The rise of China as a world power is resulting in more than a surge in Australian commodity exports. Over the past few years, a growing number of local musicians have packed their bags for booming cities, such as Shanghai, whose growing middle class is developing an appetite for all things Western, including jazz.
Sydney drummer Nick McBride has lived in Shanghai for six years. As he told Jazz Australia, while not all his musical settings are ideal, he enjoys the opportunity of playing six or seven nights a week.
Jazz Australia: What was your original reason for packing your bags and heading to China?
Nick McBride: I had spent 10 years in Sydney at the time and was looking for something new. Another reason was at the time, Australia under the Howard Government was so depressing. It really felt like we were heading towards a police state – a paranoid and conservative society with fewer and fewer opportunities. Not to mention the ridiculous entertainment red tape in bars and venues.
Then there was the GST. What a joke. With the introduction of poker machines into all these great old bars, it was like there was a further incentive to get rid of live music. Australia has fantastic music education but extremely limited opportunities beyond that due to many factors, including the licensing laws/fees for venues.
In many ways, I feel more comfortable here in Shanghai than I did living in Australia. At least here I have a chance to make a living as performing musician not just a music teacher who will teach more musicians who will become an export themselves. So many great musicians have left Australia for this reason. If it hadn’t been for Jazzgroove, I would have left earlier.
JA: What has surprised you most about the place?
NM: Shanghai seems to be constantly morphing into a Blade Runner movie set. It’s a crazy place. There are 17 million people in Shanghai and it’s obviously high density. Networking is intense here and things seem to happen very fast.
It’s a cosmopolitan city with a jazz history going back to the 1930s. Dale Barlow recommended a great book about the last 100 years of Shanghai’s history called The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City by Stella Dong. It’s a great insight into local culture.
Shanghai’s recent history has been turbulent to put it mildly. Older people here have seen some crazy things. I was lucky enough to see James Brown on one of his last shows before he passed away. I never thought I would see him live let alone here in Shanghai. Unlike some less developed cities in China, Shanghainese are into foreign culture and are used to dealing with foreigners.
Some other towns I have been to we definitely stick out. I really like the entrepreneurial attitude of the foreigners and locals here. People are willing to step up and try something new. There are always new clubs opening and closing here as in most big cities. I even had a gig as an extra in a movie once. I was offered another one as a priest if you can believe it in a local production of Marco Polo but I freaked out when I read the script and didn’t do the audition.
JA: How is your Shanghainese?
NM: She’s fine. Thanks for asking.
JA: What are the challenges of living in a city like Shanghai?
NM: Obviously there are cultural issues sometimes but I try to keep in mind that I’m in China and I should keep learning and adapting to this place rather than trying to impose my rules because things can be frustrating here. There are sometimes issues with “face” that I still don’t understand. For example a boss of a music agency asked me to find a band of foreigners to play for nothing at their new bar opening and I told her there was no chance. Apparently I was supposed to find a polite excuse. I was told later by her staff that it was about her “face”. There are many more examples of this. It’s kind of equivalent to pride in some ways but further reaching (demonstrating your influence on others also comes into it).
This is a very business oriented city so most people who live here are focussed on making money. It can be scary sometimes to see just how competitive people get with business and this also filters down to the musicians. Undercutting is a problem and dealing with music agents can be difficult but I try to work with people I can trust, including agents, to minimise problems. The upshot of this is that there are enough business people doing well here to support the venues and bands working in Shanghai.
I miss all those CD stores and hearing new music on the radio. Also there was usually some new band to check out in Sydney where as here things tend to be musically more commercial. There’s not as much choice in that respect and radio here is for the most part unlistenable.
To my ears, pop music here is based on three major influences: Air Supply, Lionel Richie and Carol King. That’s a pretty depressing foundation for pop music. Hopefully this will change with time. Until recently, access to foreign music was extremely limited. Young people here now can get all kinds of stuff via the internet and pirate DVDs.
I have to say another annoyance is the proliferation of amateur singers who seem to make a living here. It’s fun when singers like Lily Dior or Pete Moore are in town but other than that, as in Australia, a lot of the gigs require vocalists but unfortunately here there are very few good ones.
Growing up in Canberra it wasn’t necessary to speak another language so I felt I really had to leave Australia to do this. It’s been a great way to learn another language. Some people find this city a bit too crazy but you get used to life here and it becomes normal. Canberra feels so stagnant after living here. My mum loves it here. Before I could speak any Chinese, just getting a taxi to the gig was a challenge.
JA: What sort of musical situations are you working in?
NM: Right now I’m doing three nights a week with 3 point strike Willow Neilson (saxophone – Australia), Steinar Nickelsen (organ – Norway) and Erika Lee (vocals – China). We’re playing a mix of our original tunes and jazz/R&B stuff.
Another project is an organ trio with guitarist Lawrence Ku and Steinar. I have been doing some gigs in a percussion group with two Japanese djembe players, a Cuban conga player and a Mauritian singer/djembe player. I play djembe in that situation.
Sunday afternoons we usually jam in a park where Chinese traditional bands also rehearse and perform. I do a couple of other lounge gigs: one night of lounge jazz at CJW and a house band “singer’s night” at JZ club (backing three singers in separate sets).
There are corporate gigs here for product launches which often use pick up bands. I usually do one of those a week at the moment. I teach drums and have two regular students at the JZ School.
Four years ago after leaving my contract at CJW, I worked in a band called JR that was kind of a jazz/boy band. It was hilarious and tragic. I should write a book about that band. I still have some video footage of our dance classes. Scott Dodd (bassist from Canberra) and I were headhunted for the gig.
The idea was to have a jazz group focusing on rearranging Chinese songs and original tunes with two local musicians Zhumang (piano) and Feng Yu Chen (trumpet). I was tired of doing six nights a week of lounge jazz and was interested in trying a collaborative project with these guys. We were signed to a management company who were trying to market us like a pop band. For performances and interviews we often had to wear make-up and matching shirts! It was so strange for Scott and I.
We suggested more than 40 names for the band but the boss chose the most ridiculous name – Jazz Revolution! Our music was far from revolutionary and if you Google “JR”, you come up with photos of the actor from Dallas, some unknown fat American kid or Japanese Rail (there’s also a famous Taiwanese singer called JR).
Our Taiwanese boss somehow overlooked this fundamental flaw. Next she decided that we need a different name in Chinese to further complicate things. We often had to try to explain seemingly unrelated names of our band during interviews. This is just one example of a chain of bad decisions made on our behalf. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if we hadn’t signed an exclusive three-year contract with the company prohibiting us from doing any external performances other than the ones they arranged for us. We recorded a CD of our music and Shanghai’s Austrade people got behind us, assisting with media contacts, promotion and 2nd opinions on our projects. Ms Shirley Zhang in particular was a great help.
I have some classic stories about that group. We did our Beijing CD promotion in The Great Hall of The People and did a lot of touring (Guangzhou, Beijing, Hangzhou, Lhasa, Qingdao, Ningbo). We had a clothing endorsement (Agnis B) and instrument sponsorship (Yamaha), a promotion team and our own recording/rehearsal studio. Almost all the interviews we did were in Chinese so that was serious pressure to learn.
From the outset I was very optimistic and it was exciting at times but I don’t think I’ll be signing any exclusive management contracts for a while. It’s amazing how much better I am able at managing my own music affairs than a “management company”. Since leaving the group I have had a great time freelancing and working on these other projects. I also had a chance to do my first solo drum gig at the Shanghai Theatre last year for a percussion concert.
JA: Are you finding the musical experience satisfying?
NM: I think more so now than before. I’m trying to keep myself involved with more creative projects now. I feel that my playing as developed a lot since I left Australia, partly due to having a chance to play six or seven nights a week.
When I first arrived I had a different awareness of Shanghai. It was kind of “them” (locals) and “us” (foreigners). I feel like that has changed a bit now. Also, I was only playing in lounge jazz situations. I can now speak a little Chinese so I’m able to communicate and read audiences better. I’m working on some stuff with Willow and a more electric project at my friend’s studio here. When I was doing the contract gigs at CJW I was dealing with the language barrier, a high maintenance I-want-to-go-shopping-now! girlfriend and personality/control issues on the bandstand.
I was bandleader for a while and managed to put some fun bands together but then sometimes it was just a job. It’s a different world to the regular freelance life most jazz musicians have back in Australia. You play six nights a week with a band of people that are not necessarily friends playing music you might not enjoy. You are also at the mercy of the singer (boss’s choice) who brings their repertoire and style and whom you must play with six nights a week. Often it’s more of a job (or musical torture) than the freelance scene where you are your own boss.
Another highlight of the last few years here would have to be a tour and recording with Escalator. This is a free jazz project with Peter Scherr, Carl Dewhurst, Phil Slater and myself. Peter got it off the ground and we recorded at his amazing home studio in the jungle outside Hong Kong. We played in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong for that tour. The gigs weren’t all packed out but it was great fun and exciting to play free music here.
JA: What is the music scene like generally? Are there many venues, for instance?
NM: It used to be all cover bands here. I’m told there are over 400 foreign musicians working in Shanghai on any given night. I haven’t seen statistics but I would say that a large proportion of them are Filipino cover bands. There are musicians from all over, including Cuba, Columbia, Russia, France (several of whom were recently thrown out for naughtiness), and the U.S. There are now many Chinese creative music bands and artists here and in other cities like Beijing.
In Shanghai there are four full-time jazz venues and a bunch of others with jazz music a few nights per week. There are also a bunch of music festivals happening now throughout the year. Not as many as Sydney but it’s better than it was five years ago. More and more international bands are coming through here on tour also.
JA: Is there much of an interest in jazz among the locals – as audience members and performers?
NM: When I first arrived here, I think most of the locals who came to CJW because it was considered “groovy” or because they had never seen a foreign band play. Now there is genuine interest in jazz as an alternative to DJ culture, more choice in clubs and people are becoming more discerning.
Sometimes there is an element of “watch the dancing monkeys” but I think there are a lot of people really interested in hearing some alternatives to the Filipino cover bands and DJs.
There is a lot more creative music going on here and in Beijing than when I arrived. It’s just a matter of time. There is now a jazz department at the local music conservatorium and JZ club has opened a jazz school that is doing quite well. I don’t think it’s imperialistic as there is a genuine interest from local people into western culture and music.
A lot of classically trained musicians here are looking into improvising and playing jazz as an alternative. One local pianist Andy Sun used to work with me at CJW until he won the Liszt piano competition in Europe and is apparently doing solo concert tours now.
There are some local musicians such as pianist Huang Jian Yi who have studied jazz in the US and are now writing and performing with their own bands. Another fantastic piano player from Beijing is Xia Jia. He leads his own trio up there and has recorded his music. There are also two great drummers up there in Beijing – Xiao Dou and Bei Bei. I try to catch their gigs when they’re in Shanghai.
I haven’t had any weird vibes from local musicians about being a foreigner playing here. I would say that in jazz music the current ratio of foreign/local players is about 2:1, so we are very lucky that they are so hospitable.
JA: Are there many other Australian musicians working in Shanghai, or China more generally?
NM: Other Australian musicians I working in Shanghai now include: Scott Dodd (bass, Canberra), Willow Neilson (sax, Melbourne) and Marta Taylor (singer, Sydney) also Guy le Claire (a guitarist based in Hong Kong) and Pete Moore (a vocalist based in Hong Kong).
Other musicians who have visited include: Dale Barlow, Lily Dior, James Morrison, John Morrison, Zoe, James and Ben Hauptman, Aron Ottignon, Sean Wayland, Steve Hunter, Guy Le Claire, Simon Barker, Stewart Kirwin, Stu Hunter, Emma Franz, Matt McMahon and Danny Healy.
JA: Do you think the Olympics this year, and the resulting flood of people into China, will have an impact on musical activity in Shanghai?
NM: I have no doubt that there will be more media coverage here in Shanghai and definitely more tourists. This is one of China’s major business centres and there are more bars here than any other Chinese city. I’m sure we’ll have a few more punters checking out the music here.
There is a new TV channel here called ICS and they have a weekly program called Jazz Show featuring foreign and local musicians. There are performances, interviews and introductions to various styles of jazz. That says something about this city to me. There is also the 2010 Shanghai Expo coming up.
JA: How long to do plan to stay?
NM: I’m going to be here for at least another three years. To be honest I don’t want to rush back to Sydney to spend most of my time teaching or playing weddings. From what I have heard, there are even less venues than when I left six years ago.
I love Sydney and it’s sad that things don’t seem to work there for live music these days. There is definitely more creative music going on in Sydney and Melbourne and some fantastic musicians but with the amount of effort I put into music here I think I have at least double the returns I ever did in Sydney.
I’m not just talking about money returns but performance opportunities. It’s like there is glass ceiling on the music industry in Australia. Everyone seems to be looking to Europe and the US. I wanted to get out of the English-speaking world and explore music in other situations. There is so much music going on in Asia that is totally ignored in Australia. In Indonesia and Thailand there are instruments and styles that I had never heard of until I travelled. I’m enjoying the pace of life here and I’m optimistic about the future of music in this region and I want to be involved.
Find out more
www.myspace.com/ nicholasmcbride
