ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of jazz in Shanghai from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. Historically, in the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai – the legendary “Paris of the East” – was the birthplace and heart of Chinese popular music and jazz. More recently, in the 1980s and 1990s, the capital Beijing was the place where Chinese jazz was revived and once again spread. In these years, a contemporary jazz scene in Shanghai was only beginning to sprout. Nowadays, Shanghai has once again become China’s most popular, international,cosmopolitan, and wealthiest jazz center. Through detailed interviews and accounts of local musicians, this chapter explores the various internal and external factors that turned this city into a contemporary jazz center. It focuses on the specific point in time at which Shanghai’s jazz scene was reborn and the process that set jazz as its representative musical expression. In addition, this chapter raises various queries of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and cultural politics. Finally, the findings in this chapter reveal that the same factors that drove Shanghai’s jazz musicians forward towards the international jazz arena oppressed others and led to social and musical divisions within the local jazz scene.
