Jazz In China Pt. 2: Musicians and Labels

Linked as it seems they are, politics and jazz in China are a delicate topic to write about. But, as it seems to me, many of the musicians I chose to show you in this second article are in a way ‘rebels’. Many of them are classically trained, but at a certain point in their career they chose to become independent musicians. Possibly, a way to remove themselves from a certain politeness, artistically speaking, and start exploring new territories.

If John Coltrare wanted to be ‘a true force for the good’, insinuating that there’s a link in the African American jazz tradition between music and ethics (music and creativity as a source for ethics?), in experimental jazz and avant garde music from China independency from morality (from words and their meanings, as Carmelo Bene tried to do in his theatre plays) and politics are a way to give life to a music that seek an unprecedented freedom of expression.

Setting itself apart from politics and from jazz as a link between the East and the West, claiming with their works that avant garde jazz is bigger that the words of reconciliation because its source is at the core of what’s vital in every human being, these artists are showing also with their collaborations with musicians outside of their country that there’s another way, not institutional, to create a net between people, between musicians, and their audience, another way to make community and to communicate.

Incidentally this is a political act, even if it belongs to the idea that a musician can express through music what he is, indicating the art he is creating as a mirror for his own being (the metaphor of art as a mirror is taken from an interview with guitarist Li Janhong). This immediate correspondence between creation and creator, between what we are and what we do, is almost revolutionary. Obviously it is valid for Ornette Coleman and for Lao Dan, but seeing it riaffirmed with so much strenght in the 2020s gives us so much confidence for the future.

Born in Dandong, a border city in Northeastern China across the Yalu River from North Corea, Lao Dan started playing saxophone at the age of 8. In 2007 he was admitted with the highest score to Shenyang Conservatory of Music. But, instead of pursuing the conventional career path as a professional conservatory flutist, he decided to become an indipendent musician.

Saxophone and bamboo flute remain his main instruments even if he’s capable of playing various world instruments such as xiao, bawu, suona and duduk. He is always trying to put those instruments at their extreme limits, exploring non conformist ways of playing and utilizing a ‘punk’ attitude towards his jazz music.

In 2018 he tourned America playing in different cities with local musicians, while in 2019 he toured Japan, playing with the legendary drummer Sabu Toyozumi. Finally last year an album we’ll talk about later in this article was issued by No Business, a label devoted to new material and to reissue historical works by the likes of William Parker and Sam Rivers.

The album Self Destruct Machine (2022) start alternating the high tone pitches Lao Dan is well known for with sparse fragments of soft melodies, strong statements, vocal ‘scat’, severe outbursts on saxophone. Solo albums are an interesting output for every jazz musician from the 1960s onwards, and this record shows a musician that can be not only a notable partner, as it happens with some more upper crust European young improvisers we described in the past underlying their limits, but a true master musician in his own right.

The record is divided in four parts: the title-track we described here above, Clown, a meditative suite for flute and more or less cacophonous various instruments interspersed with vocal experimentations, until a more straight, intense saxophone statement. Fish Ball Hotel is a shorter piece that sees again a progression from a meditative mood to a rassemblement of higher pitches sparsed with silence and other fragments of melodies. Finally, Marathon has this Evan Parker eloquence but more physical, less abstract and spiritual.

Ze Ze The Milky Way (2021) by Jooklo Duo and Lao Dan is a collaboration between the chinese multi instrumentalist and an Italian interesting duo (Virginia Genta, saxophones; David Vanzan, drums) who collaborated also with the likes of Sabu Toyozumi, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Makoto Kawabata and Chris Corsano. This album is comprised of five tracks. Dragon Tongue starts with the drum sticks drawing interesting small but quick rhythms in which what seem a keyboard introduces itself.

After, the magic of a flute (both Dan and Genta play this instrument) starts being surrounded by small percussions in what can be described as a theatrical approach to musical vision. Bamboo Secret is a small composition for flutes, keyboards and percussion with a dramatic urge, Drunk Funk maintains the promises of its title, while Dalla Cina Con Furore sees drums and keyboards building an atmosphere suitable for the saxophones to slowly but relentlessly explode, with the last two minutes devoted to a drums and bass/keyboards plus saxophone march, and the final Tofu Blues is a mystical but ironic immersion into the waters of an inner but cacophonous meditation through the sound of pipes and the atonal keyboards.

Then, another record we want to analyze is a duo album by Lao Dan (here on dizi, alto, duduk and duck whistle) and Li Daiguo (pipa, prepared piano, tabla, bass drum, voice) as BBB & BBB (Ben Bo Er Ba & Ba Bo Er Ben) titled Hu Nian An Yu (2020). This album, recorded live as the previouses, is comprised of five parts where the meditating qualities of the introduction are sometimes interspersed sometimes mixed with the materic qualities of improvisation and the abstractness of contemporary music.

One of the most active sound artists in China nowadays, Li Jianhong, born in Fenghua, Zhejiang in 1975 is now residing in Hangzhou. In few times he became known as ‘the best noise musician in China’. In a long interview for an Italian webzine the founder of the label 2pi and of the 2pi Festival stated that his love for psychedelic music comes from listening passionately records of historical artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Tangerine Dreams and Les Rallizes Dénudés, plus from his interest in old sci-fi culture.

In his album Mountain Fog (WV Sorcerer, 2021) the fist track Did You See The Fireball? It Just Leapt Beyond The Wanghai Gang is composed mostly by noise feedbacks weaving through different rhytms and peaks. The long titles and the practice of the music obviously makes one think about the great japanese guitar player Keiji Haino, but the press (see the reviews by the Chicago Reader) find more useful comparisons with the Sonic Youth immersed in Buddhism and traditional Chinese Art (for sure the sense of space and the lyricism is different than in Moore & Co).

Mountain Fog is, instead, a duo improvisation featuring saxophonist and noise musician Wang Ziheng. 32 minutes of a live, more granular and noisy music than the previous, that has this quality as a kind of a sweetness emerging from the mass of sound. The saxophone is not electronically treated but it sounds coherently in line with what the guitarist proposes, with prolonged lines and sonorous slimes before elevating a painful chant that soon emerges itself into a barrier of noise reminiscent of Einsturzende Neubauten music, with that quality of something falling apart. 

Another interesting project by Li Janhong is D!O!D!O!D! featuring drummer Huang Jin, as you can listen through the album Ghost Temple from 2005 where the music is more destructured and less fluent, with drums and guitars elevating the wall of sound to a spasmodic research for the highest noise peak. One for sure wonders if the 30 seconds metal/jazz gems of Torture Garden by John Zorn had sons in the world of music, and this album for sure can be taken as such, even if the noise tradition in Eastern countries is solid and autochthonous.

Born in inner Mongolia, Deng Boyu has been active in the Chinese underground music scene since the late 1990s. He is appreciated as a drummer, as a solo electronic artist and as a collaborator to many artists, including Marc Ribot, Lee Ranaldo and Akira Sakata. His music has reached the Western ears also thanks to mini 20 minutes albums such as Inertion issued by a label linked to the Café Oto, a famous venue in London devoted to free jazz, avant garde and experimental music in general.

Deng Boyu uses electronics as the Art Ensemble of Chicago used small percussions at the beginning of their shows in order to create an atmosphere of contemplation and recollection, with pulsating rhythms surrounded by different layers of noise and sounds. After a small pause, a distinctive rhythm and an electronic melody take place, surrounded by the noise of what can seem a guitar drone or a guitar feedback. This music comes from a place where it is used in order to reflect, and is definitely not a word of chaos.

Tutu, a duo album played by Lao Dan and Deng Boyu, updates the tradition of the albums with drums and horns as the hystorical Mu (first and second part) by Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell. Less teathrical and meditative than Lao Dan’s previous output analyzed, this record shows a mastery and incisiveness by both players. The construction of melodies and the noise parts are equally preeminent, and the use of different tools like saxophones, flutes, voice and many percussions enrich the palette of the music giving it a high range in dynamic quality.

Apart from the single musicians here above, peak of the underground avant-garde scene in China, there are lots of interesting labels who issue albums from China artists and artists coming from all over the world. As an example, take Old Heaven Books, held by Ty Fei in Shenzen, and that features artists exhibiting at the most important free avant garde festivals in China, the OCT Loft Jazz Festival and the Tomorrow Festival.

One of the records described above, Ze Ze The Milky Way, was released by Old Heaven Books. Other records recommended to me are Burning Bookshops I & II and Faintish Radiations. Released in 2017, Old Bookshops I sees a “jam session” between such musicians as Shinpei Ruike, Hiroski Mituzani, Shinnosune Takahashi, Lao Dan and Deng Boyu, a lyrically croocked suite in three movements where every musician has his glory moment.

Recorded during the ninth Tomorrow Festival in 2019, Old Bookstore II features Masayko Koketsu, Lao Dan, Li Daiguo and Deng Boyu, and it follows its predecessor in exposing every musician’s mastery even if emphasis is a bit more on the overall result than on individual efforts, and it’s full of beautiful weavings of saxophones.

As one can hear, through the years and the multiple encounters the various scenes – Japanese, Chinese, even Russian since many musicians I introduced to you in the past from that country exhibited themselves in the above mentioned festivals – have melted and learned to collaborate in creating beauty.

Another label worth of being mentioned is WV Sorcerer Productions; mostly devoted, as the name of the label itself report, to ritual music, it also has a branch of its productions focused on experimental music and free jazz. A good starting point in approaching the label is the cassette Funcioning Anomie, featuring again Lao Dan recorded solo for the first time in a beautifully rich of sounds natural environment reminding the experiments of Peter Brotzmann and Han Bennink in the forest of Schwarzwaldfahrt.

We, the Fire are One is an intriguing album by reedist Wang Ziheng, who claims to have applied the film editing techniques elaborated by Masao Adachi for his medium film “AKA Serial Killer” to the music in order to paint shan shui, a classical chinese technique of painting natural places, like mountains, cascades, rivers. The result is a meditative music, that leaves space in equal part to sound and silence, making you experience an inner space that becomes real only while listening to music and that stays with you, at least for a little bit, even when the music’s over.

For my readers it will be possible for sure to recognize in these musicians the same creative fire we pursued in years of listening and creating new music as the one you’re reading every month on the pages of this blog. Lao Dan and his peers create music that has roots in many aspects of Chinese culture, from painting to folk music, but that has trascended their origins becoming a way to be confrontational and meditative at the same time.

Honestly I don’t know if this bunch of records would find a place in the emblazoned magazines devoted to more ‘classical’ jazz, but one thing I can say is that this music is vital, deep and it maintains their qualities of breaking up with an embellised tradition without loosing the force of the roots of those traditions, and at the same time, mixing their own origins with innovation of free playing they’re creating something new.

That’s why I’ll keep on searching for new music in the world while reviewing material from more rooted and known musicians. At the same time, I would like to express a big thank you to Liu Yuheng, owner of a beautiful blog in Chinese about alternative music, who also translated one of my article for his creature, for helping me on being aware of the music you have read about in this post. Keep up the good work, my friends all over the world.