Getting up close and friendly with one of the world’s greatest living jazz musicians.
Read MoreThat’s a mighty big horn section! Wynton Marsalis (back left) and big band at Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai
Catching Coco and the Possicobilities at JZ Club
Coco Zhao has been a fixture of the jazz scene since the late 1990s, and he sings regularly at the JZ Club with his group the Possicobilities.
Read MoreJazzing Chinese Folk: The Solitary Bird CD Release Party @ TwoCities Gallery
On Friday night I attended the release party of the Solitary Bird CD, recorded earlier this year by three musicians in Shanghai, Steve Sweeting, Jeremy Moyer, and Coco Zhao. I've known Coco since the late 1990s when he emerged as one of Shanghai's first Chinese jazz singers. In fact, Coco and his band played at my wedding here in 1999. Since then he has dedicated himself to jazz singing and lyrical composition and has greatly expanded both his repertoire and his skill set as a singer. Jeremy Moyer plays several percussion instruments as well as bowed instruments such as the erhu, and he plays them all very well. In this concert he was playing a coconut fiddle from Taiwan. Steve Sweeting is an American jazz pianist who has been living here in Shanghai for the past five years or so along with his family.
Read MoreA Week of Musical Magic in Shanghai
a description of various live music events I attended this week in the city, including the rock band Mountain Men from Yunnan, and also some jazz and folk music shows
Read MoreShanghai’s Nighttime Phantasmagoria: Haunting Nightlife Spaces Old and New
The other night (Thursday March 17) I took my Global Nightlife students and a few of their friends from the NYU Shanghai program on their second tour of Shanghai’s nightscapes. This time we started at the famed Paramount Ballroom, the finest and most celebrated ballroom of the Golden Age of Shanghai nightlife, the 1930s. The ballroom is the only one from the 1930s that today is still operating as a commercial dance establishment.
Read MoreDancing at the Majestic Hotel to "Nightime in Old Shanghai" by Whitey Smith
Yesterday I noticed a blog that referenced my book Shanghai's Dancing World along with some other clips and images of 1920s-30s Shanghai (the blogger also had some nice things to say about an interview podcast I participated in for the Shanghai Lit Fest in March 2010, which I greatly appreciated). Among them was a British Movietone Newsreel from 1929 showing elegantly dressed Chinese couples in a garden cafe dancing to a Western jazz orchestra. I immediately recognized it as the Majestic Hotel outdoor garden (I am not quite 100 percent sure of this, but sure enough to make that claim) and the orchestra would be Whitey Smith's, even though the conductor's head is cut off in the clip (you can see his body and up to his neck, but I couldn't identify him as Smith). Whitey features prominently in my book, and most of the information I found about him comes from his own memoir, I Didn't Make a Million.
Read MoreWater Ripple: A Bluesy Chinese Rock Band
Having seen too much in the way of punk and metal rock these past few weeks, I was glad to take a break and head to Mao Livehouse Tuesday night for a concert featuring more classic rock-oriented bands. The first band was Water Ripple 水纹.
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