12 Girls Band bucks Chinese tradition

The name sounds interesting enough -- even intriguing: The 12 Girls Band. And from China, at that. And when the curtain went up at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday night for the ensemble’s debut Los Angeles appearance, the visual impact was even more appealing. Twelve attractive, elegantly garbed young women, seated across a three-level riser, playing a collection of exotic-looking instruments.

But the first sound was not at all out of the ordinary -- a crisply rhythmic Western drum set solo, leading into a powerful, bass-and-drum-driven groove. Those musicians were nowhere to be seen, however, since the rhythm section sounds were delivered via recorded tracks.

The 12 Girls Band consists of five erhu (bowed stringed instrument) players, three pipa (Chinese lute) players, a pair of guquin (Chinese dulcimer) players, a guzheng (Chinese zither) player and a xiao (vertical flute) player. An ensemble of traditional instruments, in other words, played by musicians who were clearly well trained in classical Chinese styles.

But, aside from an occasional melody or two, there was little traditional about the program. The erhu players -- whose instrument, with its extraordinary vocalized sound, is one of the wonders of world music -- were used as a kind of violin section, playing virtually every melody passage in unison, often with the xiao. The pipas provided chording and arpeggiation, and the dulcimers and zither added brisk, percussive melodic contrast.

It was, in other words, a carefully packaged musical product, gentle enough to please New Age fans, unusual enough as a visual presentation to have some appeal in the MTV-oriented Western music media. What it wasn’t was a particularly compelling evening of music.

The 12 Girls Band is enormously popular in Asia. They’ve reportedly sold more than 1 million CDs in Japan, the first Chinese group to do so in a foreign country. And the inclusion of numbers such as a medley combining themes from Mozart and Beethoven was a clear indication that ensemble founder Wang Xiaojing intends to take the 12 Girls into even broader territory.

Given the somewhat lackluster condition of the current New Age market, he may well be successful in doing so. But listening to these talented young players -- especially during the too brief moments in which they demonstrated the enchanting sounds of their individual instruments -- one couldn’t help but wish to hear more Chinese traditional qualities from the 12 Girls Band and fewer repetitious, recorded, groove and hip-hop tracks.