A brief introduction to the Beijing jazz scene

There's not a lot of jazz in Beijing. Probably not a lot in China as a whole. Hell, there isn't all that much original music in any genre. But jazz is definitely a tiny minority interest. (And it may be a rare example of something they do better in Shanghai. Shanghai has just about no rock scene worthy of the name, and its modern art scene seems to be a pale shadow of Beijing's, but..... it has long been a thoroughly "Europeanized" city, and plush hotel bars like their cocktail jazz. More random prejudices and provocations to try to spur my Beijing v. Shanghai comment-thread into life!)

Although you would from time to time find a little bit of jazz going on in a hotel lobby somewhere, or at one of the grungier music bars that usually specialise in rock and folk, the only regular jazz venue in Beijing for the past x years has been the CD Jazz Café - and it's really not all that good. It has gone through a number of major re-modellings and redecorations in the time I've been here, but despite these many changes of 'look', it's never hit on a winning formula: it just keeps finding new ways of being charmless and anonymous (its latest reorganization is at least a major step forward in terms of the decor, but now a good third or so of the bar area has no view of the stage). It doesn't help, either, that it is right beside the Third Ringroad - and pretty much in the middle of nowhere, a mile or more from anything else of note that you might want to visit on a night out. And, of course, the service isn't all that great, the air-conditioning never seems to work, and it is rather pricier than the bars I mostly like to hang out in. Much of the music I've heard there has been fairly unremarkable too: we tolerate it and even enjoy it here in China because it's such a novelty, but it wouldn't create much of an impression in New York or London (god, I get an occasional pang of nostalgia for Ronnie Scott's Club [on London's Frith St] that's so acute it might actually be angina!).

Now, there's nothing so objectionable about CD Jazz Café that it would make its way into my 'hate list', but it wouldn't find a place among my favourite bars either. I would only ever go there for the music; and the music wasn't good enough to tempt me out to that side of town more than 2 or 3 times a year.

But in the past couple of years, there's been a proliferation of small, occasional music venues, and now we have the chance to hear jazz - once in a while - at a number of attractive little bars much closer to my home: Jianghu, Jiangjinjiu, Baie des Anges, Salud. The more distant rock music bars D-22 and Yugong Yishan (yet to be memorialized on this blog, but it will happen soon) are now hosting regular jazz nights too. And there's now a regular Sunday afternoon 'jam session' at a bar called X-Change (in a hotel [I forget which one] in the new - barely finished - 'financial district' to the north of Xidan). Thanks are due to Hortense Hallé, who distributes a more-or-less weekly jazz('n'folk) listings round-up on this burgeoning scene by e-mail.

Best of all, the guy behind CD Jazz has opened up a second venue by Houhai (my local lakes area), immediately above Zoo (scene of my birthday party last year): the East Shore Live Jazz Café.

It's hard to put a finger on what East Shore has that the CD Café never did, but.... it's certainly got something. Location is a big part of it: it's got a great view of the lake from the big picture-window in the right-hand half of the bar. Remarkably, however, that big window doesn't seem to mess up the acoustics too much, or detract from the suitably gloomy jazz bar ambience. A good sound system, decent staff, stage visible from pretty much everywhere in the bar.... and it's only a 25-minute walk away. Heaven.

They seem to have found some really decent acts as well (I don't think it's just that I'm getting less picky after months, years of comparative jazz deprivation....). I caught a marvellous show there on Christmas Day, a foreign band led by a great French pianist called Pierre Pradat. Some of the local acts are even better. For the past few months, the Golden Buddha Trio (nucleus of an occasionally much larger group) have been playing a Friday night residency there; band leader Kong Hongwei has a spectacular command of the ivories (and, perhaps somewhat unusually for China, is ineffably musical rather than just technically flashy), and is well worth a look any time you're in this 'hood at the end of the week. And don't just take my word for it: fellow Beijing blogger Jeremiah was raving about him just last week - and he's quite the music aficionado, and a decent pianist himself, so his opinion carries rather more weight than that of an enthusiastic but unschooled fan-boy such as myself.

Alas, the oracular Hortense has disappeared from our lives for a couple of weeks..... so I am at a loss as to what I will do this weekend. Might just head down to East Shore to listen to Kong and the boys again.