Saturday, May 10, 2014

My Blue Day




It’s a rainy day outside.  This is wonderful, largely, whenever it happens in Beijing. You can hear the soil slurping down the water and trees learning for the first time this year to lean and bend under waters’ weight.  Everything is prepared: 雨后春笋[1] I think of “Rainy Day Dream Away” and a time twenty years ago when my wife’s English wasn’t as good and my Chinese was worse, and courting, I taught her the words to that song.   Looking out my windowsill, digging everything.   I hope the civic authorities are prepared after the Beijing flash floods of last summer where the cities drainage failed.

I’m following on from yesterday’s theme of jazz in Shanghai.  The other gentleman besides Buck Clayton, to have spent important time in that city, was the great stride pianist Teddy Weatherford.  He is filling up my rainy day morning right now with a song called “My Blue Heaven.”  This looks to have been recorded in Paris in 1937.  War was following him to the Shanghai he left behind and the Paris that would also have little need for stride piano in a few years.  This song is, alas the only recording on Rdio and appropriately I’m tempted to find more elsewhere.



The sound is round and powerful.  When you listen to Albert King who was 6.6’ tall and four by four wide, bend his strung-backward strings down instead of up, you felt sorry for the strings.  Listening here to this stride style rolled by this obviously powerful man, I note that I feel sorry for the keys as well.  It isn’t hard to imagine this man filling up a room with sound over drunken din and glasses clinking.  No amplification required, thank you.  Stand back.  I saw Monk listed as a stride player in one of the pieces I skimmed.  It’s very clear to hear suddenly, listening to Mr. Watherford.  Monk’s punchy-ness, the rolling playfulness, was not, at least wasn’t sui generis.

Born in Virginia in 1903 Mr. Weatherford first got to Shanghai as a young twenty-three year old in 1926, just a year before the Jiang Kai Shek had the Green Gang assassinate the Communist Party leadership.   And it seems that this full-bodied sound powered by what appeared to be a great big smile, went from Asian port to Asian port in those years playing at hotels.  There is an article referenced elsewhere to suggest he was the man who brought jazz to India.  What a particularly brave man he must have been to be a lone jazz ambassador in those days, confronting caustic racism on top of all the other challenges anyone would have faced traveling about in those days.  Jimmy Witherspoon apparently started his career with playing wit Teddy Weatherford there in Calcutta in the Grand Hotel.  He seems to have made India his home, playing that venue for years, as he did.  He died of cholera in that great Indian destination of Chinese traders, Calcutta in 1945.



It is very tense to watch China assert itself by brining in a giant rig to the Paracel Islands, essentially daring Vietnam to do something.  Vietnam hasn’t much of any allies around, but to help them, but that isn’t anything new.  Resisting Chinese incursion is one of the nation’s oldest, most fundamental themes.  It is hard to know if the gesture is highly coordinated or if there is great divide within policy circles about moving this way.  Hot conflict with Vietnam in this era will be rather different than the lesson they tried and failed to teach their southern cousins in 1979.   Do they really think Vietnam will simply capitulate?  It will achieve little and solidify a global opposition to China if not handled with extraordinary care.  

On a brighter note, to leave you with something that is undeniably good news on a rainy day like this, as I lay back and groove: those wily ‘powers that be’, have decided to no longer play Kenny “G”’s “Going Home” to signify an official closing time.  Anyone who’s lived here more than a day knows the song.  In spite of itself, it channels China, like something sickly sweet out of a Huxley novel. The great wisdom of the Party seems to have finally discerned that Mr. “G” no longer resonates in a civilizationally sophisticated manner.  Comrades, may I suggest “My Blue Heaven?”





[1]  yǔhòuchūnsǔn:lit. after rain, the spring bamboo (idiom); fig. rapid new growth / many new things emerge in rapid succession

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