Jazz In China

"Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

"Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

Yellow Music is the first history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early-twentieth-century China. Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between "yellow” or “pornographic" music—as critics derisively referred to the "decadent" fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms—and the anticolonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance. Jones radically revises previous understandings of race, politics, popular culture, and technology in the making of modern Chinese culture. The personal and professional histories of three musicians are central to Jones's discussions of shifting gender roles, class inequality, the politics of national salvation, and emerging media technologies: the American jazz musician Buck Clayton; Li Jinhui, the creator of "yellow music"; and leftist Nie Er, a former student of Li’s whose musical idiom grew out of virulent opposition to this Sinified jazz. As he analyzes global media cultures in the postcolonial world, Jones avoids the parochialism of media studies in the West. He teaches us to hear not only the American influence on Chinese popular music but the Chinese influence on American music as well; in so doing, he illuminates the ways in which both cultures were implicated in the unfolding of colonial modernity in the twentieth century.

This thesis situates the importance of the evolution of jazz in Beijing within the broader history of the music in China, particularly the twentieth century. Prior to this study, numerous researches on Chinese jazz have been focused on jazz in Shanghai, where jazz was first introduced into China. The significance of Beijing as the cradle of a jazz revival, and the stylistic features of jazz in China over various periods, are often neglected. Furthermore, a comparison of the roles of jazz in China, before and after the 1980s, reveals the significance of Beijing's jazz revival to the current Chinese society. The arguments developed around musical morality and identity of jazz musicians constitute pertinent links to past events, starting with yellow music, to the current jazz scene in Beijing. Yellow music, or obscene music, was the term used to refer to jazz from the 1950s to the 1980s. Although this term indicates taboo in the moral codes of modern China, it became a catalyzing force within the Beijing jazz community. During the three decades from the 1990s to the 2010s, friction intensified between the jazz community and the commercialization of music entertainments, which ultimately crystalized a tie between its members, and evolved into identity. Meanwhile, a portion of the Beijing jazz community adopted a post-modernist perspective, refusing to identify with potential limit on development. Under the pressure of the Chinese cultural industry on the livelihood of jazz musicians, this "postmodernist" portion and identity advocators need each other to sustain the growth, or survival of the whole community. For this reason, coexistence turned to be the structure for inner relationships of the community, marking the decline of the momentum in questing for an ultimate interpretation of social roles inside the community. This structure of the jazz community epitomized the decentered pursuits for recognition in the broader society of Beijing.

Based on interviews, conversations, and observations drawn from extensive field research, Jazz in Contemporary China: Shifting Sounds, Rising Scenes explores the current developments and conditions of Chinese jazz. Negotiating socio-political, cultural, and spatial phenomena, the author provides unique insights for understanding China’s modern history through its happenings in jazz, unveiling an insider’s look at the musicians and individuals who populate and propel these scenes. This first-hand perspective illuminates how jazz generates and disseminates practices of creativity and individuality in twenty-first-century China.

DIVThe distribution of the gramophone and the birth of popular music, including jazz, as a part of nation-building and modernity in China./div

DIVThe distribution of the gramophone and the birth of popular music, including jazz, as a part of nation-building and modernity in China./div

Whitey Smith was a jazz drummer from San Francisco who landed in Shanghai in 1922, just in time to help ignite the Jazz Age in one of the world's most entertainment-crazed cities. It is said he brought Jazz to China, and that claim is arguably true. This memoir tells the story of his amazing life and adventures in Shanghai nightlife in the 1920s and 1930s, and then as a nightclub owner and internee in a Japanese camp during World War II. It is written with great humor, a collection of the great yarns he would have told at the bar through the years.