On this summer day in Xi’an, the old plaque in the BJS studios was again sounding overly cynical.

Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.

After all, one of the pleasures of a Chinese park is the music. You don’t have to travel to get music in the park, of course, any Beijing park worthy of the name will have a group of folks engaged in the making of it. The voices and instruments may be a bit rickety, but it’s not bloviating or shānzhài (山寨 = faked / knock-off), and that’s kind of lovely in itself.

Here’s the music:

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

And the artists:

About Tourism, the series

Engraved into a sizable hunk of Labrador granite, on a pedestal in the executive anteroom at the Beijing Sounds Studios:

Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.

It’s not a promising mindset with which to start the summer travel season. Yet that’s exactly what July and August 2009 brought to the Beijing Studios staff: tourism of the first degree…

• in Shanghai and Nanjing: a tagalong (follow-the-spouse type) business trip with a steady diet of meandering street-walking and cold-hotel-pool swimming
• in Xi’an and surrounding Shaanxi province, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall: excursions with Grandfather and Grandmother Beijing Sounds visiting China for the first time

This series, then, takes the optimistic and contrarian view that there might, in fact — counter to all past experience, deeply-held biases, and scientifically-derived hypotheses — be some reason to haul the microphone outside the boundaries of this fine capital city and open up one’s ears to the sounds beyond.