Jazz In Contemporary China

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.

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.

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

"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.

This book, the first of its kind, investigates the historical trajectory and current situation of popular journalism in the People's Republic of China. Taking a popular cultural perspective, the book redefines “popular journalism” as a particular journalistic genre and media form and applies it to conceptualize popular journalism in the Chinese context. In particular, it examines how the dynamic and complex interplay of politics, the market, culture, and communication technology in shifting contexts has shaped the changing landscape of popular journalism in contemporary China. Meanwhile, regardless of how these factors might have changed over time, the fundamental nature of popular journalism as a source of fun and a troublemaker against elite powers in China, as in other places, has remained. The book further argues that the historical development of popular journalism in China forms an important and integral part of the country's social-cultural fabric and ultimately illustrates the mediated ideological and cultural struggle between popular/public and elite/state discourses in the country’s everyday social life in its challenging and discursive transition to modernity.

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

Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that explores the global impact of jazz, detailing the evolution of the African American musical tradition as it has been absorbed, transformed, and expanded across the world’s historical, political, and social landscapes. With more than 1,300 annotated entries, this vast compilation covers a broad range of subjects, people, and geographic regions as they relate to interdisciplinary research in jazz studies. The result is a vivid demonstration of how cultures from every corner of the globe have situated jazz—often regarded as America’s classical music—within and beyond their own musical traditions, creating new artistic forms in the process. Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide presents jazz as a common musical language in a global landscape of diverse artistic expression.

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth survey of contemporary religious practices in China. It explains how recent economic reforms and concurrent relaxation of religious polices have created fertile ground for the revitalization of a wide range of religious practices and relates this to larger issues of social and cultural continuity and change.