This article from The Australian describes China’s first school of contemporary music, Beijing’s Contemporary Music Institute. It’s a good article, except I’d have to disagree with the part where they say:
The students also like being in Beijing, home to China’s most vibrant music scene.
Most vibrant music scene…well I guess being a rather vague generalization, it’s subjective enough that one can’t exactly argue with it. However I think most people can agree that Beijing has the best indie/rock scene but Shanghai has a larger and more developed jazz scene.
Only two other schools in China teach modern jazz and pop music: the Midi School of Music in Beijing and the JZ School in Shanghai. Both are small, however, and neither has a large foreign faculty .
It’s great that people acknowledge we’re here, but again, I beg to differ. Sure, JZ school is small, but over half of our faculty of around 25 people are foreigners, and the local teachers are all internationally trained, experienced performers. They say that CMI’s foreign faculty numbers 28, but how many of those are jazz instructors?
Anyway it’s pointless to even start to compare a well-established school that has been around for over a decade and has over 3000 students, with one that is not even a year old, and has less than 100. Before I go any further, I’ll just say we should have a spirit of cooperation with other schools who are doing similar things, and especially one as successful as CMI. And even if JZ school is especially strong in the jazz performance department, CMI offers a well-rounded education about all sides of music including business, production, and recording, as well as performance; they also offer a huge array of classes in tons of subjects.