Course: MUSIC 140 Introduction to Jazz, Duke University
Instructor: Andrew Waggoner, D.M.A.
Teaching Assistant: Devon Carter
Jazz is an African American music, but it has increasingly become an international music embraced by people from different places across the globe. As a harbinger and an ingenious player of jazz in China, Liu Yuan (刘元, b. 1960) is known by many as the “China’s Godfather of Jazz” (Liu and Huang; Marlow 122–23; Zhong). He is not necessarily the most talented jazz musician in the history of jazz in China, but his story certainly narrates the larger picture of jazz’s development in post-Mao China. He started to engage with jazz in the early 1980s and remains an active and influential participant now. This paper reviews the personal experience and music of Liu as well as the spaces and listeners of his music in detail.
The Rebirth
Before Liu’s era came, jazz thrived for 30 years and died for 30 years in China. Jazz was brought to China in the early 1920s through Shanghai – the largest metropolis in the Far East. Thanks to the entertainment businesses and mass media industry newly established by the westerners, jazz started to spread across Shanghai and to major cities like Wuhan and Guangzhou (Hu and Zhang 53; Huang 61; Marlow 39). At the beginning, jazz heavily relied on dancing clubs and nightclubs in western concessions, serving only as the background music to dances (Huang 61). Big bands were found in many dance clubs, making swing jazz the “most widespread music genre in Shanghai at that time“ (Hu and Zhang 53). The establishment of China’s first radio station in Shanghai contributed to jazz’s dissemination in the city and to other major commercial hubs (Huang 61). The development of recording technologies provided effective tools to further spread and preserve the music to the broader audience (61). While foreign jazz musicians dominated China’s jazz business in early 1920s, the foundation of the first all-Chinese jazz band by Jimmy King (金怀祖) in 1940s marked the growth of indigenous jazz musicians (Hu and Zhang 53; Huang 61). However, during that period, the musical and cultural essence of jazz were largely overlooked in exchange of massive profits derived from commercialized and commodified performances. Although local Chinese musicians gradually expanded their involvement in the music, jazz remained a means of entertainment rather than a comprehensive art form, without “retrospective generalizations of its theoretical and practical knowledge” that could pass on through generations (Huang 61). Therefore, despite its popularity, localization, and cultural penetration, jazz remained an external and exotic commodity to Chinese society that was hard to pass on over generations.
For Liu and other first-generation jazz musicians in the Communist China, the limited musical legacy of jazz’s early development in China was not their only challenge. In fact, jazz ceased to exist for almost 30 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, installed a series of political campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s that targeted western cultures and ideologies and established a single totalitarian hegemon. During his reign, “all things Western—including Western classical and jazz music—were severely repressed” (Marlow 9). Guo’s study on public narratives of jazz in China lists a few examples of how jazz was politicized during that time: “‘jazz is an obscene music combined with feudalistic, dispirited minor keys,’” “‘it conforms to America’s capitalist lifestyle,’” and “‘it is a reactionary music inside out’” (64). In such sociopolitical environment, the transmission, development, and even existence of jazz was essentially blocked in China.
With Mao’s death in 1976, the new leadership decided to initiate a comprehensive political and economic reform as well as opening the country to foreign cultures and ideas, known as the “Reform and Opening Up” policy. At the same time, jazz started to reemerge as a high art form in the United States after its decline in the 1950s and 60s, completely changing its image from an insubstantial popular music. This new image of high art made jazz easier to be accepted by the new leadership in post-Mao China. Through his review of four musical events taking place in the 1980s, Marlow argues that Deng Xiaoping and the party leadership started to implicitly “support[] permissiveness with respect to Western-style culture—such as classical music and jazz” (84). With people’s minds finally freed from repressions of the cultural hegemony in Mao’s era, economic growth also incentivized cultural development. The Chinese society had increasingly stronger demands for new music, which provided the perfect timing for jazz’s rebirth in China (Huang 62). However, both the limited legacy of early jazz development in Shanghai and the cultural purification in Mao’s era led to the generational gap in local Chinese jazz musicians. In other words, theoretical and practical knowledge of jazz was not able to be transmitted across generations in China.
With no inherited knowledge from older generations, Liu embarked on his jazz journey on a different path. Liu’s father, Liu Fengtong (刘风桐), was a famous suona (唢呐, a Chinese double-reed horn) player. Thanks to his father’s influence, Liu Yuan made his way to become a suona soloist in Beijing Song and Dance Troupe (北京歌舞团) after graduating from Beijing Art School in 1975 (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 109; Hei; Marlow 123). During the troupe’s visit to Dinant, Belgium—the hometown of saxophone’s creator Adolphe Sax, Liu’s suona got stolen so that he had no instrument to play during the troupe’s performance (Jin). Wandering off in Dinant, he discovered saxophones and purchased one for himself after returning to Beijing (Hei). He said that “‘back then, many senior musicians [in the troupe] thought that playing the saxophone deviated me from my own job’” (Hei). The loosened cultural environment, however, empowered him to reselect his own career and represent himself through music. Liu made his first attempt to play jazz in China after his visit to Dinant, when he started the Seven Plywood Band (七合板乐队) with six other adventurous teenagers in the troupe. In 1984, the band released their first album, on which Liu comments that “‘there were signs of making jazz music, but it turned out to be something like light music due to limited techniques’” (Hei).
Like many other new-generation jazz musicians in post-Mao China, Liu shifted gears to other genres after his unsuccessful initial exploration of jazz. Guo and Sun contend that it was “due to the spontaneity, irrationality, and passiveness of perceiving, learning, and practicing popular music at that time” (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 110). Liu found a good way to start off in rock music. In 1986, Liu joined the ADO Band with China’s leading rock musician Cui Jian (崔健). They played and recorded not only many famous rock songs but also fusion jazz pieces (110). With the help of rock’s popularity, Liu implanted jazz elements into the band’s music and represented the beauty of jazz to the Chinese public.
The Music
Liu’s early attempts of bringing jazz to the Chinese audience were largely intertwined with his participation in rock’n’roll. As the saxophonist of Cui Jian’s rock band, Liu always wanted to incorporate jazz elements and spirits into their rock songs. Martin Fleischer, an amateur jazz lover and a former cultural attaché to the German Embassy in Beijing during the 1980s, had many experiences with Liu in his search of local jazz musicians during his employment in China (Marlow 118, 122). Fleischer led musical workshops for local musicians, including ADO Band members, to acquire additional musical knowledge and training. That’s when he discovered Liu’s enthusiasm and talents on jazz: “[Liu] didn’t really need the training. ‘I think he was the only developed jazz musician I had met at that stage’” (122).
In 1987, ADO Band was approved to play jazz at a foreign-owned restaurant in Beijing. Based on Liu’s recollections, the band played virtually everything at that time: “‘It was like a party, people dancing, singing, and playing instruments: Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, famous songs around the world, African music, Reggae, Bossa Nova, in addition to songs that we wrote by ourselves’” (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 71). Liu admits that they did not play traditional jazz pieces with “long and lonely improvisations”: the music they played were “quite comprehensive in its essence” (71).
Liu’s jazz entered the public eye starting from 1988. During Cui Jian’s live rock’n’roll concerts in 1988 and 1989, ADO Band played “Watermelon Man” during the intermissions (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 110). This was almost the Chinese public’s first direct exposure to jazz outside of restaurants, dance halls, and hotel lobbies. The song is a hard bop jazz standard composed by Herbie Hancock in 1962, with a form of sixteen-bar blues. However, the band did not introduce this song as jazz but left it as an integral part of the rock’n’roll concert. Zhang Youdai (张有待), one of China’s most influential DJ and the founder of China’s first jazz radio program, remembers that he, “‘as an audience member [at that concert], also thought that Watermelon Man was a rock song’” (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 71). In a 1990 music festival in Beijing, ADO Band presented their original jazz piece “Beijing Weather Report” (北京Weather Report) in the middle of many rock and pop music (72). Though there is no recording available, it is reasonable to assume that it was a fusion jazz song since its title alludes to the fusion jazz band Weather Report. In ADO Band’s 1994 song “Balls Under the Red Flag” (红旗下的蛋), Liu added a three-minute-long saxophone solo segment at the end (Cui et al.). That segment is essentially free jazz, featuring improvisations with high flexibility and freedom as well as extremely complicated rhythmic layouts. Liu explains that “‘in fact, I composed this solo segment only to accommodate the entire song. I didn’t have the intention to necessarily make it jazz, but it might have created an effect [similar to jazz]’” (Hei).
It isn’t hard to discover that Liu’s early exploration of jazz was broad yet disarranged, working with various genres like hard bop, free jazz, and fusion jazz. Talking about his early career, Liu admits that “‘I was listening to different types of music in a relatively disarranged manner, because I didn’t develop a conceptualized understanding [of different types of music]’” (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 110). The music that Liu introduced in his early career was largely obscure and ambiguous, which was “not in direct conflict with the overall environment of musical performances” (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 71). However, all these explorations were closely connected with rock music. Many local musicians in the post-Mao China “naturally inhabited at the mild intersection of two genres” as they did not possess the professional knowledge to differentiate rock and jazz (72). Liu contends that “‘I inhabited this form of band so that I could continue to make music and play the saxophone. If I had done jazz only, I couldn’t have even found other musicians to work with me. That would be a complete failure, right?’” (72). In Liu’s early music and even the development of jazz in the entire post-Mao China, jazz started as a companion and byproduct of rock, taking up the public space for rock but also contributing to the growth of rock. Therefore, Liu’s early music was essentially fusion jazz deeply intertwined with the growing rock’n’roll music in China.
Entering the mid-1990s, Liu began to settle down. He formed his own jazz quartet – Liu Yuan Jazz Quartet – and performed at CD Café, a jazz club in Beijing’s embassy district (Hei). This was the first time that he incorporated the term “jazz” into the public image of his music, signifying his increased effort to present jazz as an independent subject to the Chinese public. In 2006, he opened his own East Shore Jazz Café (东岸爵士咖啡) in Beijing’s historical district of Houhai (后海). His jazz club was acclaimed by Time as “the most promising venue in Beijing’s budding jazz scene” (Marlow 124). A 2000 recording of Liu Yuan Jazz Quartet’s performance at CD Café suggests that Liu started to detach from the framework of rock music and turn his music back to the earlier stage of jazz’s development. The recording includes the quartet’s rendition of “My One and Only Love” by Guy Wood and “Tangerine” by Victor Schertzinger (Chan). Compared to his early incorporation of jazz into rock music, Liu’s music demonstrates a higher level of rhythmic complexity and harmonic changes. He attempted to situate his jazz close to its musical and cultural roots: “‘Jazz is something you must understand from its roots. It originated in Africa and then arrived in the United States – Americans developed it as a genre of music. Anyways, you have to know everything about its roots, and then you will understand my jazz performances now much more easily’” (Zhong).
The Spaces
In the beginning, Liu had a hard time finding the perfect place to play jazz. His first venue was a restaurant called Maxim’s Beijing. In 1983, Italo-French fashion designer and businessperson Pierre Cardin invested millions of dollars to open China’s first foreign-owned restaurant in the center of Beijing (Hei). Maxim’s Beijing is a high-end restaurant offering French cuisines, which duplicates the entire dining experience of the original Maxim’s in Paris. There were often live performances at the restaurant, but jazz was not a part of them. Around 1987, Liu and other members of ADO Band petitioned to perform jazz in Maxim’s Beijing. According to the interview on the then-manager of the restaurant Song Huaigui (宋怀桂), Pierre Cardin personally approved ADO Band’s jazz performance: “‘Maxim’s never had jazz music played in the restaurants, neither in Beijing nor in Paris. This had to be approved by Pierre Cardin himself’” (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 71). In 1987, ADO Band started to perform at Maxim’s once every two weeks (71).
In addition to playing at Maxim’s, Liu joined many other local jazz musicians and started to play at foreign-owned hotel lobbies in early 1990s. Following Deng’s economic reforms, premium hotels surged in Beijing since the early 80s to accommodate the inflow of foreign direct investments. Government instituted detailed regulations for star-ranked hotels to match their guest services to the hotels’ ranking and status in the city (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 111). It gradually became a common practice for foreign managers at premium hotels to select their own favorite bands to perform at the lobbies, including jazz bands (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 73). According to Martin Fleischer, “the only places where you could listen to live jazz performances were bars at hotel lobbies in the late 1980s” (73). In 1993, Liu formed a new quartet and started to perform daily at the lobby bar and restaurant of Hilton Beijing (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 111). Long and frequent performances at hotel lobbies helped musicians like Liu increase public exposures and acquire more practical training and knowledge. However, their music was largely commodified and served as “decorations, ingredients, and packings” to the hotels (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 73). Despites its increased popularity, jazz was confined into functional purposes and failed to freely express its musical and cultural essences (73–74).
After the hotel lobby era, Liu started to play jazz with his newly formed quartet at CD Café in 1995 and became its manager in 1999 (Jin; Marlow 123). For Liu, “‘jazz should return to its original environment – it belongs to bars, where a sense of conversation is much better, and it is more pleasant to perform’” (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 112). Throughout the 1990s, jazz bars became the nexus for all local jazz musicians to celebrate, communicate, socialize, and practice (112–13). Liu sees something more: “‘jazz bars provided information to the society that jazz was developing’” (Hei). He remembers that “‘more people started to recognize the environment there. Audiences began to stabilize, and a network of communication was developed in the jazz bar’” (Hei).
In 2006, Liu left CD Café and established his own jazz bar – East Shore Jazz Café, where he continued performing jazz with his quartet (Marlow 124). The jazz bar is in one of the liveliest districts in Beijing that is full of bars, nightclubs, and fancy restaurants. Its windows on the second floor look over Houhai Lake, offering a rare sense of serenity in the busy city of Beijing (Hei). The bar adopts a wooden design with warm and bloomy lighting, creating a soft and gentle environment that welcomes all sorts of people to dine, drink, relax, and enjoy the music (Jin and Na 110). Liu places a telescope on the balcony, “through which the guests can enjoy the green waves of the lake […] as if they are away from the busy city for a brief moment” (110). Contrary to the expensive admission at Maxim’s, Liu no longer charges anything for his performances. Liu expresses his wish that “‘more people could come to our bar and see what jazz really is. Lots of people have heard and seen jazz and started to pleasantly submerge themselves into the music. I hope that my bar is a relatively open and inclusive place’” (Hei).
The change of different venues that Liu performed reflects a general trend in the jazz venues in post-Mao China. From high-end restaurants and premium hotel lobbies to independent jazz bars, the spatial setup of jazz in China evolved from “a hierarchical space with arbitrariness, exclusivity, and display of wealth” to “an aesthetic space with community, humbleness, and inclusivity” (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 113). For Liu, his control over the venues of his performances increased over time: he was only a contracted musician at first at Maxim’s, then a manager at CD Café, and finally the owner of East Shore. The shift of Liu’s role in the spaces increased the freedom and agency of his music – the spatial constraints disappeared. With the spatial transformation, jazz unleashed itself from a commodified object attached to consumerism. It began to develop its own subjecthood with a deeper focus on its music and the people involved.
The People
In the beginning of jazz’s revival in post-Mao China, jazz came to its listeners instead of the other way around. In the 1980s, jazz was confined to rock concerts, foreign-owned restaurants, and premium hotel lobbies. Due to its spatial exclusivity, the socioeconomic and cultural spectrum of its listeners was also restrained. Only a few years after Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up” policy, most of those who could afford to dine or stay in high-end restaurants and hotels were foreigners. As an example, Maxim’s Beijing was a hidden paradise frequented mostly by diplomats, celebrities, and foreign businesspeople in Beijing (Hei). The food cost over 100 Renminbi (equivalent to 12.5 USD in 2021), while a local resident earned only around 40 Renminbi (5 USD) per month (China Enterprise Media Resources). In addition to the expensive food, admissions to live performances cost more. Liu recalls that “‘the admission was worth of 100 to 200 Foreign Exchange Certificates, while we couldn’t even afford buying a glass of coke at the restaurant’” (Hei). As a result, 80% of the customers at Maxim’s were foreigners – it was “a symbol of higher status to dine there” (China Enterprise Media Resources).
It was also true for premium hotel lobbies. To expose himself to jazz, Liu used to sneak into premium hotels in Beijing during the early 1980s (Jin). According to Liu’s recollection, “you could drink and dance however you want once you were in the lobby of Friendship Hotel, but you could never do that outside” at that time (Jin). Friendship Hotel (友谊宾馆) was considered a foreign-related business therefore only admitting foreign citizens. Liu remembers that Cui Jian used to pretend to be Chinese American in order to “sneak into the Friendship Hotel and buy imported cigarettes” (Jin). Therefore, the strict regulations and the socioeconomic status for local residents denied the locals’ exposure to jazz during the first decade in Deng’s era (Guo and Sun, “Spatial Coding” 72–73).
When the economic reforms progressed and locals’ purchasing powers surged, high-end restaurants and hotels were no longer dominated by foreigners in the early 1990s. The emerging middle class started to frequent these places to adopt bourgeois lifestyles (73). The audience of jazz gradually grew, but rather than being attracted to the music, the local middle class were forced to confront jazz as they consumed it as part of the larger commodity. The interactions between listeners and musicians were highly limited. Based on Guo and Sun’s interview with Geng Liping (耿丽萍), a famous vocal jazz artist in China, listeners never played any important roles to the jazz performances in hotel lobbies: “‘the guests were not sitting next to you or directly in front of you. They listened to your music even if they turned their back on you. If you were playing at the lobby, they just sit on the couches, drank coffees or teas, and listened to your music’” (73–74). However, a lack of interactions did not mean a lack of resonance. An anonymous listener of Liu’s live performance at Hilton Beijing commented that the music “‘sounded weird to me at first, but it was never abrasive. Within minutes, the music took me to an entirely new world […] The music offered me a mixture of relaxation, luxuriousness, lightheartedness, and pride’” (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 112). Although jazz was highly commodified within a commercialized spatial setting at the time, it did resonate and connect with the listeners in void of their active pursuit of such musical experience.
As jazz’s spatial setting transforms, the borderline between musicians and listeners dissolved. In Liu’s CD Café and East Shore Jazz Café, guests were not just listeners but started to engage much more deeply with the music. Talking about his experience at CD Café, Liu is proud that “‘some foreigners and young people who loved jazz started to join us and performed their own segments in the jam sessions during second half of the daily performances’” (Hei). An interesting example of this was a performance by the ambassadors of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Italy joining Liu’s quartet at CD Café (Guo and Sun, “Spaces” 113). The listeners at jazz bars played their own music and learned from each other, creating a sense of community belonging and promoting the spread of jazz to the broader public. Liu vividly remembers that “‘the atmosphere was superb at CD Café back then. Even the boy selling album outside the front door was able to name a few jazz musicians’” (Hei). There was also a surge of local audiences at jazz bars throughout the years. French and English were the primary languages at CD Café when Liu performed there, but Chinese became much more dominant at Liu’s East Shore, “indicating an increased number of Chinese jazz listeners” (Jin).
Liu looks forward to attracting a broader local audience to enjoy the beauty of jazz. However, he refuses the commercialization of jazz to adapt into the social expectations of music consumption. “‘Does jazz have to be a mass art?” he agitatedly shared his opinion during an interview in the winter of 2016, “If we start to make jazz like popular music, what would that be? It would become like children’s songs!’” (Zhong). He criticized how the jazz community in Shanghai became commercialized in recent years and lost its professional and artistic essence: “‘they play inauthentic jazz in Shanghai’” (Zhong). As an alternative, he anticipates social development and reforms on music education in China. He admits that jazz is now still a subculture in China, where participants and listeners are highly limited (Zhong). Only music professionals and enthusiasts with sufficient socioeconomic resources manage to be part of this subculture. But if people are given enough resources and opportunities to “understand jazz correctly[,] it would be very interesting for society” (Marlow 124). While he believes that patience is necessary, he emphasizes that music education should play a crucial role. He points out that a lack of jazz education must be resolved to promote the musical aesthetics of the entire Chinese population (Marlow 124–25; Zhong).
For both Liu and China’s jazz industry in general, listeners have become more localized, participatory, and culturally engaged because of the socioeconomic development and spatial transformation of jazz performances in China. However, jazz musicians and listeners still form a relatively exclusive subculture restrained by their socioeconomic status and level of music education. Liu’s individual story sits within a broader context of the jazz development, political and economic reforms, and sociocultural transformation in China. In many ways, Liu’s story reflects the experiences of many jazz musicians in China’s post-Mao era and narrates a part of jazz’s epic. That might be why he does not like to be called the godfather: “a lot of other people are doing a lot of jazz here, and I’m not the only one” (Marlow 125).
This paper has 40 footnotes and references from 14 external sources. Please see the original document to view the full list of references.
