by Nate Chinen
Born and raised in a small western village, Xia Jia moved to Beijing in 1986, at age twelve, to study classical piano at a conservatory. He turned on to jazz in the mid-nineties, during the music’s first tentative bloom in China. “At that time it was really hard to find any jazz records,” he said, between puffs of a cigarette, in a conversation on the roof deck of the East Shore. One prize acquisition in his collection was the 1989 self-titled debut by the Chick Corea Akoustic Band. “I listened to that one album for such a long time,” he said. “Endlessly. Because that’s the only thing I had.”13
When he left China to pursue a degree in jazz studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, Xia Jia became an outlier, and in some respects a pioneer. He was mentored in the program by the veteran jazz pianist and educator Harold Danko, amassing classroom and bandstand experience before returning to China. He brought a wealth of insight back to Beijing, where he reconnected with one of his earlier mentors: Liu Yuan, a trailblazing Chinese jazz artist, and the owner of the East Shore.
Liu Yuan, a slender man in round spectacles and a Panama hat, had the gracious but quietly intense demeanor of a man accustomed to making things happen. We spoke one evening on the East Shore roof deck, with translation from Nathaniel Gao, a Chinese-American alto saxophonist who arrived in Beijing from the States in 2006, the same year that the club opened. A saxophonist himself, Liu Yuan started performing jazz in public in 1986, when few other Chinese musicians were doing so. He’d been trained on his father’s instrument, the suona, a double-reed horn common in the music of the northern provinces. And he had experience touring internationally with a traditional folk troupe, but his main affiliation was with Cui Jian, a massively popular singer-songwriter known as the Father of Chinese Rock.
China was gradually opening to Western culture in the wake of the cultural revolution, but unlike Shanghai, a port city where trade and commerce have always yielded a vibrant nightlife, the capital city had little infrastructure for live music at the time. For a while the only places to play jazz were a French restaurant and some hotel bars in the embassy district, where foreigners made up most of the clientele.
But in the mid-nineties Liu Yuan began playing at a bar called CD Café, eventually turning it into Beijing’s first dedicated jazz club. He was the club’s manager and main attraction, working with a small handful of other early adopters like the bassist Huang Yong and the pianist Kong Hongwei, commonly known as Golden Buddha. The first Beijing International Jazz Festival got up and running around this time, focusing much-needed attention and audience interest on the music until it faltered in 2001. A kind of retrenchment followed, with some jazz musicians fretting that any forward momentum in the nineties had been a tantalizing fluke.
But then Liu Yuan, seeking more creative independence, left the CD Café in 2006, and opened the East Shore. “For the last twenty years, with all of these places, I’ve been trying to maintain a place for real jazz exclusively,” he said. “There has been some financial pressure. It’s still worth it.”14 He was also part of the committee that agitated for and helped organize a major new event, the Nine Gates International Jazz Festival, which ran annually from 2006 to 2013.
Like most musicians I met in Beijing, Liu Yuan characterized the scene as motivated more by art than by commerce—an explicit contrast to Shanghai, where there’s plenty of work but in a less creative vein, and the audiences are likelier to talk over the music. The East Shore, proudly operating without a cover charge, had been set up as a sort of clubhouse, for players as well as fans. As soon as the Blue Note Beijing was up and running across town, marquee American musicians booked there began popping up at the East Shore after hours, to hang out and jam with the locals.
This conferred a certain legitimacy, though Westerners don’t exert the level of influence they once did in Beijing. Matt Roberts, an American trombonist who first arrived there as a student in the late eighties, recalls forming one ragtag early group with Chinese musicians playing folk instruments like the suona and the sheng, a reedy mouth organ. “We just kind of made it up as we went along,” Roberts said. “I had about ten cassette tapes, and I kept loaning them out.”15
The situation was drastically different for a more recent wave of American expats, like Gao, who grew up in Iowa City; the trombonist and composer Terence Hsieh, who was born in Durham, North Carolina, and studied at Oberlin Conservatory; and Anthony Vanacore, a drummer who moved to China to teach music in Hangzhou, before arriving in Beijing. All three are pillars of the Beijing jazz scene, but they work on more or less equal footing with their Chinese counterparts, in a mutual exchange. “What’s interesting about Beijing is that you really associate with the local Chinese,” Vanacore said, “whereas Shanghai is more Westernized, so a lot of the musicians are foreigners. Here in Beijing there are some phenomenal musicians—guys who have never been abroad, can’t really speak much English, and they play incredibly. These guys have had so many barriers to deal with: language, access to the information. They overcame it. It’s amazing.”16
At the same time, some of the most promising developments on the Beijing jazz scene were the direct result of foreign exposure: local musicians who, following Xia Jia’s lead a generation later, were seeking out training in Europe or the United States, and bringing their expertise back home. Liu Yuan and Xia Jia both pointed to the fact that some of these talented young players were unknown to them, having headed abroad straight from the outer provinces. In a jazz ecosystem that once felt stiflingly small, this was an encouraging sign.
Xu Zhihan, the guitarist, has a twin brother: Xu Zhitong, who plays drums. When I met them in Beijing, they were both studying jazz at conservatories in Germany, where the tuition and cost of living is cheaper than New York. They spoke broken English with an unusual accent, part German in its inflection, and part Chinese. We sat in a booth at Jianghu Bar with Matt Roberts before he played a gig with his band.
At one point I asked Roberts to explain the difference between the Beijing scene now, as opposed to the early nineties, before Xu Zhihan and Xu Zhitong were born. “Oh, it’s very easy,” he replied. “You’re sitting next to two phenomenal musicians. And when I first arrived, foreign musicians knew how to play jazz and Chinese musicians didn’t. It was very one-sided. Now the number of really exceptional Chinese jazz musicians is much, much larger.”17
The generational transfer of knowledge, which has always been the gold standard in jazz, played out neatly in the story of the twins: Xu Zhihan learned to play jazz guitar by studying with Liu Yue, whose drummer was Xu Zhitong’s teacher, Bei Bei. Unlike their elders, they were familiar with jazz, as a mode of expression, from the very start of their musical training. The Internet isn’t quite the frictionless experience in China that it is in the West, but their exposure to music via YouTube and various file-sharing services was a far cry from the limitations of an informal lending library of worn cassette tapes.
After our conversation, I heard the first half hour of Roberts’s set, which consisted of surefooted arrangements of familiar postbop fare. Then I headed out into the night, walking down Minhua Hutong in the direction of the East Shore. There I heard the Xia Jia Trio, with Ji Peng on bass and Xu Zhitong on drums. They played a mix of smart originals and jazz standards, in a meditative but deeply swinging style. Xia Jia was, as before, the picture of soulful restraint. Xu Zhitong’s rhythm foundation had a persuasive undercurrent, even as he occasionally spiked the beat with small but neatly surprising digressions.
The music pulsed with creative freedom—a quality that, in context, would seem to invite a political allegory, one that decades of State Department policy had been designed to instill. But that jazz-as-democracy narrative reflects a crude binary that every Chinese jazz musician I met took pains to disavow. “Jazz, for me, it’s not politicized,” said Liu Yuan. “It was just a new method of expression. So in that sense it does represent freedom, on a personal level.”<
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Hsieh, though born and raised in the West, has echoed that ambivalence in a series of perceptive articles about the misattribution of political motive among Chinese musicians. “Some very smart people, academics and such, assume that jazz must be an instigator of democracy in China,” he told me. “It’s a double standard, not just in jazz but with art in general. The West supports art in China that reflects a revolutionary narrative, or protests against the government. But there are a lot of other ways to frame whatever’s happening here.”18
What has been happening in Beijing, and with jazz in China more broadly, is difficult to capture in a phrase—unless you’re content to point out that both the quantity and quality of homegrown musicians has been sharply on the rise. The factors in this change are plentiful, and the situation is rapidly evolving. Long after I left Beijing, I was still thinking about Xia Jia’s confident forecast for the city’s jazz ecology. “I think in a few years, if you look back at this moment, you will see that it was when everything changed, in some big step,” he said. “I can feel that.”
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When we talk about jazz’s reach around the world, it’s standard practice to refer to the dissemination of a language. Extending the metaphor, progress can be charted in terms of proficiency—and there’s no doubt that many more players around the world meet that criterion than did a generation or two ago. Hancock’s assessment is right on the mark in that sense: as a musical lingua franca, jazz has had remarkable, even stunning, success.
But there’s also a more mutable connotation in the jazz-as-language metaphor. The English critic Stuart Nicholson conjures it succinctly in his formulation of a global jazz landscape.
Just as the use of the English language in the global context does not always mirror the vocabulary and rules of grammar and syntax and the way English is spoken in Britain or America, there are jazz styles that have evolved outside the United States that do not necessarily follow the way that jazz is played inside the United States. No language, not even the musical “language” of jazz, remains pure in the globalized world.19
Nicholson is far from an objective source here. He first floated the notion of “glocalized” jazz practice, borrowing a term from corporate buzz-speak, in his 2005 book Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address)20—a work of impassioned advocacy for new European jazz, framed as a reactionary polemic against the American status quo. With that agenda-driven argument, Nicholson effectively railed against one blind spot while trying to package and sell another one. Still, he has a point when he alludes to the vicissitudes of grammar and syntax. He’s also right to suggest that many jazz musicians outside the United States have carved out modes of expression beyond a standard framework, personalizing and hybridizing the music.
Consider the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, which for more than a quarter century was jazz’s most rigorous and prestigious proficiency test. Every year submissions poured in from all over the world, often resulting in a dozen or so semifinalists from a handful of countries. Starting in 2005, the first prize went to some of these international arrivals, including Melissa Aldana, a suavely capable tenor saxophonist from Chile; Lage Lund, a cool-tempered, inventive guitarist from Norway; and Tigran Hamasyan, a precise, hyperdynamic pianist from Armenia. Each prevailed over a field of immaculately trained Americans by proving sure mastery of consensus jazz protocols.
Hamasyan, for example, won the Monk competition in 2006 in part by finessing the standards “Solar” and “Cherokee.” But then he went on to build a prominent career out of cultural fusions, either with electronics and high-contrast dynamics or—as on the 2017 album An Ancient Observer—with Armenian folk and Euro-classical references. In a sense, Hamasyan earned his place at the table with a demonstration of fluency but secured it with an expression of artistry, accessing a specific cultural lineage.
And as his example illustrates, a folkloric accent is only one path to that outcome. When the electric guitarist Hedvig Mollestad rips through a jagged squall of distortion, she’s drawing from a much more brackish well than the one that gives Tord Gustavsen, a sedate and fastidious pianist, his brand of sustenance. But both artists represent an extension of the Nordic jazz that Nicholson champions. So too does the electroacoustic ensemble Supersilent, which can traverse a spectrum from rippling stillness to crushing heat in a single group improvisation. In short, there are many layers of precedent and possibility—and funding—for an emerging improviser in Oslo. The same is true to varying degrees in Barcelona, and Seoul, and Tel Aviv.
Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from Benin, grew up playing in traditional West African percussion groups while absorbing the strains of Afropop and Brazilian music that he heard at home and around his mother’s coastal village. He was seventeen when he first picked up the guitar, and cosmopolitan from the jump: because Benin has no native guitar style, his early influences came from elsewhere on the African continent, like Nigeria, Mali, and the Congo. When he stumbled across a George Benson CD, he was able to draw a parallel from jazz improvisation to the vocalizations of West African griots. In jazz, he also recognized a cousin to the rhythmic nuance that animates most African music.
Loueke left Benin to study music in Ivory Coast in 1990, but it wasn’t until relocating to Paris a few years later, to attend the American School of Modern Music, that he had proper exposure to jazz. He was then recruited by the Berklee College of Music, where he formed what would become his longstanding trio with a couple of fellow students: Massimo Biolcati, a bassist with roots in Sweden and Italy, and Ferenc Nemeth, a Hungarian drummer.
Like most jazz musicians, Loueke would have little practical use for a word like “glocalization.” But in conversation, he employs the metaphor of local dialect. “Jazz is a language,” he said in 2008, shortly before the release of Karibu, his Blue Note debut. “I have my accent, I have my way to choose different words. But most important for me is to understand that language.”21
Loueke’s approach as an improviser is buoyant and percolating, with broad fluency in postbop harmony and complex polyrhythm. He also brings unmistakable perspective from African folk music—not just fingerstyle technique but also vocal-percussive effects, like plosive pops and palatal clicks. The originality of his hybridized jazz signature was immediately apparent to Hancock, who heard him during an audition for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. Loueke was not only admitted to the program but also drafted into Hancock’s band.
Another leading twenty-first-century jazz artist to embrace the jazz-as-language idea, in the service of multicultural expression, is the alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, he received classical training but was self-taught as a jazz musician until he, like Loueke, went to Berklee, at nineteen. Zenón furiously committed himself to learning the music’s fundamentals, racing to make up for lost time. When he reconnected with his Puerto Rican heritage, it was in something like a bloom of self-discovery.
When I came here, all that I wanted to do was learn how to play jazz. That was my goal, and for the first three or four years that I spent in this country, going to school and getting immersed, basically it was almost like learning a new language for me. Because I had never studied jazz formally. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about what my music was going to sound like when I asked: Who am I? What do I have to give? I started thinking about the fact that all this time I had spent studying jazz, I had never done that with Puerto Rican music. Even though I grew up with that music, I didn’t go deep into it. I just felt that it was a responsibility. As a Puerto Rican. And I came to appreciate what that meant to me, in ways that I probably would have never come to understand it if I had stayed in Puerto Rico. I became prouder and more in touch with my patriotism and nationalism by not being in Puerto Rico, and by exploring Puerto Rican–ness through music. From the outside.22
It helped that one of Z
enón’s mentors at Berklee was Danilo Pérez, who was then in the process of pulling together the concept for his sweeping pan-American statement album, Motherland. Zenón already knew Pérez from the pianist’s ambitious earlier albums, like The Journey (1993). He was struck by the fact that this Panamanian musician was so conversant in the jazz mainstream, and not just those varietals with an Afro-Caribbean thrust.
By the time Zenón began first turning heads on the scene, during and after his graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music, it was obvious he had something special. The first thing to notice about him was his sound: sweet-tart, buoyant, and ripe, with an inflection that could give the impression of earnest emotional transparency. The suggestively vocal quality of his tone was something to which he’d applied conscious effort, willing himself to think of the instrument as an extension of his physical self. And his nimble phrasing was just as striking: Zenón had a dragonfly’s speed and lightness, but even in a darting cadence he exuded thoughtful restraint and a resistance to cliché.
His first major turn in the spotlight came by way of a fellow Puerto Rican, the tenor and soprano saxophonist David Sánchez, who was not quite a decade older and then signed to Columbia. Sánchez’s album Melaza, released in 2000, is a muscular, proudly ethnographic album inspired by the impact of the African slave trade in Puerto Rico. (“Melaza,” meaning “molasses,” alluded to the by-product of refined sugar cane. Eager to get his larger point across, Sánchez named one track “Against Our Will.”) Throughout the album, shrewd arranging strategies fuse Sánchez’s earthy tenor with Zenón’s flowing alto, often in an urgent unison that splinters into tightly coiled harmony.