Gina’s Can Band

Hakka band: Gina’s Can Band
(Photo credit: 吉那罐子)

Chinese name: 吉那罐子

Year of Establishment: 2006
Founder: Gina Yang (楊淑喻)

Founded in 2006, "Gina’s Can Band" appeared in the music industry as a creative musical group. Over the years, it has accumulated many creative works and a lot of performance experience. Lead singer Gina Yang (楊淑喻) is a Hakka from Taoyuan City’s Xinwu District. For many years, she and band leader CanC Li (李康慶) have adhered to the belief that in the multicultural society and mainstream awareness, they must insist on having a distinctive style when it comes to music creation. Other band members include drummer Chen Yung-cheng (陳勇成), guitarists Liu Hsu-ming (劉旭明) and Palonlon Pazizau (温俊凱), and bassist Kung (大恭).

In 2016, the band released its first full-composition album "The Funky Song For Tung Blossom (桐花放客)," which contains different styles of genre, including rock, reggae, blues, funk, and ballad. It subverted audience’s imagination about Hakka songs. This album was shortlisted for the 28th Golden Melody Award for Best Band, Album of the Year, and Best Hakka Album Award. In 2018, it won the first prize in the Hakka category with the album "Love For Granted (理所當然)" in the Taiwan Music Competition and Songwriting Contest. This album included the tune "A Song For Formosa (唱我們的歌)" which brought in Taiwan’s indigenous and Minnan languages, presenting an image of Taiwan’s diverse ethnic groups singing together.

Gina’s Can Band
(Photo credit: 吉那罐子)

At the 30th Golden Melody Awards Ceremony in 2019, Gina Yang won the Best Hakka Singer Award. Other shortlisted singers were: iColor (愛克樂), Lo Si-rong (羅思容), and Hsieh Yu-wei (謝宇威). Yang’s high-pitched and powerful, sometimes gentle and beautiful, singing won over the jury.

Gina said that language is one of the elements of music, and it can be mixed with different genres and evoke different feelings with the music. This unfettered freedom in creating their songs gives various possibilities to the band’s creations and shatters people’s stereotyped impressions about Hakka music.

As co-coordinators of the band, the other members worked together with Gina to create and sing. The band members are from varied nationalities and ethnicities. Through their careful "tuning" of the songs, they give each of their joint creations an individual life. Each of the band’s songs has a section of the life of Gina’s Can Band, be it happy, angry, or bittersweet. And of course, there are also some sad stories. Through their songs, the band have released their souls, and continuously performed their touching music to everyone.

In recent years, Gina’s Can Band has seen their seniors give new life to the Hakka tradition with innovative music. This has inspired the band to be brave in trying new approaches and writing their lyrics in the Hakka language. They hope that they can also integrate elements of Eastern and Western popular music into their works and sing in their mother tongue, so that Hakka songs can be presented in a way that is different from the past. They also look forward to letting everyone gain a different understanding of the native language and creative bands. Through their efforts at creating unique music, they hope to inject new life into the Hakka culture.