CHINA: Over 6,000 jazz fans swing next to the Forbidden City, reviving a music style once banned for decadence in China

Record ID: 605177

  • Title: CHINA: Over 6,000 jazz fans swing next to the Forbidden City, reviving a music style once banned for decadence in China
  • Date: 6th June 2007
  • Summary: CLOSE-UP OF DRUMMER PLAYING WIDE OF AUDIENCE SAXOPHONIST PLAYING WIDE OF CONCERT
  • Embargoed: 21st June 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: China
  • Country: China
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVA65E6OCK3AHW4APYN8EJW3TEO1
  • Story Text: The Forbidden City Concert Hall hosts the largest ever jazz festival in China. The Nine Gates Jazz Festival features 18 concerts, and attracts over 6,000 fans to swing a few metres from the Forbidden City in Beijing. Ever imagine listening to jazz in the Forbidden City? This time probably not, but almost.
    Beijing Nine Gates Jazz Festival is hosted in the Forbidden City Concert Hall, just steps beyond the wall of the thousand-year-old ancient Chinese palace.
    From May 25 to May 31, 18 bands from both China and overseas showed off their unlimited imagination and skilful improvisation to Beijing's burgeoning jazz audience.
    The festival kicked off with Beijing City Jazz Orchestra, a big band composed of the city's most prestigious musicians and conducted by one of China's top pianists, Xia Jia.
    The ancient inner city of Beijing had nine gates, from which the festival gets its name.
    The Director of the festival, bassist Huang Yong is quite confident the festival is a bridge between Chinese jazz concepts and the ideas of world's jazz musicians.
    "We hope more great jazz musicians can join us. We hope even more that the festival can introduce our Chinese jazz to both Chinese and world audiences," said director of the festival, bassist Huang Yong.
    Huang Yong also said that big names such as Keith Jarrett and Wayne Shorter are on the list for next year's plan.
    Over a thousand people flocked into the concert hall on the first day of this year's festival, mostly jazz fans in their twenties or thirties.
    "I think most of the jazz audiences are young people, including some young teachers in colleges. They have enormous influence on students," a listener Pei Yun said.
    The festival featured some world famous jazz musicians, including veteran French violinist Didier Lockwood, who used to play with jazz legend Stephane Grappelli.
    Jazz flamed in China for a very short period of time during the 1920's and 1930's, when some American musicians brought it to Shanghai, the most liberal city at the time.
    After the Communist Party took power in 1949, jazz was defined as a decaying lifestyle of the western bourgeois class, especially during the culture revolution.
    It was not until early 1980's, with China's market economy reform and new policies that allowed Chinese people to get books and cassettes of various music genres from abroad, that jazz was introduced into mainland China along with other music concept as Beatles and Pink Floyd.
    Kong Hongwei, a classic-trained pianist from one of China's prestigious music conservatories, is one of China's early jazz pioneers who started studying jazz from the late 1980's.
    Kong and his Golden Buddha Trio prepared vigourously for the jazz festival. The trio also includes bassist Huang Yong and Izumi, a Japanese drummer.
    Kong thinks his oriental culture background is not a hurdle in his pursuit to study jazz There is no clash between Jazz and Chinese culture, he says.
    "Jazz can be learned through training, which has nothing to do with culture. There is no swing or blues in Chinese culture but you can learn them. The problem is that when I began studying music, there was no course about them in China's higher education system. Now jazz is taught everywhere in the world, like in Japan and other places in Asia, as well as in China. Though it's not so mature in China, it's better to have something than nothing," said Kong.
    Zhang Ying is one of China's active jazz vocalists. She thinks that jazz is not for the elite class and it should be shared with ordinary audiences.
    "I have also composed some Chinese jazz songs so that Chinese people or people in Beijing can understand. When a song is written in Chinese, there must be some Chinese taste in it," said Zhang.
    Jazz is no longer a strange word to Chinese people. Musicians from the Shanghai Music Conservatory, some of them graduating from the Mecca of jazz -- Berklee Music School -- have now introduced jazz courses to China's music education.
    And next year, these changes are sure to ensure that the Festival will attract even more fans to the Forbidden City.
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