people associate me with the Cantopop oldies. And that’s my market. I’d love to expand my horizons and have classics of my own. I can only hope. Perhaps that’s why I like singing demos. When I sing a demo, I create the groove and the interpretation is all mine. It gives me satisfaction and it’s a good feeling to hear others try to imitate me on commercial releases. See: www.mimilo.net.
Henry Chung is one of Hong Kong’s leading bluesmen and harmonica players.