Jazz in China Pt. 1: History of Jazz in China

“There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause” – Mao Zedong 

If you are a regular reader of Complete Communion, you had found interesting stuff in the past weeks about jazz in Russia and in Japan. Many years ago, for All About Jazz, I compiled a review of interesting free jazz and electronic music coming from Istanbul. Now’s the time to talk a little bit about jazz in China. This last duty is a little bit demanding, since jazz is not only, in this case, a matter of art and enjoyment, but also part of a strategy. That’s why I read with great attention a thesis published in 2018 I found out surfing the web.

The Thesis is by Li Mo, issued originally in 2010 for the University of the Arts of Nanjing and reproposed in 2018 for the University of Kent. As I did in the past with a thesis by musician and musicologist Dana Reason Myers in an article about the avant-garde and sexism, I’ll reproduce some of the most interesting passages with my own words, and in a second post I’ll explore the most interesting musicians now living and exploring music in China. But for the moment, a little bit of history.

In 1972 Richard Nixon visited China. Not too long after this opening, U.S. jazz came to Beijing, more and more taken as a tool for diplomacy, as the case of the Blue Note opening in Beijing during these last year will show. In december 1978, the Eleventh conference held by the Central Committee of the Communist Party was going to an end, and president Hua Guofeng, successor of Mao Zedong was replaced by Deng Xiaoping.

The country was reopened to the international trade and media, and millions of young people resumed their academic careers. Many forms of foreing music, previously disdained as immoral, were now accepted. 1978 was also a turning point for jazz musicians entering China from Europe. A post modern trend from the U.S. became internationalized, and accepted by European audiences, with figures like Albert Mangelsdorff and Willem Breuker.

This type of jazz however was in decline in the U.S. where Wynton Marsalis claimed it was a deviation from the great jazz tradition. Post modern jazz found out in China a fertile ground in order to expand itself. Beijing local musicians were already fascinated by them, starting a collaboration. In 1993 first Beijing jazz festival appeared, promoted by Udo Hoffman (from Germany). On the other hand, when Xi Jinping visited Barack Obama there was a cultural exchange, in which the president of China introduced the Americans to Chinese opera and Chinese were offered a jazz concert.

Prior to the opening of places where to study jazz, Chinese musicians learned music from the records of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. After it was possible to travel, more and more jazz musicians started visiting and studying in New York, taken as the Mecca of jazz music. Nowadays jazz in China is promoted as a way to create good relationships between the two countries, educators are sent to China and funds are invested to enhance the development of jazz in China.

In June 2015 Steve Bensusan, president of Blue Note Entertainment Group extended its chain of jazz clubs into Beijing. The local’s opening was delayed until August 2016. The place where the club is placed is the line of the division between the Inner and the Outer city, where there’s a thick wall and the gate and its vicinity is called Zhengyang Men (colloquially Quianmen), a place for business and a performance center since XIII Century. After the 1950s the communist governement removed the wall and modified the transportation network. More and more commercial centers fluorished in the Inner City. Sicha Hai, with its intense night life, is one of these new centers, where live music is practiced since the 2000s.

Chinese Jazz Age is a time around the 1930s when both yellow music and a new form of left-wing music arose. Yellow music means ‘obscene music’, as jazz and jazz-tinged music before the 1980s was referred to by people in China. Jazz has been introduced in China in the 1920s and it was popular amongst the ballrooms of Shanghai. Buck Clayton, a trumpet player in Count Basie’s band, talks about its experience in Shanghai in his autobiography. He and his band was forced to leave U.S. by the difficulties of living for persons belonging to a racialized group of people and to a subculture like jazz music.

The continuous arrival of American musicians in the 1930s made Shanghai the center of jazz in Asia, making of the city an international metropolis. This premature globalization was of help for Clayton and his fellow musicians, enjoying a respect they didn’t had in their home country, but not all the people living in Shanghai were at the same level. Real jazz was performed only in luxury ballrooms like the Canidrome, while poor people felt it only like an extravagant and rotten culture brought by cruel foreign invaders.

Liu Yuan, a preeminent saxophonist from Beijing, states that this fist ‘jazz music’ was not real jazz: the chord progressions were simply applied from classical music or Hollywood film music, the rhythm was tipical ballroom style like waltz or Charleston and it was totally composed, with no improvisation. Possibly it was Chinese popular music played with saxophones, piano and drums, in order to give that music a jazz tinge. Plus, most of the people were exposed to jazz only through films and records.

During colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s when huge masses of people left campaigns for the cities, and economy was turned upside down from old agriculture to a cities’ economy, young guys, and intellectuals, were becoming more and more radical. In this situation, jazz became a target of hatred. After 1978, as Bernoviz Nimrod states in his China’s New Voices: Politics, Etnicity and Gender in Popular Music Culture and the Mainland, the governement almost encouraged diversity in thought, and more freedom in arts and lifestyles.

According to Nimrod, who in his dissertation treats jazz, popular music and propaganda art as a whole, it seems that the governement and the protesters shared many common notion in their ideology and are tied together. Anyway, from 1978 to the 1990s jazz music has so much few followers it was neglected or not considered by both the masses and the political power.

Taken in the past under the Empire of China as a sacred color, at a point that nobody could wear it without permission, after the Opium Wars and the expansion of the West over the East, yellow was considered as a synonim to obscene and immoral, after the importation of the American phrase ‘yellow journalism’, a term used to criticize misinformation and sentationalism – today we talk about ‘fake news’.

The use of the term yellow music in reference not only to jazz but to a great variety of forbidden musics, reached the peak during the Cold War. Morality and music are tide up in China since the West Zhou Dinasty (1046-771 BC): moral music could assist a moral king to rule a country to gain prosperity. This belief was conserved during the following dinasties, linking itself with the affirmation of the patriarchy, even if matrilineal lines never ceased completely to exist.

At the same time, music itself, or ‘yue’ in Chinese, passed from the original meaning of a sum of sound, poetry, ritual and dance only to the meaning of sound in itself, while ‘cai feng’ (songs from the fields in Chinese) expanded itself as a earliest surveillance system on ideology: crimes like corruption and insurrections were punished by execution, according to the lyrics.

As a taboo in musical morality, the term ‘mimi zhiyin’ (indulgent music) took its place. When the color yellow started to be used in the media war during the 1940s, immediately it depicted also ‘obscene’ music and art, and ‘mimi zhiyin’ was reinforced during the Cold War era. Since the fall of the Ming Dinasty (1368-1644) women were restrained from public stages; losing their legal status, occupational female musicians fell into an ambiguous realm between entertainment and prostitution.

On one hand, we had in Beijing Opera female roles played by male actors. On the other hand, artists were constantly living at the margin of society, and this led to people living a life of gimmicks. From the 1910s, the New Cultural Movement initiated by the Nationalist intellectuals started a series of politics to help the women. Foot binding was banned and breast tie was prohibited. In 1910 Nanjing opened the first school for women. In 1920 this changes created new job opportunities.

Women came in urban areas to find out their jobs. A liberation movement of women grew, having its peak in 1926 when Chiang Kai-Shek became president of the National Party and started leading China. Unluckily the new ideas and laws didn’t affected women living in rural areas at least at the beginning, and, more important, they were abandoned by their husbands seeking job opportunities in the cities. And the ‘new women’ were saw by the rural women as conditioned by a ‘Western virus’.

This difficult dialectic, or if you prefer mutual intolerance between rural area and the cities, brewed into a catastrophe during the Cold War era. Anyway, the changes in art and social life increased in the 1930, with the rise of Chinese cinema, which romanticized lower class women, prostitutes, or sing-song girls that appeared as a trend also in literature works. Obviously this romanticization didn’t led to a better life for women, particularly in cities.

As far as music, the first Western symphonic band in China was established in 1879. By 1925, the Shanghai Public Band performed only for Europeans and in segregation. Musicians coming from Europe not only played in the band, but also teached music to young local pupils. In 1927 these young musicians became the core staff in establishing an orchestra department for the newly built National Conservatoire of Music. Under pianist Mario Paci from Italy the segregation ended and the band became the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.

During the 1910s the rise of Western-style schools  brought a new genre of music, the ‘Xuetang Yuege’ or school song. After 1917 Russians refugee, in a considerable number, moved into Shanghai and some became the main body of musicians and dancers in middle-ranked cabarets. Live jazz concerts were introduced to Shanghai during the 1920s. One of these jazz band was under the direction of Mario Paci, even if we don’t know what music the band was playing.

The first jazz musician to tour China was Danish American drummer Whitey Smith (1897-1966), who before coming into China was a performer in San Francisco. He met Louis Ladow, owner of the Old Carlton Café in Shanghai and in need of a band. Smith arrived in Shanghai in 1922 and stayed until 1937, until the Japanese invasion. Valaida Snow (1904-1956), African American vocalist and trumpeter, arrived in 1926, the year Chiang Kai-Shek became president, and the year of the civil war, with the Jack Carter Band.

She stayed only two years in Shanghai and there are no much documents about her stay. When she left, the Nationalist Party won the war and the capital was transferred from Beijing to Nanjing. These are also the years in which the USA denied the concession of Japanes jurisdiction in China, encouraging Chinese Nationalists in their pursue of power. Popularity of jazz in Shanghai was brief and very limited: wars, rivalries and turbulence deprived jazz from a sustained market.

After cooperation between National and Communist Parties ended in 1927, all cultural elements, including jazz, became targets for communists to reject and denounce. The ‘old Shanghai jazz’, famous in the 1930s and 1940s, was a mixture between chinese and jazz elements. The more complicated chords were left out in advantage of the pure melody, and the rhyhtms were simply taken from charleston, not swing.

After Snow, Buck Clayton, who was also a member of the Duke Ellington orchestra, appeared on Shanghai jazz scene in 1934, after he met the Chicago pianist Teddy Weatherford who toured China a few times before. Still suffering for the effects of the Great Depression, Clayton decided to go in search of a new odience in this foreign country. Unluckily we have no recordings of this adventure. In the night clubs of Shanghai during the 1930s many different styles of music were called ‘jazz’. A huge amount of Russians and Filipino players exceeded African American musicians.

Soon a hierarchy was created: the foreign musicians like Clayton often played in luxury locals like the Canidrome or the Paramount for the élite, the Filipinos and Russians were hired for taxi cabaret music, while the Japanese and Chinese players joined the stage later, in the second half of the 1930s. The term ‘jazz’ was designing only the instrumentation taken from jazz music, anyway. The music was a cabaret music with percussion, piano, brass and reeds.

The only period of authentic American jazz played in Shanghai was from the 1920s to 1937, the year of the Japanese invasion when Clayton and other expats like him came back to the U.S. The earliest Chinese jazz band, Yu Yuezhang’s Band, appeared in 1935 but two years later China was at war and entertainment fell into a fragile situation.

Listening one of the few records of ‘jazz’ released in China (see video at the bottom of this article), the piece Nighttime in Old Shanghai by the Whitey Smith’s Orchestra, what we hear is a rhythmic base of Charleston, a Classical chord progression tidily ‘marched’ by all brass players together with the incorporation of Chinese elements and a Tin Pan Alley style melody.

Smith possibly was a big influence on popular composer Li Jinui (1891-1961) and had a big impact on Chines audience, who learned how to dance in his ballroom. This music became so the prototype of the so-called ‘Old Shanghai Jazz’. In 1934 Buck Clayton reached China, pushed by the economic crisis the U.S. was still coping to thanks to the Great Depression. Unluckily no recording of Clayton band in China has survived, but very likely he played Swing in the Canidrome. Musicians were adapting their music to the situations.

In the nightlife of the 1930s many styles of cabaret music were called ‘jazz’. The hierarchy we previously noted took place. When Clayton lived in Shanghai, the Canidrome and the Paramount, top quality ballrooms, were frequented by rich Chinese merchants, clerks and well-to-do students. Russian and Filipino players were hired for taxi cabaret music. Japanese and Chinese players joined only in the second half of the 1930s.

Anyway two crucial elements for jazz music, improvisation and swing, were not present in the music played in Shanghai. Even if a small élite had access to ‘true’ U.S. jazz, after 1945 this ‘smooth’ jazz of Shanghai became the only form of jazz known in China when Jin Jiemei Band became the most important band at the Paramount cabaret. Finally, in 1950, even this semplified form of ‘jazz’ was banned: the relationship between China and the United States faltered due to the Korean War and jazz was listed with the ban on ‘yellow music’.

Li Jinhui’s (1891-1961) music was associated with yellow music and was taboo. He was denounced as ‘the father of yellow music’. Criticized by many to be a ‘charlatan’, or a ‘heretic’, the ‘father’ of Chinese popular music and Chinese ‘jazz’ was pointed out this way since he wasn’t following the European traditions of how to play piano, and since he wasn’t obeying the norms and standards of the musical world (see video at the end of the article).

1959, the year of the release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah Uhm, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come was a pivotal year for jazz music. This music was taken seriously and there was a debate about ‘serious’ or ‘real’ jazz music. That year for China was a nightmare. First there was the Cuban revolution that pushed the Cold War into a new stage, polarizing ideologies.

The year before Nikita Khrushchev became prime minister of the Soviet Union. His negation against Stalin irritated Mao Zedong, leader of China at that moment. In effects, while Mao was struggling to increase its own absolute power as Stalin did – and this was the only comparison between the twos – opportunists inside the Communist Party sought to promote their own position and to eliminate competitors.

In the musical societies, amateurs musicians saw an opportunity to overthrow the authority of professional and conservatoire musicians. Critiques became a trend in academia and the media. The decade of the 1950s saw the world ‘jueshi jue’ (jazz) as a taboo in musical morality in China, and the cause for the ban was Korean War. The music media, affiliated with the political propaganda, launched a campaign against American culture, criticizing more the life-style of its consumer more than its musical traits.

Thanks to a collaboration between National and Communist Parties, jiuwang pai (left-wing patriots) and xueyuan pai (academic musical elites) formed an alliance in order to create anti-invasion musical works. In the decade 1956-1966 sanctions on yellow music were made with great intensity and jazz was put into this category. The term changed meaning in the decade, coming to that of passiveness, indulgence, uncooperative, pleasure, and even pure art. Moreover, the term yellow music was banned in an Orwellian juxtaposition of red and not red music.

The period between the 1940s and the 1970s was covered by a vacuum of jazz, whereas in the U.S. it was a period of re-definition of the genre. Jazz reemerged in China in the 1980, when local musicians from classical and traditional music saw this genre with curiosity and adoration. In the same period, thanks to the diffusion of post-modernism in Beijing, people fell into a chaos of ideology and intellectuals became more introspective.

A new trend in reviewing history emerged, and the ‘art serves politics’ dogma was questioned. But again, with the 1989 military coup that brought Jiang Zeming as president of China, designated by Deng Xiaoping, China fell into domination of the conservative power and the situation suspended all discussions about political issues and history. Censorship reached a peak until the 1990s and ‘social modernization’ became the only mantra for ideas.

‘Obscenity’ became the most common justification for censorhip. During this period, as seen, jazz was discussed only from a moral point of view, and not from a musicological one. Only notable exception is an article by Tong Changrong and Wang Ying titled ‘American  Jazz’ where origins, history, instrumentation and musical features of this music are discussed in depth, despite a conservative perspective. This voice had been strangled in the revolutionary moral cleansing of the 1960s, and jazz was forgotten in China until the 1980s.

During the 1980s discussions about jazz music arose, and the moral vision was suspended. In 1979 Ozawa Seiji toured Beijing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing also Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, and the affection for Gershwin music rippled through the conservatories in Beijing. Jazz started being studied into the academia, this time only as far as his musical and hystorical aspects, not the symbolic ones.

Works of jazz writers like Dan Morgenstern and Max Harrison were translated. From the beginning of the 1980s the various genres (pop, rock, folk, jazz) started to be seen not as a whole but singularly in their specificity. And if from the beginning of the 1980s some small bands started playing ‘chinese jazz’ again, the importing of records, cassettes and more over in time CDs and their consumption created evidence of the difference between the jazz played in China in the past and the original jazz music.

Before the 1990s even if there were jazz ensembles in Beijing, they were playing only in private events. These were more like jam sessions than real concerts. Thanks to the rising of clubs, hotels and cafeterias, these musicians started to go public. In 1993 Udo Hoffman, a German businessman and a jazz lover, initiated the first jazz festival in Beijing. From this time local bands from Beijing started catching the attention of the international media and the rising local entertainment industry.

According to the 1985 Temporary Administrative Bill for Cultural Exhibitions only bands or individuals affiliated with a musical institution could participate on the commercial stage. In 1993, the Cultural Bureau started tu publish an Administrative Regulations for Commercial Performances: bands and singers had to register and get permission in a cultural and administrative institute before they could be hired.

In the 2010s the requirement of show licences tightened, and censorship reduced its interference on artistic creation. Immediately after China reopened for trade and culture in the 1980s, the excitement for new opportunities and unknown risks became bait for adventurers. One of these was trumpeter Matt Roberts. Born in Pennsylvania in 1960 and chosen by Sun Ra as part of his Arkestra in 1990 at least in one occasion, a concert in Boston, experience that tied him to the world of jazz, in 1987 he bought a trombone and started exploring the world of jazz in Beijing.

Here in the Central Conservatoire of Music he could rehearse and found friends musicians so to create an octet. Failing to import jazz in institutions, at those times still in the hand of the conservatives, on the other hand music businesses in Beijing were growing. Like Roberts, many foreign musicians formed bands for gigs and jams. Because of jazz they knew each other and started to create connections with local musicians.

Also arriving in 1987, Martin Fleischer – from Hamburg, Germany – because of a diplomatic position he came to Beijing and that same year formed his first band, the Joint Venture Jazz Band with local musicians coming form different countries, not only Chinese, and with a second band, The Swing Mandarins. After a small departure Fleischer came back in 1990, and gave life to different combos with flexible participants.

Gradually jazz faded from the strict monitory of popular music, due to its obscure musical expressions. Liu Yuan, born in 1960, started playing suona, a double reed instrument from China popular music, because of his father and uncle were playing the same instrument. In 1979 he joined the Beijing Musical Troop and toured Europe until 1981. He heard jazz for the first time in a small town in Belgium or Romania, and thanks to the import of cassettes or records had the opportunity to lsiten to Grover Washington Jr. finding the ‘jazz’ played in China very different from what he heard.

After discovering also records by Miles Davis and others, Liu Yuan started to teach himself jazz, with a saxophone produced by a local company. Around this time, orchestras and musical troops were re-organized by the cultural bureau in Beijing: young musicians were recruited into the new institutes. In 1990 Roberts formed a quintet called Alas, from a brand of cigarettes, and started touring hotels and bars. At that time, jazz was limited to the embassy district.

The first place outside of it in which Matt Roberts could play was Sicha Hai, current center of the local jazz scene. Roberts was teaching at the conservatory but gained much more from its activity as live musician. In 1992 Roberts came back in the United States. When he returned to China in 1994 he found out the community has expanded. There he formed the Left Hand sextet, then finally with the support of Scott Silverman, his current drummer, he founded the Five Guys on a Train.

The first jazz club in Beijing, the CD Café, opened up in 1994, becoming soon the center of the jazz community in the city. By the 2000s clubs and cafeterias hosting live performances grew in numbers. Indipendent musical clubs also appeared. Divisions of styles gradually crystallized, and bands formed based on these divisions. Since the same years jazz clubs expanded into more areas of Beijing.

In 2015, Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment, announced his plan to open a club in Beijing. Way back in 1993 MIDI School of Music was founded, and it became the cradle for institutional jazz education in China.