Remembering Cambodia's chapei master

Kong Nay modernised traditional music and inspired a new generation of artists

- MIKE IVES

Soeung Chetra, a high school student in rural Cambodia, practises a centuries-old musical art form — singing improvised ballads while plucking a Cambodian lute known as the chapei dang veng.

Like other Cambodian chapei players, he was inspired by Kong Nay, a master who died last year at 80. “I want to be as famous as him,” Soeung Chetra, 16, said outside his family’s wooden stilt house.

Few Cambodian artists of Kong Nay’s generation survived the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the regime that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979 and created a nationwide system of forced labour camps and killed up to a quarter of the population. Fewer still spent decades building a legacy.

Kong Nay, who was blind, raised the chapei’s profile by teaching young proteges and performing melancholic ballads at home and abroad. One of his last projects, a collaboration with a Cambodian rapper, exposed a new generation of Cambodians to their country’s traditional music.

“People say he’s the Ray Charles of Cambodia, but some people don’t like that,” said Song Seng, a nonprofit administrator who introduced Kong Nay to some of his first students.

Ray Charles, his admirers say, is the Kong Nay of America.