Shanghai Jazz; Not yellow but red, the color of passion.

Before I started writing this Blog I decided to do some reading on Shanghai Jazz first. All I knew really was an impression I had from Shanghai Triad, the movie with the ever so gorgeous Gong Li in a leading role. I came upon some articles referring to a revival of the music style and the introduction of one of them, was pretty much equal to my impression.

“The Story of Shanghai Jazz: In the colorful cabarets and sepia-lit dance halls of Old Shanghai, Jazz music set the background score to a fleshy world of mobsters, adventurers, and sing-song girls. Old Shanghai was the uncontested Jazz capital of Asia, where musicians from the World over tested their musical mettle nightly to the delight of enthusiastic audiences.”

That was not quite the atmosphere I found last Saturday. There was delight, delight in the eyes of the owner and musicians to see a full house, 

definitely delight in the eyes of those who attended the two set concert but no mobsters or adventurers who came to rest their heads on the shoulder of the lover for that evening...just law abiding Singaporean residents. 

I was lucky, that evening, to be in the company of my lovely friend Yihui, who was able to translate some of the song titles but also gave me some cultural nuances. An interesting one is that even till today, the perspective of the genre is not very positive. It, in the 1940ies, being dubbed by the communist party as “yellow music”, gave it pornographic and other immoralistic angles, and provided a very negative image.

Many of the songs are about love gained or lost, love that can be or cannot be. Little melancholy or compassion for the ones whose hearts she broke, could be read from the smile of Jasmines Chen as she looks you in the eye and sings " De Bu Dao De Ai Qin". They were hard times.

The style, I think, definitely calls for a seductive female voice, a voice with clarity, yet a bit husky like Jasmine’s. All old prejudices to the music aside, with Jasmine offering the romantic tunes, dressed in a lovely bright red dress, and standing against the red velvet backdrop of the new SingJazz Club stage, one could imagine to be back in that era. 

Gong Li, martini to her lips, could have been sitting right next to me! Was she??

Jasmine was introduced to us by Jeremy Monteiro, who met her on one of his tours, this time passing through Shanghai.

 

Other band members were:

Ren Yu Qing on Bass 

Julian Chan on Saxophone

 

 Tamagoh on drums

In an earlier blog I made reference to the importance of the international network musicians create and this is just more evidence. It is good for Singapore to have their talent travel and open up our horizons by broadening theirs. 

In history there may not be too many parallels, with Shanghai’s, it being much longer and much more turbulent than that of Singapore, but now they are both modern thriving cities, that have a diverse population and an international perspective. It seems, from what I have been reading, the Shanghai Jazz is making a little revival. 

I am hoping that SingJazz can continue to leverage that. Maybe then Gong Li will visit one day. I hear she's sometimes in our neighborhood! We can only dream.