Jazz in China: A Cultural Conversation

By John McDonough I Mar. 21, 2023

Author Eugene Marlow at the Great Wall of China
(Photo: Courtesy Eugene Marlow)

According to the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the musical genre came late to the Far East, and especially to China. “There were a few isolated appearances by Westerners,” it says. “But the presence of all these musicians reflected little jazz interest.”

Eugene Marlow begs to differ. In 2018, he published Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Freedom of Expression, which took the story back to the opening of China to the West in the 1840s. In his new film documentary, Jazz in China, Marlow zeros in more specifically on what the music actually has sounded like over a century of recorded history. The narrative is carried along principally by the commentaries of musicians and authors who, like Marlow, have published histories of the Chinese jazz scene revealing a largely untold corner of jazz’s story, past and present.

Distribution talks are proceeding with various national platforms following a recent non-exclusive telecast on CUNY-TV in New York. Meanwhile, those eager to download the 60-minute production for private viewing may contact meiienterprises@aol.com for a link.

The Chinese jazz scene rests on a simple premise: China has a long history of central authority from emperors to dictators and is an authoritarian culture from top to bottom. Yet, for a century, the individualism of jazz has “survived and grown” in China, according to Marlow, because it embodies both authority (rhythm) and freedom (improvisation) in a manner that has not challenged larger forms of order.

Marlow’s story begins in old New Orleans and travels fast as the world began to dance in the 1920s. Historian Andrew David Field tells us it entered China through Shanghai as educated young people found jazz through a combination of foreign travel and the Western influences of silent film, records and the larger media revolution. According to Andrew F. Jones, Shanghai in particular became a portal of Western popular culture into China. Great ballrooms and hotels created a network of venues where Chinese musicians found audiences hungry for a dance music that had arrived from the West. The crowds included everyone from Chinese underworld bosses to visiting American celebrities. By 1937, Shanghai sparkled with a glitter and glamour to match New York or London.

But how far did jazz penetrate beyond Shanghai into the interior of the mainland? “It didn’t,” Marlow says. “Jazz, at least in China and in other countries around the world where there were authoritarian governments, existed only in the cities. You didn’t find it rural areas in those early years.” This despite a limited Chinese radio and record infrastructure. By 1935, we find “RCA Victor in China” set up in Shanghai, not only to sell American product but to document indigenous pop singers such as Zhou Xuam.

But, especially before World War II, there were two Chinas. “You have to keep in mind the demographic evolution of China,” Marlow says. “When I was in China for the first time in 2000, I [could still see] the two parts of the country: the sophisticated, entrepreneurial people looking very much like Americans; and the peasants wearing straw hats riding bicycles. Only six years later, they were all riding small motorcycles. The miracle of China is that they have taken several million people out of poverty and into a middle-class life. They, and the higher elites, are the ones who appreciate jazz.”

That is today’s China, which emerged from four decades of war and violence, first against Japan, then against itself in civil war, then through 30 years of totalitarian rule. The country didn’t open up again until 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong.

“After Mao,” says Marlow, “All the technologies that have influenced the world, from plane travel to audio cassettes and CDs and finally the internet, have spread the message of Western culture and jazz through China.” Accordingly, a procession of young Chinese players would reach beyond pop music and absorb the work of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, John Patitucci, Ray Brown, Steve Sparrow and others.

Singer-composer Liu Sola describes her discovery of Junior Wells and American blues and how it influenced her debut recording, Blues In The East. Later she met Ornette Coleman, who challenged her sense of compositional order in favor of pure sound. Yet, no one would confuse Sola’s work with American jazz. “You have to consider the musical culture of China,” Marlow notes. “Even now there’s a strong folk music lineage in China, which is agrarian and rural by its nature.” But cultures thrive on conversation with other cultures, perhaps nowhere more than in China.

Jazz escaped the crackdown of the Tiananmen Square revolt, largely because it remained politically nonaligned. This left a clear track for growth from the ’90s forward, inspired by an increasingly aging cadre of American models: Wynton Kelly, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Michel Petrucciani and, above all, Oscar Peterson. We hear Kong Hongwei, among the earliest post-Mao pianists, comparing credibly with Peterson on a driving pair of “C Jam Blues” jams filmed 42 years apart.

Today, Chinese musicians are coming of age in a system of strict “emphasis on tradition, technique and ‘the right way to play,’” says Beijing pianist David Moser in the film. “They have to get over this hump … because if you’re afraid to play wrong notes, you’re not going to play jazz.” But this system seems to have built a generation of trained musical talent capable of playing precisely what it intends to play, wrong notes and all.

The film concludes with a look at the jazz audience in China — overwhelmingly young — and the club and festival networks, where both Western and Asian musicians mix freely in relatively intimate settings in which the music is close enough to touch. More important, the Chinese jazz club scene seems more widely distributed across Chinese cities than ever before. There’s even an outpost of New York’s Blue Note in the middle of Beijing. The audiences may never rival the crowds found at pop-oriented fests, but they seem young, select and here to stay while the music is reproducing itself in more conservatory programs throughout China. And if that’s not enough, the most popular destination for Chinese music students remains the United States.

Curiously, the film is silent on the scene in Hong Kong, a British colony for 99 years. “That was on purpose,” says Marlow. “Clearly there was a jazz scene in Hong Kong, but it was a separate story. I wanted to focus on mainland China and what everybody considers the major cities of the country.” DB