Back
in Beijing for a day. Tomorrow
I’ve got to go down south again to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Feelin’ it.
I had a lovely walk around People’s Park the other day in Shanghai though, that makes all this travel worth it, almost. I took a stroll with a gent who possessed a surfeit of knowledge about a topic I’m surprised I never really considered seriously before; jazz in modern Chinese history.
I had a lovely walk around People’s Park the other day in Shanghai though, that makes all this travel worth it, almost. I took a stroll with a gent who possessed a surfeit of knowledge about a topic I’m surprised I never really considered seriously before; jazz in modern Chinese history.
I was caught off guard, walking through the park, amidst the
big deciduous trees in full bloom.
I’ve stayed in a hotel near there for years and somehow had never done
this promenade. I’ve stared down
from this same hotel for years at the park and been grumpy about the fact that
the local party brass saw fit to build some big ugly, official buildings within
what should be the “people’s” park.
Years ago I rode by my bike downtown from the East China Normal
University to the Bund and the main ICBC branch, the only one in the whole city
I could get local currency, every week and, looking back it never occurred to
me to park my Flying Pigeon and have a walk about the former race track. And yesterday, standing beneath the
former Shanghai Race Club building, the photo of which I profiled yesterday, I
learned about Buck Clayton’s stay in Shanghai.
Born in Parson Kansas in 1911, Buck Clayton spent two years
in Shanghai, from 1934-1936 when the city of settlements was probably wild
enough to make Count Bassie’s Kansas City of the same time, seem tame. He headed a band named the Harlem
Gentleman who apparently had to endure the racist affront of uncultured U.S.
servicemen throwing bricks at them.
And, like so many jazzmen and women experienced in Europe both before
and after the war, the local population treated Buck Clayton like a star.
I was intrigued by this story because it flies in the face
of the standard racist default that one assigns to China. The former empire, struggling for its
place in the world of nation’s necessarily defaults to a racist superiority
over people of African descent. Au
contraire, Mssr. Clayton was apparently treated like royalty by local people,
including the cream of society, the Song sisters themselves who frequently went
to the Canidrome to see the Harlem Gentlemen. A natural diplomat, he would often perform songs composed by
Li Jinhui, who adopted Chinese musical scales to western jazz modalities. Buck Clayton left at the onset of the
Sino Japanese war and apparently regarded the time he spent in Shanghai as
among the most pleasant of his life.
Li Jinhui’s future was no such 轻车熟路[1] The father of modern Chinese music was hounded to death at
the age of 75 during the Cultural Revolution, for having introduced decadent
Western “yellow” (e.g. pornographic) music into impressionable Chinese minds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Jinhui
Listening now to the tune “Squeeze Me” recorded with a
septet as many years from his Shanghai days as separate me from my first time
there, in 1957. The full trad jazz
sound reminds me ironically of neither Shanghai nor Harlem but Wales. In 1986 I did an archeology dig near
Cheshire. One night, we hosted a
bit of a party with the local folks and a gent showed up who was a beaming
character with a trumpet who played in a full Buck Clayton sort of style. He and his mates got progressively lit
and progressively fuller in their swinging as a result, playing brilliantly
into the border country evening, under the stars. Perhaps my mind went there, when I hear this tune, because
I’m reading Kingsley Aimes “The Old Devils” which primarily concerns itself
with being old and drunk in Wales.
I’ll speak more about that later, but I appreciate how confronting a
Kansas jazzman’s Shanghai tenure can transport one to something Welsh.
Locally, I’d like to hope this is not like the two years
that preceded Buck Clayton’s departure from Shanghai. China which had settled Spratly disputes with Vietnam in the
past by tactfully agreeing to disagree, has taken to spraying Vietnamese
vessels with water cannons. China
would be wise to remember the undignified lesson it, itself, had to learn the
last time it tried to “teach Vietnam a lesson, un 1979. During that incursion of a few month’s
time, China lost more slightly people than America did during ten years of
conflict with Vietnam. Their southern neighbor has a long history of violently disrupting "lessons" such as these.
Nearby the Philippines have arrested a group of Chinese fishermen
caught with endangered turtles in disputed waters. This won’t play well back home. The Philippines may be feeling confident, after having their
defence treaty reaffirmed after Obama’s recent visit. Vietnam has no such treaty. But if anything could serve to push the erstwhile enemy into
a U.S. embrace, and welcome home celebration at Cam Ranh Bay it is China’s
recent behavior.
[1] qīngchēshúlù: lit. to drive a lightweight chariot on
a familiar road (idiom) / fig. to do sth routinely and with ease / a walk in
the park
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