We end today in praise of Chinese music. It's probably not what you think however. I'll let Robin Haller describe it. Haller is a British record producer who has worked for many years with artists from the far-flung Xinjiang province in north western China.

“As a listener in America or Europe, you probably have a sort of very vague idea of what Chinese music is. It might be Chinese opera, it might be some kind of classical Chinese music you've heard in a Chinese restaurant. You know we start off with that cliché of Peking opera, you know, cymbals, drums, orchestra...”

“And then you take in to sort of geographically the furthest place away from Beijing, you're in Xinjiang, you're in a bazaar, you're hearing this strange Turkic tongue, it's nothing to do with what we traditionally associate with China. But it's still very much a part of China.”

Very Chinese, even though there's an acoustic guitar. And the words are in Kazakh. This is the music of Mamer (mamour).

You can almost hear the wide expanses of the grasslands in northwest China, Mamer's native home. These days he lives mostly in Beijing, with a couple of trips home each year to Xinjiang province where his family still lives.

Mamer's no country bumpkin though. He grew up listening to King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic and British art rock from the 70s. Now he's returned to his Xinjiang roots with a style he calls Chinagrass. Mamer's purpose -- says his producer Robin Haller -- is to take Chinese rural music and do to it what alt country bands in the US have done to country and western.

“Chinagrass describes a lot of things. It could be Mongolian music. If you were in Beijing or Shanghai, you'll find Mongolian bars where people sit and get drunk and listen to Mongolian bands kind of playing away. And I suppose what Chinagrass is about is sort of reclaiming this sort of roots music from the grasslands, from Xinjiang, from near Tibet, from inner Mongolia. It's about making real art music and singing also in local languages.”

And yet Mamer can't escape his British-art-rock listening habits. This song in particular, "Proverbs," bears the mark of those influences...it sounds like Stevie Winwood and Traffic, performing in Kazahk. Here's what Mamer himself has to say about that.

“So Mamer says, especially those kinds of 60s 70s British bands are things that he still listens to a lot, and influenced him a lot. Maybe when you strip all music down to its basics, you know for the most part, songs are quite similar, aren't they? So maybe it's not surprising. I found that working with Mamer, when you strip these songs down, they could be Irish songs, they could be Scottish songs, there's an universality to a great song that anyone anywhere can understand.”

We leave you with the track "Proverbs" by Chinese artist Mamer from his just released album "Eagle."