I spent a good part of this summer working on my documentary film about the history of jazz in Shanghai. The film begins in the early 1920s and ends in the summer of 2021. I decided to change the title of the film to reflect the century of history that it now covers.

After screening the film to a live audience in Shanghai last spring, I received some valuable feedback from Graham Earnshaw, who is in the film, and from others as well. The consensus was that I need to catch up with the scene’s development over the past few years, including the pandemic and its influence on the scene, and that I needed to add some elements to the story, including the important role played by the music conservatory in training jazz musicians in Shanghai.

In May and June I shot some concert footage at the JZ Club and other venues in Shanghai, and I interviewed a few musicians about the scene’s development. I spend the past two months re-editing the film with the new material, and trimming down some of the music scenes. I also did some interviews with living descendants of some of the jazz musicians from 1930s Shanghai, and I also interviewed Andrew Jones, my colleague at Berkeley, who has written extensively about the history of popular music in China. The result is that the early history section is greatly enriched, and the final section of the film takes the viewer into the current moment, which is why I can now call it “A Century of Jazz in Shanghai.”

After all that work, I had one more task to complete before screening it again this fall. With the help of my student research assistants, who did the translation work, I added Chinese subtitles to the film. Meanwhile, Songlan, the co-owner of House of Blues and Jazz, set up a screening event for the latest version which I’m calling V21. On Sept 26, we held an afternoon screening at the club. Among the viewers were none other than the pillars of the jazz scene over the past 20 years or so, including of course Lin Dongfu, owner of House of Blues and Jazz, as well as JZ Club founder Ren Yuqing, Greg Smith of the Cotton Club, Jasmine Chen, and Alec Haavik. I was a bit nervous screening the film in front of this group. Also quite a few Chinese and international people joined the screening, filling up the club. My daughter Sarah was also there. 

After the screening, we did a Q&A. And after that, we hung out to chat for a while. I was glad to find out that the builders of Shanghai’s jazz scene over the past 25 years reacted well to the film, as did the mixed audience of Chinese and foreigners.

Now I feel confident that the film is as good as it is going to be. There are still some issues to sort out, but I am gearing up to hold more screenings and to submit the film to some festivals and academic conferences. I’m not sure about distribution yet.

It’s a good feeling to be nearly completing a documentary project that began 17 years ago with me running around town with a small handheld camera shooting the nascent jazz scene in 2004.