[JPL] All That Chinese Jazz

[Dr. Jazz]

ALL THAT CHINESE JAZZ
 
Kate Molleson
Canwest News Service

Beijing - It's hot in the small auditorium at Beijing's Contemporary 
Music Academy, and the hundred or so students gathered for the master 
class shift uneasily in their seats, trying to concentrate. A young 
tenor player is blowing over a blues progression, earnestly reworking 
licks he's memorized from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane albums. His 
face is set in a frown of nervous concentration, and though his sound is 
solid enough, his fingers move over the keys too tensely to be smooth.

Yannick Rieu listens with eyes shut and head bowed.

"Let's try that again," he says as the tune comes to a close. "This 
time, don't be afraid of making a mistake."

Rieu is a quiet character, gently serious but fiercely passionate. The 
process of working through a translator clearly frustrates him, and his 
hands move in exaggerated gestures of encouragement. That universal of 
wordless communication, the thumbs-up.

Eventually, inevitably, he returns to music. "Let's play together. Let's 
really listen to what the other is playing."

For nearly three decades, Rieu's distinct saxophone sound - dark, broad, 
gritty - and intricate, tender compositions have earned him a faithful 
international audience and the deep respect of his peers. He's a thinker 
as well as a player, one of Quebec's most profound musical children.

He chooses his band members on the strength of their passion and the 
size of their ears, not on any fancy finger-work or showmanship. His 
most recent quartet configuration, the one that travelled to China last 
month, is a pick of Montreal's younger generation: guitarist Jocelyn 
Tellier, bassist Rémi-Jean LeBlanc and drummer Philippe Melanson.

Three weeks ago, Rieu completed his fourth tour in three years, 
organized around Beijing's four-year-old Nine Gates Jazz Festival. He is 
starting an annual teaching residency this autumn, and is already 
planning to return to the Chinese festival circuit next year.

Modern jazz is young in China, but the genre laid its roots in earlier 
eras. Old Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s was the Asian epicentre of 
dance halls and cabarets, complete with flapper dresses and New 
Orleans-style big bands. Students returning from American universities 
brought back the seductive sounds of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong - 
music born of struggle and pride and transported to the East in a craze 
of stylish opulence.

"At that time, Shanghai was like an open window," Ren Yu Qing, owner of 
the city's JZ Jazz Club, explains, "1,500 people would go to the 
Paramount Jazz Club to hear big bands and dance the cha-cha-cha."

The political roots of the music they were jiving to probably bore 
little relevance to the style-driven mid-war Chinese elite, but it was 
this age of eager Westernization and heady consumption that founded the 
country's taste for jazz.

And then silence. For 30 years, from the onset of Mao Zedong's communist 
revolution in 1949, jazz was cut from Chinese airwaves, clubs boarded up 
and dance halls transformed into workers' unions.

The Chairman saw jazz as a plaything of the elite, an accessory to 
foreign imperialism and the antithesis to common Chinese culture. His 
party instead encouraged regional folk music, played collectively on 
traditional instruments or sung by workers' choruses.

Only in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping's reformist policies gradually opened 
China to the world, did jazz once again appear on the Chinese radar.

And what a different beast it had become in those 30 years.

While Western ears had followed the evolution from Armstrong's big bands 
to Parker's dizzying bebop, Thelonius Monk's angular melodies to 
Coltrane's modular harmonies to Ornette Coleman's free jazz and Miles 
Davis's electronic fusion, Chinese listeners found a rude awakening into 
what seemed a difficult, dissonant sound.

Thus began the slow process to close that 30-year gap.

The Internet has helped massively, of course, providing a link between 
musicians in Beijing and Paris and New York. Access is available to any 
album on the market, but it's knowing what to listen for that remains 
the challenge.

"Chinese people still have much to learn in terms of listening to jazz," 
says alto player Nathanial Gao, who teaches at the Beijing Conservatory. 
"People hear Kenny G and think it's, you know, quality jazz (though I 
guess that's true of a lot of places!)."

"I'll play Charlie Parker to my students, then tell them to go home and 
find some records that they like. They're still very unsure, and usually 
come back with something obscure that they found on the Internet asking 
'is this jazz?' They don't have enough experience with the sound."

Chinese music originated to link man and nature: The earliest evidence 
of formal music can be traced back to 2697 BC, when the emperor Huangdi 
sent a scholar in quest of bamboo pipes that could be blown to match the 
song of a phoenix bird.

Though there are no surviving scores, Tang dynasty records describe 
instrumental preludes to court dancing as being rhythmically free and 
largely improvised. In traditional Beijing opera, aria texts are based 
on series of couplets of seven or 10 syllables each, meaning phrases end 
on odd beats. Even in popular song, a singer will hold a note for 
dramatic effect, and instrumentalists will wait for the cue to continue, 
so that rhythm is governed not by regular metre but by the flow of the 
melody and the personality of the character.

Traditional Chinese music is also culturally mixed, as influences bled 
in with Buddhists from India and with the desert trading movements from 
central Asia and Persia.

When I ask about the cultural relevance of a definitively Western music 
in modern China, Ren Yu Qing corrects me. "Jazz isn't just American. 
Jazz is about people expressing themselves, so in that sense it's folk 
music. We could call it world music . . . one day Chinese jazz will 
sound like Chinese jazz, just like Scandinavian jazz now sounds like 
Scandinavian jazz."

Gao says that though touring bands from North America and Europe keep 
China in touch, it's important Chinese audiences see local musicians 
playing jazz.

"It becomes less alienating that way," he says.

Much of Nine Gates's programming features Chinese groups, to which Rieu 
listens with interest.

"Chinese groups sound timid," he says. "I haven't heard any that really 
has found its own voice yet. They are glued to tradition, but this is 
understandable. Jazz is so young here. I predict that within 10 years 
there will be excellent things happening. In Shanghai's saxophone 
society, there are already over 50,000 members. Imagine! That's a lot of 
saxophone players!"

And, crucially, there is an audience. Nine Gates is just one of 
Beijing's jazz festivals, serving a growing group of listeners keen to 
tap into the global sound. Its fully-packed venue is the Forbidden City 
Concert Hall, an impressive 1,400-seater auditorium set in the grounds 
of the famous palace.

Leading Beijing's jazz devotees is tenor player Liu Yuan, owner of the 
East Shore Jazz Bar where regular jam sessions are held and where Rieu's 
quartet opens its tour. The bar draws its inspiration from New York's 
classic jazz haunts - the darkened lighting, the low tables drawn close 
around the intimate stage - and is, not surprisingly, a fixture of 
Beijing's ex-patriot community.

But the picture windows behind the band look out to the willows of one 
of China's stateliest imperial lake gardens; don't forget, they remind 
us, that jazz is just a newcomer to this ancient culture.

/Yannick Rieu performs at the Montreal Jazz Festival Saturday, July 5, 
at 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
/