Contents
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•
An Introduction to Heyday
•
Awards & honors
•
Recent Press Coverage (quotes)
•
FAQ
•
Andrew Jones on the Story of Shanghai Jazz,
courtesy of afropop.org
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Contact Information
•
Heyday is a 1930s style jazz bar featuring some of the top talent from China
and around the world. The aim was to provide an intimate environment
where performances are of a more personal nature,( performers and
audience are never more than 20 feet from the stage as the seating fans
An
introduction
to Heyday
around the stage). Also, central to the concept was the quality of the drinks
we serve. We simply don’t think you should have to choose between going
to a live show or getting a great drink. They go together. In order to deliver
on this part of the vision, we’ve assembled a world class bar crew who serve
up drinks that you would expect to find in the finest craft cocktail bars.
•
Since opening in January 2015, Heyday has been named Best Live Music
Venue by That’s Shanghai, Time Out, and Shanghai WOW! magazines and
been nominated for Best New Bar by City Weekend, Time Out Shanghai,
and That’s Shanghai. We are honored by this recognition and the positive
buzz we have received in the press, and are committed to building on the
momentum we have built.
•
Below are a number of artifacts that may be useful to our friends in the
press who wish to write about Heyday, including quotes from recent articles,
downloadable photographs and videos, an FAQ, and an interview with
Andrew Jones reposted courtesy of Afropop about the Shanghai jazz scene
of the 1930s. We are also happy to participate in interviews, contribute
written content, and provide other support for articles.
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Awards
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Heyday was named Best Live Music Venue by 3
major publishers in Shanghai in its first year.
Awards
Heyday won the Most Favorited Bar Readers’ Choice
Award from Bon App, one of China’s most highly
regarded social reviewing applications of
restaurants & bars. The review was based on 12
months of data from 2015, which included more
than 80,000 user generated reviews of restaurants
& bars in Shanghai alone.
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Travel & Leisure:
http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/best-shanghai-bars-cocktails
“With its cushy banquettes, terrazzo floors, and waitresses in qipaos, this
just-opened club is an homage to Shanghai’s 1930s jazz era, complete with
vocalists crooning Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald songs.”
Recent Press
Coverage
City Weekend:
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/shanghai/blog/reviews/new-bar-heyday/
“… excellent live sets from Shanghai's jazz notables like Jade Lee, Jonas
Seetoh and Coco Zhao.”
“The intimate atmosphere and local talent crooning classics like ‘East of the
Sun’ and ‘Just the Two of Us’ on a crystal clear sound system are delicious
enough to keep us coming back to Heyday.”
Time Out Shanghai:
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/venue/Bars__Clubs-Cocktail_bars_Bars__Clubs-Live_Music_Venues/24650/Heyday.html
“Smart vintage live jazz bar with impressive cocktails”
“…Heyday, a slick new addition to the Taian/Xingguo crossroads, the city
has a new ‘old-timey’ lounge worthy of attention.”
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Shanghai Wow
http://www.shanghaiwow.com/en/2015/02/Bar-Buzz-–-Heyday
“Heyday is looking to bring Shanghai’s classy, decadent past roaring in to
Recent Press
Coverage
its heady present with a combination of live music, excellent cocktails and
sleek design.”
“Basically, this is a vintage jazz bar that has put a lot effort into the music
without skimping on any of the other aspects that make a great nighttime
spot. The idea is that a lot of the time you have to decide whether to take
in some great live music or enjoy some real high quality drinks – Heyday is
a place where you don’t have to make that choice.”
“There’s a lot of dedication and detail put in to expressing the time period’s
elegance and it comes off really well, glitzy but never gaudy.”
“Some of the signatures here are really special – the Heaven Built on Hell
(RMB 78), named for a nickname once given to this great city of ours, is a
winning mix of raspberry and orange foam made with Japanese egg whites
on a base of vodka. The drink is itself spread across two levels, but its
sophistication goes beyond this winking physical acknowledgement of its
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name. It’s smooth, sweet and perfectly constructed.”
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Shanghai Wow
http://www.shanghaiwow.com/en/2015/04/Shanghai’s-Newest-ThemedBars
Recent Press
Coverage
“At the end of the day, though, Heyday is about music, drinks and
ambience, and so far it seems to be winning on all counts. There are already
a handful of jazz bars in this city, but the attention to detail here and the
savvy introduction of a drinks selection as stellar as this already make it a
standout.”
“Heyday is one of the most welcome additions to Shanghai nightlife in
recent memory – a jazz bar that puts as much emphasis on its cocktails as
it does on its music, which is provided by a tight house band during the
week and big name local singers at the weekend.”
“But Heyday’s jazz theme goes deeper than just regular live performances.
Its name comes from the fact that it draws on Shanghai’s 20s and 30s
golden age and the bar goes all out with it – the jazz all skews vintage, the
waitresses wear qipaos and the whole venue radiates the kind of retro class
that died out with the jazz age.”
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Luxe City Guides/Penninsula Hotel
http://www.peninsula.com/en/PenCities/shanghai/Swank-JazzJoint-20150413?prev=hotel
“The Art Deco-tinged den, with its brassy ceilings and cozy plush booths
surrounding a full-band setup, spotlights local and international talent like
Coco Zhao and Anne Evenou.”
Recent Press
Coverage
“Alongside the intimate atmosphere for music appreciation, Heyday takes
good care of your glass, too. True to the bar’s distinct motif, Aaron J Feder
(formerly of Willy Moreno’s el Ocho) brings to life a 1930s-themed cocktail
programme.”
Daily Secret
http://china.dailysecret.com/shanghai/en/xuhui-district/bars/
heyday#.VTdWEVxN3FI
“If you thought teleportation wasn't possible, you haven't walked down
Tai'an Lu yet: Amongst its cafés and convenience stores lies Heyday, a live
jazz bar that pays homage to Shanghai's 1930s jazz era. Here, you'll go
back in time to find bartenders dressed in suits and waitresses in qipaos, all
in a dark, intimate venue that showcases local jazz talents like Coco Zhao.
Ask one of the bartenders to whip up a Heaven Built on Hell — a chili
vodka-based cocktail that'll certainly jazz things up. Live performances take
the stage Tuesday through Sunday. Ready for takeoff? “
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“P.S. Need a stronger cocktail? Ask for the Vieux Carré, a whiskey cocktail
that dates back to 1930s New Orleans.”
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Q: What was the inspiration for Heyday?
A: Heyday was inspired by what is often referred to as the Golden Era of
Shanghai. It was a period in the late 1920s and 1930s when Shanghai’s
nightlife was renowned. It was a time of elegence, sophistication, and no
F.A.Q.
small dose of decadence. It was also a time when jazz featured prominintly.
This is a time that is still recalled with nostalgia some 80 years later, and as
Shanghai itself has returned full circle to its former glory, it seemed
appropriate to let people step back in time and experience an important
part of Shanghai’s history and culture.
Q: What sort of music do you play? Is it only jazz?
A: Heyday is a vintage jazz club, and so when you come you can expect to
hear classic music. That includes a lot of swing music, standards made
famous by legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington,
and so many more greats. It also includes latin jazz, Bossa Nova, Cuban, as
well as French chansons, or even Shanghai jazz. There is such a wealth of
music to draw from when you use words like vintage or classic. Above all,
we are commited to featuring great talent and performances that leave you
breathless.
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Q: How did you deliver on the drink quality side of the concept?
A: We started by bringing in a 12 year veteran and award winning
bartender, Aaron Feder. He helped us with building out a team that is truly
as good as they get. That team has developed a drink menu that includes
barrel aged cocktails, our jazz themed signature cocktails, and the ability to
F.A.Q.
create bespoke cocktails to meet the taste of what our guests are looking
for at the moment. We also have a great selection of fine wines,
Champagne, and an impressive spirit selection, including single malt
whiskey.
Q: Who are some of the performers you work with?
A: We have a house band that plays most nights and a rotating selection of
singers. The house band is composed of Danny Zanker and Ronnie
Williams, vertans of the New York jazz scene, and Oleg Roschin, a
classically trained pianist who discovered that jazz was his calling. We’ve
been fortunate to work with some amazing singers, including Coco Zhao,
Anne Evenou, Apphia Campbell, Zhang Le (of Shanghai Restoration
Project), Jade Lee, Jonas Seetoh, and many others. We also feature
instrumental stars such as Li Xiaochuan and his band, Alec Haavik, Tony
Mak, Tinho Pereira, and Mark Fitzgibbon. We have also had 2 Grammy
winners, Dana Leong and Marco Bosco, grace the Heyday stage, as well as
the likes of Eliot Zigmund, longtime member of the Bill Evans Trio, who has
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played with Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and other jazz legends.
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F.A.Q.
Q: Who are the founders of Heyday and what are their backgrounds?
A: Brian McKay and his wife Sally Dai are the ones behind Heyday. Their
experience is oddly not in F&B. Brian worked for 18 years in software
development as head of product for EF and other companies, and his wife
owns a chain of spas in Shanghai called Zen Massage. “This was a
departure for us, obviously, and it was more of a passion project than
anything. We felt that this was needed in Shanghai, and we wanted a place
that offered great music and a great drink, so we created it“ Brian said.
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Andrew Jones
on the Story
of Shanghai
Jazz
Courtesy of afropop.org
http://www.afropop.org/2415/andrew-joneson-the-story-of-shanghai-jazz/
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In the 1920s and 1930s, a hybrid form of Chinese jazz mixing the fresh big band sounds of the U.S.
with folk melodies of China blossomed in the cabarets and nightclubs of swinging Shanghai, at a
time of great social and political upheaval in China’s history.
Afropop Producer Marlon Bishop sat down with the expert on the topic, Andrew Jones, while
producing “Africa in Asia: From Shanghai Jazz to Tokyo Rastafari” for our 2011 Hip Deep season.
Andrew Jones is the author of “Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese
Jazz Age”. He teaches at U.C. Berklee in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
Marlon Bishop: To start: set the scene for us in the Chinese jazz age. What was it?
Andrew Jones: What was it? That’s a good question. Musically, it’s the era in which you first had
modern Chinese pop music start to develop out of the melting pot of Shanghai.
MB: But at the same time – there’s this decadent world of nightlife, from my understanding, right?
A.J. Yes, Shanghai was an amazing space for night life. There was everything from extremely
exclusive clubs catering mostly to wealthy foreigners, to countless “taxi dance halls” where you’d
buy dance ticket to dance with women who were there as escorts. Then there were a lot of kind of
down and dirty dive bars, which existed to entertain military personnel: American GIs, or French
sailors, that kind of thing.
M.B.: It seemed like a lot of fun [laughs].
A.J. [Laughs]. The phrase that people used back then for Shanghai is “heaven built on hell,” and the
hell, I guess, was the kind of plight of a lot of common working people there. There was a lot of child
labor and there was a lot of prostitution business that was pretty oppressive for local people. But, at
the same time, it was a kind of glittering modern city with lots of entertainment.
M.B.: Tell me the story of Buck Clayton in Shanghai.
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A.J.: If you’re a jazz aficionado of the swing era, Buck Clayton is a huge figure. He played trumpet for
Count Basie for many, many years, but I was really surprised and intrigued in reading his
autobiography to find that his first band – the first band that he led – was actually in Shanghai.
He was from Kansas City, but he ended up in L.A. He got an opportunity to take passage on a steam
ship over to Shanghai with a really crack band of great musicians. He got a contract there at this
very high-class cabaret in Shanghai and started living and working there for a couple of years. By all
accounts, he had a fantastic time. He went out and got beautiful suits made. He enjoyed the high life
there. He hung out with Russian émigrés, with Filipino musicians, with all the various adventurers
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
and characters that you found in a city like Shanghai.
Unfortunately, he had to do that because his gig at the Canadrome, this very fancy place, was ended
because of some kind of dispute reputedly with an American marine who thought that he looked the
wrong way at a white woman. That’s the lore. The whole incident might have actually been invented.
But, in the end, he ended up playing for a slightly lower-class night club with a lot more Chinese
patrons, and learned to play some of the local Chinese jazz music that was flowering at that time.
M.B.: I read in your book that the most prolific jazz composer of the period was Li Jinhui. Who was
he?
A.J.: Li Jinhui is a really interesting character. When I first started studying the music of this era, I
had already done some work on studying Chinese rock ‘n roll music in the 1980s and 1990s. I was
pretty interested in finding out about the pre-history of that. Where did modern Chinese pop music
come from?
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So, I ran across this name, Li Jinhui, and he was almost always – How should I put it? He had a bad
reputation. He was supposed to be a bad guy who created the degenerate form of music that was
called “yellow music”. “Yellow music” means, basically: pornographic, salacious, off-color music in
Chinese. It was a music that had been banned by the Chinese Communist Party. It was a kind of
music that was seen as being decadent and colonial and unfit for Chinese ears after 1949, after the
revolution.
But what I started to find out about Li Jinhui was actually pretty surprising. He was known as the
founder of pop music but, in fact, he began his career as a nationalist and a patriot who was trying
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
to modernize the Chinese language by instituting a new, standard Mandarin to knit together the
patchwork of different dialects in China to create a stronger, more unified nation. The way that he
hit upon to do this was actually to write operas for children using Chinese folk tunes, western
instruments and having scripts for the kids to sing in standard Chinese.
M.B.: That doesn’t sound anything like it has anything to do with this “off-color” jazz hybrid.
A.J. Well, it’s kind of an interesting story. He had a group of orphans and poor kids who he took on
as his protégés. He taught them how to sing and dance, so he had a song and dance troupe. Then he
started recording these songs to promote them more widely, but what happened is those girls
started to become stars.
At the same time he was doing this, there’s an explosion of local Chinese cinema and local Chinese
pop music. So he, along with his song and dance troupe, got sucked into this new, emergent media
industry. Pretty soon, all the young girls that he had trained became the biggest stars in Chinese pop
music and on Chinese screens. He, himself, became a very famous song writer and kind of pioneered
this new style of modern jazz music, almost against his will or expectations.
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M.B.: What happened from there? How did these orphans end up being a huge national
phenomenon touring Asia and everything?
A.J.: Back when he was writing his operas, he was looking for a way to find funding. One of the ways
he made money was he started touring. His most successful tour, in some ways, was to southeast
Asia, to Thailand, to Singapore, to places where there were very large Chinese populations of
Diasporic Chinese who were very interested in seeing the latest stuff from Shanghai and hearing the
latest songs. So, his music actually started entering into, I guess you could say, a broader circuit. It
was popular both in the big cities in China but also throughout the Chinese-speaking world. You can
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
find his records still in dusty old shops in Chinatowns in Seattle, San Francisco or Vancouver. It was
very popular in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, so it kind of had a global audience even at that
time in the 1930s.
M.B.: Li Jinhui was a composer, but who were the faces of Chinese Jazz?
A.J.: There was Zhou Xuan, who was probably the greatest voice of the era, and Zhou Xuan was
really interesting. She was also an orphan who had been adopted by Li Jinhui, and then her career
took off when she started playing in the movies. Movies always had theme songs that helped to sell
the movies, but also helped to sell the records and also helped to create a star image for the singers,
as well. So, Zhou Xuan became the greatest vocalist of the era, and she’s known as the “Golden
Voice.”
There was another singer called Yao Lee who actually was discovered by Zhou Xuan when she was
in a radio studio doing a jingle. Later, apparently Zhou Xuan started to regret that she had
discovered Yao Lee, who became known as the “Silver Voice.
Beyond that, there were many, many more singers. It was a kind of constellation of stars at that time.
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M.B.: Was it literally Li Jinhui who was writing all of their music, or is that an exaggeration?
A.J.: In the early days, he wrote many of the most popular songs, but as time went on, of course,
there were other composers.
The other interesting thing is there were a lot of refugees from Russia in Shanghai at that time, and a
lot of them were in the music business. So, the band at EMI Pathe, the biggest music label in
Shanghai, was composed in part of Chinese musicians, but also Russian musicians, some of whom
went onto to become pretty famous modernist composers after they left Shanghai and went to the
U.S. They were doing the arrangements.
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
M.B.: You mentioned a little bit that this was a fusion, but what did this new music sound like? What
was its characteristics? What would you hear on a typical Li Jinhui track?
A.J.: It changed a lot over time. The vocals do sound a little bit foreign, I think to contemporary ears.
They’re pretty high-pitched and a little bit nasal, which is drawing on Chinese opera traditions. But
also people enjoyed a kind of cutesy little girly type vocal sound at that time, partly because this
evolved from children’s songs, so that’s how they sang in the beginning.
That would be mixed with some pentatonic melodies, that is, Asian-sounding melodies, often drawn
from local folk songs. But the instrumentation would be piano, guitar and jazz bass sometimes
mixed with some local elements like clappers or gongs from Chinese opera. So, it’s a kind of weird
fusion. As time went on, it became a little bit more modern sounding, that is, it sounded a little bit
more like U.S. jazz in the orchestrations, with horns and the kind of harmonies that you’d hear in
swing.
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M.B.: Was there anything unusual about these singing stars being these public figures? Was that
transgressive in terms of gender expectations at the time?
A.J.: That’s also a really interesting part of the story. As late as the early 1920s, it was really seen as
pretty risqué for women to be on stage, to be actresses, to sing in public because, basically, singing
in public was equated with being available sexually. So, selling songs was often seen as selling one’s
flesh.
There had also been restrictions against women performing in traditional opera in China during the
Qing Dynasty. This wasn’t necessarily originally a Han Chinese thing; it was imposed by the ruling
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
Manchus. But by the early 20th century, the tradition was that even female roles in Peking Opera, for
instance, were played by males because women weren’t supposed to be on stage.
When you have this first generation of singers who are nurtured by people like Li Jinhui or women
who decide to do modern drama on stage, they were often seen as lighting rods for the
development of a new fashion industry and a new media centered around enjoying and buying the
image of these women but also they became politically controversial. They were see as too modern,
too risqué, too provocative, too sexy.
I think these women like Zhou Xuan actually played a really important role in making for a new
visibility of modern women in Chinese life at that time. That’s also one reason that Li Jinhui took a
lot of criticism because his stable of young girls that he’d cultivated and nurtured doing children’s
operas all became the kind of luminaries of Chinese pop culture in a very open, revolutionary way.
M.B . Let’s talk about how the music of Li Jinhui and, more broadly, jazz got caught up in what was
happening politically at the time. What was the conflict?
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A.J.: By the 1930s, you started to have a pretty powerful political conflict between the Nationalist
Party and the newly-formed and insurgent Chinese Communist Party, which, of course, escalated
eventually into civil war after World War II.
So, you had leftists who were, essentially, trying to stand up for the oppressed working classes and
the peasantry and who were influenced by Marxism or Communist ideals in one way or another.
Then the Nationalist Party that was pretty much representing the idea of a strong capitalist Chinese
nation-state. That was basically the battle lines that were drawn in that time and Shanghai was the
battleground.
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
These new pop songs, I think, probably elicited the anger, distaste and displeasure of both sides of
all political camps because they saw them as not being serious, as being too much involved with
pleasure, frivolous nightlight, sex and commercialism. So, whether you were a serious nationalist or
you were a serious Communist, you thought that probably the mass media shouldn’t be used for
pleasure, but should be used for propagating some political line.
M.B.: What was the leftist side trying to accomplish with music?
A.J.: Probably the best way to talk about that leftist side is though Li Jinhui’s student, Nie Er. He was
a young musician from the boonies, from Yunnan Province in southwest China, who arrived in
Shanghai. He was kind of a prodigy. I think he had a very fun life in Shanghai. He was hanging out
with all the starlets who Li Jinhui was training. But also, like a lot of people at that time, he witnessed
the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1931. And, like a lot of other people, I think he was radicalized by
that and he saw the crisis that China was facing.
He started to feel –like a lot of leftists – that Li Jinhui’s music was too colonial, not spirited enough. It
wasn’t going to be the kind of music that would mobilize Chinese people to fight the Japanese and
to create a better nation.
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So, he kind of rebelled his teacher and his boss and started writing poison pen pieces against him
saying, “His music is just commercial trash, it’s exploiting the female charms of his starlets, it’s
politically degenerate and we need a new, more revolutionary music to replace it.”
And so Nie Er, started to write those kinds of revolutionary songs. He worked with the film studios
on a new kind of generation of Chinese leftist films that were trying to mobilize people to fight, to
organize, under really difficult conditions of censorship. One of the songs that he ended up writing
was called “The March of the Volunteers.” That was a very stirring and inspirational song that is now,
actually, the Chinese national anthem. So, if you watched the opening ceremonies for the Olympics,
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
you heard that song written by Nie Er, Li Jinhui’s student and rebellious disciple.
M.B.: Someone should make a movie about this, it’s such a great story.
A.J.: [Laughs]. There was a movie about Nie Er made in China, actually.
M.B.: Didn’t he die at a really young age?
A.J: He was in his early 20s when all of this was unfolding. He had visited Japan and went swimming
one day. I think he was a very romantic sort of brash soul, so I think he went swimming where he
shouldn’t, swimming in the surf, and drowned I think at the age of 23.
M.B.: What did this leftist music that was coming out like in comparison to this? What were the
musical elements that made that music?
A.J.: It was really completely different, and all the ways it was different had to do with politics or
with ideology. Since Nie Er was criticizing the kind of sensuality and femininity of the music that Li
Jinhui had been writing, the kind of Chinese jazz music that existed, he replaced mostly female
vocalists with chorale music.
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He replaced the jazzy rhythms with a more march-oriented rhythm, so it was a much more
militaristic music, a music to mobilize people to march together as a nation. He replaced the jazzy
melodies with melodies were perceived as being more masculine. Also, there was a lot of influence
from Hollywood film music, of the more kind of adventurer, hero-story type, as well as Soviet martial
music. So, it’s a totally different kettle of fish.
M.B.: It’s interesting: It’s like one form of western music is being used to criticize another form of
western music that’s considered decadent.
A.J.: Right, in both cases, there are still influences of Chinese melodies and a sort of Chinese
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
feeling, which comes through in the melody, but, essentially, they’re brokering different varieties of
musics that were circulating globally.
M.B.: You mentioned the leftist side. What was the assault on the Nationalist side against Shanghai
Jazz?
A.J.: In the early ’30s, the ruling Nationalist Party had a movement called the New Life Movement. It
was basically a propaganda movement to instill proper virtues and morality in the people. The
Nationalist Party at that time wanted to adopt or re-champion Confucian morality as a sort of
ideological glue for the nation. So, they wanted to clamp down on Li Jinhui because they saw the
music as being decadent. There was a lot of hypocrisy in that and, of course, once you ban
something, it just means it does even better in the marketplace.
M.B.: At a certain point, the two strongest political factions are very much against this music. Is
there anyone standing up for it?
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A.J.: In a way, I suppose, the market talked because the records still sold. They were still very much a
part of the film culture at that time. Even some of the leftists when they wanted to criticize this
music, they’d use this music to criticize it. They’d have movies with the same stars and some of the
same music but they’d rewrite the lyrics or rewrite the scenarios to make it clear that this music was
decadent and the people who were singing it would go wrong. But, of course, they were getting
people into the theater through the attraction of the music and the starlets who were singing it, so
there’s a kind of irony in that, as well.
M.B.: From my perspective, if I’m a Chinese media consumer, all these great jazz songs and this
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
great fun music all of a sudden gets replaced by austere movies about the struggle of the proletariat
with military marches, I’m not as interested personally. Maybe that’s just me [laughs].
A.J.: Part of it, it has to be understood in the context. In 1932, the Japanese attacked Shanghai and
there was a brief, very fierce modern warfare that took place in Shanghai. As a result of that, a huge
Chinese neighborhood was basically burnt to the ground. It’s as if, all of a sudden, a big chunk of
Brooklyn is gone. To the people who are in Manhattan, I think that would change your feeling about
what’s important about what kind of citizen you’re supposed to be.
Basically, you had a kind of sea change in the tenor of the times. People started to get extremely
worried about what they saw as the very survival of their country. So I think there was some kind of
fertile ground for music that was based on peoples’ feelings of fear, desperation and anger.
M.B.: So – after going through this research, what do you think about the music that they were
making?
A.J.: In what way? Aesthetically?
M.B.: Well, I guess more about what they were doing. What did you take away from it?
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A.J.: Part of what my book was trying to do – and this has actually somewhat happened in the last
ten years – is rehabilitate this music. For many, many years, from the 1950s until the 1990s, really,
this kind of music was seen as being politically incorrect and of very limited value. It was seen as
being trivial, vulgar, unimportant and not worthy of respect or scholarly attention, or even the
attention of fans.
Part of what I was trying to do was say, “Hey, that story is actually very complex and China’s
engagement with modernity and with global music goes back a lot further than we think, and it’s a
lot more complicated than people think, as well. It’s not just a question of colonial influence or
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
western influence; it’s actually a kind of interesting interchange, exchange or transaction that took
place between China and the West.”
It’s interesting, since the book came out – and this isn’t only or even principally influenced by the
book, although I think it did have some influence – Li Jinhui has now been rehabilitated in China. In
fact, there was a postage stamp issued with his face on it quite recently, last year, which was very
interesting to see. Now he’s actually being championed as a sort of visionary. So, times have
changed.
M.B.: One thing I forgot to ask – did the Chinese associate this new jazz music with the AfricanAmericans that pioneered it at all? What were their perceptions of the music as “black” music?
A.J.: It’s kind of a complicated question. I don’t think, actually, in the ’20s or ’30s most Chinese
people had black people very much on their radar screens. To a certain extent, a lot of stereotypes
that circulated in the U.S., say, on Hollywood screens made their way to China, as well, so you got
some of that, too. There were racist stereotypes that were kind of transmitted by the power of U.S.
culture abroad.
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But, at the same time, there were some Chinese intellectuals and writers who were reading Langston
Hughes. When he visited Shanghai, he was kind of a star. He met with one of China’s most famous
modern writers. He was featured in magazines and there were, in fact, articles about the struggle of
black people in the U.S. at that time. There were some people trying to make connections and trying
to link China’s colonial struggle to the struggle of other oppressed people in the world, including
African-Americans.
That tendency, I think, was really picked up later on after the revolution in China where, very selfconsciously, the Chinese Communist Party tried to paint itself as a champion of third-world peoples
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
and the champion of Africa. Interestingly enough, that is now continuing. There’s been some
controversy and a lot of talk about a very increased presence of Chinese investment and Chinese
people in Africa these days. It’s a kind of continuation of that policy during the Maoist period of
supporting Africa and casting China as a friend to Africa.
M.B.: What happened to this music after the revolution? Did it disappear completely?
A.J.: I think what’s very interesting is that this music did not disappear at all; it just went into exile. By
the 1950s, this kind of music had been clamped down on but, following the record companies –
especially EMI – and some of the film studios, it just moved. It moved to Hong Kong and it moved to
Taiwan. It moved to what was called during the Cold War “Free China” and thrived there and
flourished there.
So, contemporary Chinese pop music, in many ways, is still very much the product of this earlier
encounter between American pop and Chinese folk. Nowadays, for instance, the dominant Chinese
pop music is a kind of fusion of contemporary R&B sounds with Chinese folk. So, the more things
change, the more they stay the same in some ways.
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M.B.: I guess, overall, what strikes me about this story is just how much music seems to be
important to people when they are defining what happens with the political future of China at this
time. Music is not “just music” in this instance; music has much higher stakes to all parties involved.
A.J.: Yeah, I think you could tell a really interesting alternative history of modern China through
popular music, but also through the fact that for more than 100 years there’s tradition of Chinese
people engaging with America and other kinds of global cultures and remaking their own culture
through that dialogue.
Andrew Jones on the
Story of Shanghai Jazz
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Contact
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Brian McKay
Phone: +86.134.7251.5452
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www.heydayjazz.cn
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