Small Island Big Song

After a gap of three years, the Small Island Big Song music project is putting out its second album, Our Island, in January of 2022, and at the end of 2021 it began a 36-show performance tour of Taiwan, the US and Italy.

The tour kicked off with a performance at the 2021 Taiwan Creative Content Fest, organized by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency. Putad Pihay, lead singer of the band Outlet Drift, which won the 2021 Golden Melody Award for Best Indigenous Language Album, sang the song “Pinagsanga” (“Nature”) in the Amis language. Singer–songwriter Sauljaljui incorporated Paiwan indigenous mourning chants into this work, while musician Sammy Andriamalalaharijaona from Madagascar and singer Emlyn from Mauritius contributed to the piece online with performances on traditional instruments. A resounding accompaniment of surging drums helped create a moving song of respect for the ocean.

Linking Austronesia through music

The first album of the Small Island Big Song project comprised 18 songs recorded by producer BaoBao Chen and her husband, Australian music producer Tim Cole, during visits to more than 100 musicians in 16 Austro­nesian countries over three years. What got this program started was a remark made by an elder in the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu.

When BaoBao and Tim visited Vanuatu in 2012, a local elder told them: “Our ancestors came from Taiwan.”

Initially skeptical, BaoBao learned that Taiwan was indeed the place where Austronesian culture originated. Evidence for this comes from plants and languages, but mostly discussion had been limited to academia, and there was very little contemporary dialogue. This is why in 2015 she began fundraising for the Small Island Big Song project, with Tim taking on the tasks of drawing up cross-­cultural contracts, producing music, and filming videos.

The professionally trained Tim insisted that recordings not be done in recording studios. He went all the way to Hawaii to the rim of the Kīlauea volcano to record a traditional chant by the singer Kekuhi Kealiikana­kao­leo­hai­li­lani at sunrise. He recorded “Women’s Water Music” beside the Blue Hole in Vanuata. He also recorded songs accompanied by traditional instruments in a mangrove forest in Papua New Guinea and in the New Zealand rainforest. These songs express the links between man and nature, and between man and culture. The soft-spoken Tim says with obvious excitement: “Music performed in this manner is a statement to Nature and is extremely powerful.”

With Taiwan as their starting point, Small Island Big Song project founder BaoBao Chen and music producer Tim Cole visited Austronesian countries, linking together Austronesian cultures. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

The sea has no borders

The album Small Island Big Song, released in 2018, not only was nominated for Best Concept Album at the 2019 Independent Music Awards in the US, it also won the German Record Critics’ Award for Album of the Year, making it the only winner from Asia. They then undertook a tour of more than 50 shows in 16 countries, attracting live audiences totaling more than 170,000 people.

The song “Uyas Gerakun,” which served as the curtain-­call grand finale, featured a traditional Truku mouth harp (rubug qawqaw) played by the Truku singer and hunter Pi Teyru Ukah for the main melody. In Sarawak and Papua New Guinea they have their own similar instruments, and these were layered onto Pi Teyru Ukah’s playing. Then the rhythms of the Maori Haka martial dance and of the chants of the Balinese Kecha dance were added, and all these musical elements were combined. Although the rubug qawqaw only has a thin sound, it added a distinctive feel to the surging wave of music, like a drop of water in the ocean.

The Small Island Big Song project not only links together Austronesian islands, it also bears witness to the fact that Austronesian peoples migrated to the Indian Ocean. For example, says BaoBao, there is a folk instrument in Madagascar known as the valiha—a tubular harp made of bamboo or wood—that all local people can play. Musician Sammy told her that when their ancestors first arrived on Madagascar, the valiha had split bamboo strings. Later, after bicycles were introduced to the island, people began using unwound brake cables to add metal strings instead. To everyone’s suprise, when the group visited Sara­wak in Malaysia and musician Alena Murang took them to see a pagong that her grandmother used to play with a bamboo pick, they suddenly realized that the pagong was the original form of the valiha. There are also ident­ical instruments in the Philippines and Indo­nesia. Historical records mention such an instrument in Taiwan too, but it no longer exists today.

To start their 2021–2022 world tour, Small Island Big Song gave a concert in Taiwan, headlined by Taiwanese indigenous singers Sauljaljui (right) and Putad (second right). (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Truku musician and hunter Pi Teyru Ukah went with Small Island Big Song to perform at the 2019 Colours of Ostrava music festival in the Czech Republic.

Paiwan singer Sauniaw Tjuveljevelj joined Small Island Big Song on a trip to Vanuatu, where she shared music played on the traditional nose flute.

A group photo with Small Island Big Song project planners BaoBao Chen and Tim Cole (front), and Malagasy musician Sammy Andriamalalaharijaona (second row, wearing straw hat).

Relatives across the ocean

One of the songs on Small Island Big Song is “Naka Wara Wara To’o,” written in a local indigen­ous language by the Solomon Islands pan flautist Charles Maimarosia. He has said that taking part in the Small Island Big Song project was like finding relatives over the seas, and the song was written for this extended family.

On tour, although the singers from different lands each had their own mother tongue, they were surprised to discover that the numbers one through ten have similar pronunciations from Easter Island to the Amis people of Taiwan, and the singers even had similar body language.

During the tour, beyond their musical ­exchanges, Sammy from Madagascar became the best of friends with Sauljaljui despite the difference in their ages.

Sauljaljui, who for 14 straight years has organized an indigenous culture and music festival in her home com­mun­ity of Kapanan in Pingtung County’s Mudan Township, says: “I discovered that we have many things in common. Our lives are inseparable from the land, and we are both facing the problems of the loss of the land and traditional music.”

The Small Island Big Song ensemble performing on the main stage at the 2018 Etnosur Festival in Spain.

Changing the world with music

The Small Island Big Song project conveys concern about climate change. For example, the song “Gasikara,” which is sung and played collectively on traditional instruments by musicians from six countries, describes coastal environ­mental issues like coral bleaching that are faced by their homelands. Tim, who has been involved in music for 30 years, wanted to use the stories and music in the songs on the album to speak out on behalf of the environment, and on behalf of the sea. That is why he chose to use the singular word “island” rather than the plural “islands” in the album’s English title, to indicate that “we have only one Earth.”

BaoBao and Tim have personally witnessed the impact of climate change on these island countries. In Vanuatu, after they took an air taxi to attend the Torba Music and Arts Festival, a local elder took them to see how rising sea levels have changed the coastline. Residents of outlying islands in Vanuatu have been forced to relocate because of the frequent cyclones and rising sea levels, becoming the first climate refugees recorded by the United Nations.

In one song on the 2022 album Our Island, at the end of the duet “Liswar Zanset” (“Our Ancestors”) sung by Amis singer Putad and Mauritian vocalist Emlyn, there are some lines of poetry recited by Selina Leem of the Marshall Islands, who spoke at the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in 2015: “Their people displaced / Their lands taken / My lands, drowning.” She is expressing the sorrows of people who may be forced to leave their homes in the long and narrow Marshall Islands, which are threatened by climate change and rising sea levels and may become uninhabitable by the year 2035.

Sauljaljui filmed the music video for the song “Madjadjumak” (“Finding Each Other”) in Pingtung for the new album from the Small Island Big Song project.

Emlyn, one of the premier singers in the traditional Sega style of Mauritius, makes a heartfelt appeal for protecting the ocean in the original song “Liswar Zanset.”

Island of sharing

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tim and BaoBao have stayed in Taiwan for the past two years and ­focused on producing the second album. Tim says that the songs on Our Island are about environmental and land issues, shared Austronesian culture, and the aspira­tions of indigen­ous peoples. In the future the project will col­laborate with a large events promotion company from Australia to undertake inter­national coproductions.

Putad, who took part in the coproduction and co­creation process, says: “Even if the meetings are online and the creative work is being done remotely, I feel that these foreign artists who I have never met in person are so similar to me and so familiar to me that they can ­really understand me.”

Sauljaljui says: “Every performance on tour, we hold each other’s hands and wish each other well. I always feel honored and moved at ‘being chosen,’ and often as I sing about my heartfelt desire to save the environment, I can’t stop crying.”

Next up, starting in January of 2022, the Small ­Island Big Song team will go on tour across the USA with perform­ances at numerous venues including Broadway and the University of Pennsylvania. Their last stop will be in Europe, on the island of Procida in the Bay of ­Naples, ­Italy’s Capital of Culture for 2022. BaoBao relates: “At present we’re still making arrangements, but we hope we can add a final performance in Taiwan. After all, Taiwan is the starting point of Austronesian culture, and this is music that Taiwan is contributing to the world.”

Putad Pihay, lead singer of the band Outlet Drift, uses her original song “Pinagsanga” to convey respect for Nature.