shanghai jazz scene .com

A review of this excellent album was requested in an anonymous comment quite a long time ago, and I’ve been planning to write it for a while now. So now I’ve finally gotten around to it, even though the album has been out for about a year already. Better late than never, especially in the case of a beautiful musical work like this. I would like to review more locally recorded and produced jazz albums, so if you know of some worthy one that might have escaped my attention, let me know in an email or leave a comment and I’ll get to it eventually.

Lawrence Ku, guitarist and composer, has been based in Shanghai for a few years already since moving here from Beijing, where he had been living for a good half-decade or more. Recording an album with seven players is no small feat, especially when it features some of the busiest players in town. I am especially impressed with this in retrospect since beginning my own process of organizing rehearsals and recording sessions for my own album. He has come out of it all with an excellent album, which showcases the range of his composing and playing styles. Not to mention some great other players as well.

The album opens with an tune called “Toothless” that takes the listener through extended forms for the melody and each solo, one of the many epic tracks on the album (the shortest tune on the album clocks in at 7:52, the longest is nearly 15 minutes). Like many of the tunes on the album, Lawrence has come up with different supporting structures for each soloist to make a journey though, rarely using only the melody form for solos to blow over. The second tune, “Sisters” was presumably written for (or about) his twin daughters, and illustrates their playfulness (or how they fight with each other?) from the beginning with trumpet and saxophone improvising together at various points.

The album has a lot of slow, mellow tunes, which can be a turnoff to some listeners but upon deeper listening there are a major strength in Lawrence’s composing style. He writes rich, unusually voiced harmonies that evoke complicated feelings. “Ballad for the Blue Box”, “Speechless”, and “Sentimentia” all show these more introspective emotional sides to the album. His tribute to Monk, the unique arrangement of “Well you needn’t”, brings the classic tune into a completely different light than it’s ever been heard. The album finishes with a climax on the epitome of the word “epic” with the rock ballad “Three doors, three keys”.

If you want to check out some of the tunes from this album or others Lawrence has played on, as well as some live recordings, check out his website or his myspace page. They have both been (as of this writing) recently updated with new info and recordings of his. You can also check out Lawrence (as well as many of the other musicians who play on his album) playing live at the JZ Club a few nights a week. Currently I believe he’s playing there every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

Is the Blues Room going to change its entire concept because they’ve decided this live music stuff doesn’t make enough money? Or maybe they have other ideas about how to go about it. I don’t know what the place has in mind, but they are cutting off Al Gordon and Bill Heid’s performance contract a few months earlier than they were originally signed up for, which means the duo’s last day performing there will be this Thursday, January 31 instead of the end of April as originally agreed.

If anyone else knows what is going to happen over there, please leave a comment here. If I find out anything new I’ll be sure and let you all know. For now, though, I can say if you want to hear Al and Bill’s dynamic duo playing everything from blues to bebop, then you better go check them out in the next couple days before they finish.

The trip to Nanjing

It’s been a long time since the (JZ All-star) big band went on its crazy adventure to Nanjing last October, but the story is too good to leave untold. Of course, it wasn’t scheduled to be a crazy adventure, but rather a simple big band gig in Nanjing for the German week festivities happening there. We knew it was going to be especially festive on our own return trip, as it happened to be E.J. Parker’s birthday during the drive back to Shanghai (after midnight the same night). The trip getting there was mostly uneventful, except for a sudden exploding tire sound and hasty stop to check it, and then after a pronouncement of “tire’s not blown, just lost the surface of one” an exceptionally slow rate of speed that caused the ride to take about 6 hours. Also Barry Wedgle (who was filling in for Lawrence Ku on the trip) fell asleep and Rolf took this classic picture of him just as a truck passed by carting a horse and carriage. As the bus pulled into Nanjing, we proceeded to get lost as nobody had thought to bring a map of Nanjing with us, and our driver received a stern talking-to by Coco for his oversight. We had initially departed from Shanghai with plenty of time to spare, but with traffic jams, the tire issue and the subsequent snail’s pace, we were already coming into Nanjing an hour after the originally scheduled sound check time.  We were all on edge, thinking we were going to miss the sound check completely, that everything was going to be a mess, and it was all the driver’s fault. At least we all thought so.

Now if you’ve ever received a stern talking-to by Coco Zhao, then you would probably feel wronged too. Our bus driver certainly did. But he didn’t say much just then, and we rushed off the bus as soon as we finally reached the venue hoping we hadn’t missed our chance to sound check, and already accepting the possibility that the whole big band performance was going to be ruined. Of course, we hadn’t remembered that the event company running the entire event was German–and so of course a sound check was promptly arranged, and it was lightning-fast, ultra-effective, and simply a breeze. In and out, boom. Not a problem at all. We were shown our dressing room, barbecued chicken dinner was served, and we played the show for throngs of screaming teenagers without a hitch. After packing up and getting another snack, the band got back on the bus and got ready to celebrate E.J.’s birthday for the bus ride back to Shanghai. The bus tire had been repaired while we played the gig so it should have taken only 3 or 4 hours to get back.
We had just passed around the second round of vodka-soaked gummy bears and had just cracked open some beers when the bus passed through the toll booth and suddenly pulled over. The driver stood up as we looked on and simply said, “who’s got my money?” He insisted that his boss told him not to drive one more meter until he’d been paid in full for the trip. We yelled and pleaded, begged and fumed, knowing full well that he was just bitter about receiving a Coco-yelling and wanted to delay us even more for hurting his feelings earlier in the day.  However, nothing seemed to work, and finally after at least half an hour one of the trombonists called the police. Meanwhile, James Danderfer in his sunglasses and black leather jacket was on the roadway trying to flag down another bus for us to hire and ride home in. The cop who finally showed up told the driver to get moving, and finally he did, grudgingly. And before we took off again, the cop pulled us aside and said, “when you get back on that bus you leave him alone. Poor guy has obviously been abused by you cruel jazz musicians.” So we did. We left him alone and we partied the whole way home. Except E.J. was the only one who lasted past 3 hours of warm beers, vodka gummy bears, and more warm beers.

Hosted by Lawrence Ku, this show will be featuring all the big names on Shanghai’s jazz scene as it explores everything jazz in this bustling city, and more. I’m not sure what more they could possibly talk about without getting away from the topic of jazz, so I’ll be watching the show to find out. It airs every Sunday night at 8pm on Shanghai’s new International Channel, the second channel to run in English language on Chinese public television (though it will also have Japanese language programming), and started January 1, 2008.

I’ll be on the show myself at some point as well, as I just spent this afternoon getting interviewed about my musical experience, background, and inspiration over at the JZ School. All I can say is, I’m not very eloquent when speaking out loud…I just hope they have really good editors to take out all the “um”s and “ah”s. They also interviewed Theo Croker, so I imagine he’ll get featured on the show as well.