Name
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Stephen Lo
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Member Since
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2006 October
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Email/Facebook
Youtube name
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slo1357@hotmail.com
hkjazz1
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My Instruments
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Yamaha YAS32 alto (off production, predecessor to YAS475);
King Voll True tenor (the listed price in 1932 was US$200);
Buescher BU3 soprano (a good horn despite harsh critics…).
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My Journey Into Music
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I belong to the baby boom generation and I think I am a lucky latecomer of it. I love music and singing but instrument lessons for students were uncommon in my time. I learned some guitar from schoolmates as we sang to tunes of folk music and ABBA in the 70s. As the musical scene moved along, I turned to classical music later and to jazz recently.
My children took instrument lessons at young age and had much fun. They showed me the positive result of good teaching and proper lessons. If you cannot make good sound and enough progress to satisfy yourself, you tend to lose the drive to go further. You also need to be the harsh critic to your own playing in order to have breakthroughs. I began proper lessons when my children became teens.
I chose the sax because it can make sophisticated and intimated sounds. It is the instrument closest to the human voice and is equally expressive. Jazz brings back to us the good old analog world and I am confident that Jazz will conquer the world once again.
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My Favorite Music
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I like many kinds of music as taste changes from time to time. The sax is good for Mandarin pops of the golden age of 1970s but Bossa Nova is my favorite. Big Band Jazz is almost a century old and the joyful mood is unparalleled. Antonio Carlos Jobim, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong are my heroes. My favorite female vocals include Sarah Vaughan, Jo Stafford, Julie London, Astrud Gilberto, Laura Fygi…and Susan Wong.
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Other Hobbies
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Other related hobbies of mine include the digging up of history of songs and deciphering lyrics and their allusions. Music is micro-history of people. The world has changed a great deal in the last 80 years and the feeling of people is preserved and distilled in good (usually also popular) compositions. They tell you details that history books do not tell.
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