Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. This is Jeremiah Jenny coming at you live. No, actually, it's a recording, so not live at all from Geneva, Switzerland. But joining me, David Moser, back in Beijing, back in China. How are things in the city now that you've returned from your tropical sojourn? From the frying pan into the refrigerator, sort of, is the way you would put it, I guess. Feels good to be back in a lot of ways and
Something happened while I was gone. I think the gods of the infrastructure
did what they are supposed to do. The horrible intersection close to where I live, and nobody cares about this but me, but it's called Da Shan Zi. And it's a very famously crowded intersection for four different directions with mopeds and everything. And by some miracle, they've now succeeded in expanding or widening the roads. And there's these new overpasses.
And it was a wonderful feeling to zip through that intersection. Granted, it wasn't rush hour, but it was obviously much better. My mood is, you can't imagine how that affects my mood because that eats about 20 to 30 minutes of my workday every day that I go into work. And coming back home too, so it may be about maybe 40 minutes of extra time. That's my, I know it's very personal and it's no one cares about me, but Beijing traffic is a
is a frigging nightmare, as you know. David and I are so old, we remember when podcasts were actually broadcast live over these little things called radios, and they'd be interrupting the host periodically for the traffic report, you know, Chopper Dave over the I-95 corridor. So we're bringing a little bit of that nostalgia to you folks while in the middle of the podcast, Dave gives the Dachshunds 798 region Beijing specific traffic details if you're...
In the neighborhood. What we're going to talk about today, though, and many people don't realize that David, apart from being a phenomenal scholar of the Chinese language, a great teacher, and of course, a wonderful podcast host, is also, and I feel very confident in saying this, one of the Beijing foreign community's most talented musicians and somebody who's been performing in the city for
for the entire length of his tenure, most famously and most regularly with the, and I never pronounce this correctly, Dave, the Acustra. Is that right? Is that how we pronounce that? No, it's the, it's Acu, which is based on the Lu Xun novel, right? Acu was not a very admirable character, but the Acu Arquestra.
And that's another very much of an in-joke. This avant-garde jazz orchestra leader, Sun Ra, called his group an orchestra. I'm not quite sure why, but so that's where that comes from. Well, Sun Ra thought he was an extraterrestrial, so I figure he can name his orchestra whatever he wants. Yeah, it's a sort of a paean to Sun Ra because our trombonist, Matt Kuhn,
Matt Roberts actually played with Sun Ra, played some gigs with Sun Ra. So he's a worshiper of Sun Ra. And part of our religion is that he is an extraterrestrial being and he's still out there and his spirit still inhabits us all. This is going to be a weird episode. So David, connections to extraterrestrial beings aside, your band's been playing a long time. And I was hoping you could tell me a little bit or tell our listeners a little bit more about Jazz in Bay.
Beijing in China right now. We've had some episodes before. We had Marquita Presswood, who was on, who talked a lot and gave us some really good information about the jazz scene in Shanghai in the 1930s. And of course, a couple of years ago, we had our good friend
Andy Field on who talked about his book, a memoir about the rock and alternative scene in China over the last 20 years. And I feel there's been a lot of talk about that. You know, there's been a lot of books, documentaries talking about the punk and the rock and alternative scene. And that's really cool. It's an amazing scene. Don't get me wrong. But I feel like somehow the jazz scene has been, at least the contemporary jazz scene, has been somewhat buried. And I was hoping that maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
How has this scene developed? Who are some of the players? And I think later on, I'd like to talk to you because I feel like some of the characters that we talk about when we talk about jazz in China, they end up becoming also part of the rock scene as well. There's some overlap there and some cross-pollination. So first, why don't you tell me, how did you get started on the jazz scene? And what was it like when you first started playing gigs in Beijing? I was sort of very lucky to come at the exact same
well, nothing is exact, but just at the basic time that jazz was just reviving in China. This was in the 1980s, 1986, 1987. There was already a rock scene. Probably everyone will know who Cui Jian is, the famous rock star who was the Tiananmen, Yuo Suiou composer, sort of an iconic figure. But there was at that, when I came here as a failed graduate music student who had been
been working for a master's degree in composition and was thinking, well, you know, I think I'll have to give up my music career because I can never make money on it and go into where the real big bucks are, which is Chinese language. So there I was thinking, you know, I guess I'll never play the trumpet again. I won't play the piano.
And suddenly I got here and I realized, especially around 1988, 89, 90, that there was a burgeoning jazz scene there. St. John is a good example because the early jazz scene was mostly rock musicians.
who had heard this music or heard of it and were fascinated by it and felt that it was a different level of musicianship and a different level of artistic aesthetics that they could easily tell that this was really worth putting a lot of money and effort into because it was so fulfilling. Back then, people weren't so monetarily minded. They weren't caring about money. Yeah, at that point...
I simply ask a Beida friend, you know, somebody asked me, what do you miss about the U.S.? And I said, not much, mostly jazz. They said, hey, well, I know a jazz pianist that plays jam sessions every Saturday at Maxime's, this sort of nightclub. He gave me the piano player was Liang Heping, very famous at that time. I've called him up and he said, yeah, sure, come along, have a jam session with me. So that's how I got started and sort of
By coincidence, that first night when I went there, playing trumpet, by the way, at that point I wasn't playing piano. By coincidence, all the people at that jam session were kind of the key players that I would be cooperating with and teaching or learning from.
in the next many years. Cui Jian happened to be there. And then a lot of people whose names I won't mention because the audience won't know who I'm talking about, but some of the rock drummers, the musicians that were there. And it was amazing to me because they were all playing out of this same handbook, the Bible, I would say, of jazz tunes called The Real Book. It's a book of standards. And they were using that. And of course, they couldn't pronounce some of the names, so they would call out tunes with just the page numbers.
I said, let's do a page 120. He said, oh yeah, one page 120. That's a good one. You know, I had some conversation with those people. They were interested. They didn't know much.
Someone asked me, do you think Miles ever played Dixieland? And I went, Miles? He's referring to Miles Davis. And he called him Miles, which any jazz aficionado would do that. You wouldn't say Miles Davis. You'd say Miles. They said, wow, this guy must really know his stuff. I said, well, Miles wasn't that era. He didn't really play Dixieland. It would probably, if you want to listen to Dixieland trumpet, you should go to Louis Armstrong. And he said, who?
They said, aha, they have gaps in their knowledge. And that was sort of the... And from that point, I became not only a participant, but for those few years, ipso facto, a kind of teacher because they were really... They felt I was, you know, a messenger from that world of jazz, even though I wasn't. I did jazz. I love jazz. I played jazz, but not that great. But I was... I, along with some other foreign friends, were thought of being bearers of this information. And it was great fun to see...
these young players get interested and, you know, learn about the music. That was a very remarkable time. I have two questions. One is, you went from trumpet to playing piano, which is interesting because I always think of trumpet players becoming bass players. Think of, like, Phil Lesch or Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
So it's an interesting progression there. I'm curious, you talk, they were using, they're playing out of the real book, which for those people who don't play jazz, it gives you the basic chords and the melody of 300 songs. That's the kind of thing that professional musicians use. If you ever go to a piano bar or something, it's what the guy has either memorized or has in his briefcase so that he can play just about any song that gets requested. Yeah, let me explain just real quickly why that's called that.
That book you're talking about was usually called a fake book because you may not know the tune, but you can fake it because it just has the basic melody and the chords, right? And this other jazz standard book, as a joke, they call themselves the real book.
That's the joke, right? That's why it's called the real book. But it's a kind of fake book, which means it has... You don't know the tune, but you can play it still anyway. Were there particular songs, musicians, eras that seemed to be in heavy rotation? Were they calling it like, let's do old 34, and it was one that they've done many times before. Were they attracted to any particular... I mean, jazz is such a huge history. You mentioned Miles. You mentioned Dixieland. We've already talked about Sun Ra. But...
Were the songs or composers that were at that time particularly popular among the people that you jammed with? At the very beginning, that night that I went there, I would say it was a little bit of a more primitive level than that. They sort of knew something about chord theory, and some of the tunes they just played them and found them attractive and just liked them, even though... But the problem back then was that
that most of those songs in the real book, probably most all of them, musicians had never heard the original recordings. So I was very often when I would sit in or I would be playing a gig, I would look at the bass player playing a very, very standard song in which there's a bass introduction. And I said, why are you playing it this way? This is ridiculous. And he said,
ah, Mo Laoshu, you know, I've never heard this song. Do you have a recording? So one of the things, one of my roles, and I'm actually very proud of this, although it was a very easy thing to do, is every time I went back to the United States, I bought a lot of CDs, although very few people had CD players at the time, but lots of tapes, you know, recordings of the music, of the actual standard songs. And, you know, and I would come back and distribute it to my friends, especially tapes.
cassette tapes. And it was very funny because I would give it to a friend and I would say, now, I hope that you give this to other people so that they can copy it and spread this around, right? Because it's back then, we didn't have digital copying back then. But a lot of these musicians were very jealous of that. If I would give them a tape, they would hide it and they wouldn't share it with any of the other musicians because I have the secret of the music here in my hands. And if I give it to other people, they'll learn it better than I can. So
One of the problems back then was getting people to share their music. But, you know, I should mention a jazz legend who just died a few months ago. The saxophone player in Sui Jian's band, who was Liu Yar, he started out playing the suona, which is a Chinese instrument. He became a fan of jazz on a trip overseas to Europe where he sat in or he watched a jazz festival or something and was just absolutely floored by the music.
And he came back to China with just one cassette tape of Grover Washington Jr., who's a kind of a soft jazz, you know, jazz player. And that was the only jazz recording he had. And so he just listened to that incessantly. And of course, as time went on, you know, began to get bootlegged.
videos and tapes. There's a whole chapter in Chinese music history of the daco CDs that were these CDs that were brought, smuggled into China that were sort of partly mutilated so they couldn't sell them in the US. There were CDs that never sold enough, so they sold them overseas to China as junk, as raw material to melt down and make into other things, right? And people would sneak these out of the
of the docks and into the cities, you could play these CDs. CDs, they would put a gash in the CD at the edge, but CDs play from the inside out. So you could buy a CD that was mutilated, but you could hear 90% of the songs. And those kind of was a revolution. That was a revolution because musicians finally were able to get treasure troves of jazz music
But that was right around 1995. So before then, people were really cherished the music that they could get. After people began to get acquainted with the music and really listening to it, and we mentioned Miles Davis, it was interesting to me that most of the jazz musicians gravitated to Miles Davis, his style, which was a much more cool style and not as such a technical style.
style and not just musical pyrotechnics. It was all about the groove, the feeling and the feeling of the blues and his famous album, Kind of Blue. They loved that album and they just worshipped Miles Davis. And I thought this was very interesting because there were other, you know, there's Charlie Parker, there's the Bebop era.
And of course they listened to that too. But it was interesting to me that these Chinese musicians gravitated to Miles because he did have a kind of a Taoist kind of mentality about his music. You know, he would famously tell his musicians, you know, Miles had a throat accident or I guess he got into a fight or something like that. But he had problems with his throat. So Miles, you talk like this, you know, all the time, you know.
And so Miles told his band, "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." I said, "Whoa, very zen, right?" But he meant that, play this ineffable thing that it's not on the surface, but it's there. That was very interesting to me that they sort of resonated with probably in terms of jazz, the most kind of Taoist jazz musician we have might be Miles Davis.
I'm sure it was not a coincidence. And to this day, I would say most of them, if you ask a lot of these musicians who was the greatest jazz player of all time, a lot of them would say Miles Davis to this day. I think there's something to be said for that. You know, the idea, and this is an oft-repeated phrase, but it's very true when you think about Miles Davis. Music is the space between the notes.
And I think when you listen to some of the earlier, talking about Charlie Parker back in Dixieland, I mean, it's a difference between listening to
a blues guitarist like B.B. King and a guitarist like Eddie Van Halen. There's that, the space to let the music breathe is a really important part of it. Moving forward a little bit from these earliest jam sessions, maybe a little bit rough, how did, what was the next phase for jazz in China? As people started to listen to more of the music,
started to develop their own playing styles as groups started to form. When did you start to really feel like this is a scene that's either taking off, about to take off, or has achieved some kind of elevation? For me, it's pretty easy to pinpoint that time. I think it's around, really around 1995. I think that was the time of the digital explosion and these DACO DVDs that we were just mentioning. And also...
Windows 95 was in 95, right? And suddenly everyone was putting that on their computer, right? Even the Communist Party was putting that on all of its computers, right? And you suddenly had lots more access to the music. I think around that time, Chinese musicians were giving me advice or giving me suggestions. Hey, you ought to listen to this guy because they were getting all these influx of these
these mostly from Japan. Japan is a jazz country, you know, so they had lots of CDs that would be smuggled into China. And then also there were, it was just the beginnings of the internet and the people going back and forth. So they were able to bring back jazz textbooks and all sorts of materials. Another breakthrough that I participated in was the first big band, an actual jazz big band. It was a friend of mine named Du Yinjiao, who was a PLA soldier.
And when I met him, he was in the PLA Army Band, and he would play the Chinese National Anthem during the day for Jiang Zemin. And then at night, he would go to the clubs and play jazz. And he learned to play jazz by listening to Benny Goodman on the shortwave, on the Voice of America shortwave.
That's how he learned jazz, right? But he got this idea because the PLA Army Band were just musicians who were on these barracks, and all they did was sit around all day and play around and eat and smoke and listen to jazz. But then they had to play this crappy, well, excuse me, I don't want to say that, this sort of very proper military music that the PLA gets them to play, right?
they wanted something better and and and to enjoy this idea let's let's form a big band you know real jazz big band so we were buddies and we played in a band so he said let's let's do this and so i i bought a lot of uh charts music from the u.s big band music for a time i was sort of not exactly directing it but you know teaching them how to play big band it's you know it's it's
Jeremiah, you can imagine it's very hard for people who are not in jazz to musicians to play the swing feel that's distinctive, you know, that swing, right? Which doesn't come naturally.
And it's hard enough to get one musician to play with a swing feel. It's another thing to get a whole big band to swing together. So you can imagine the first rehearsals for the first month were just absolute chaos. All the melodies were slipshod. But to make a long story short, he managed to get it together. The people began. And we've had recordings so they can mimic it.
And they actually came up with a pretty good repertoire. And then they began to play for New Year's Eve parties at foreign hotels on January 1st. And at first, the army band, the leaders, didn't like this sort of jazz. Why are you playing this, you know, Western decadent music? But they suddenly found that a jazz band could make money. And so at that point, he sort of lost control over the big band because the army leaders didn't
took it under their purview so that they could actually do the gigs and get the money off of it. So that was pretty interesting. But as far as I know, that was the first actual big band, big jazz band, and there were many, many since then. But that was a real breakthrough. I feel like there's almost some kind of movie or Netflix series here about trying to teach a group of musicians who more or less were raised on communist military marches
to play swing music and big band jazz, a kind of Mr. Holland's opus meets, you know, the Benny Goodman Orchestra. I don't know. I think it would just be somebody's missing an opportunity here. Well, for all you Netflix producers out there, I'm here. As jazz starts to develop in the 90s into the 2000s, was there any attempt to make connections with the jazz scene
From the pre-1949 era, again, we talked to Dr. Marquitas Presswood a couple of years ago, and he has written some great articles about just how rich and varied the jazz scene was, particularly in Shanghai. And of course, we have other records of jazz bands playing all over China, in Beijing, in Guangzhou, of course, in Hong Kong and places like that.
Was there any connection? Was there any attempt by the players in the end of the 20th, early 21st century to look back at some of their forebears in the 1920s, 30s and 40s?
Yeah, somewhat. There actually was still a band of very elderly musicians who played at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, called themselves Lao Shu Pi, the old tree bark. And these were musicians who were, I don't know, in their 70s, 80s. I just remember the drummer had a hearing aid, so I don't know how well he could follow the music. But these were musicians who had, I guess, participated in some of that music, at least in the early 30s, maybe late 20s, early 30s, I'm not sure.
And they're gone now, of course, but that was a link to that period of time. And, you know, I heard them play. It was jazz, but it was kind of like really strange jazz. But, you know, they had a sense of it. But keep in mind, Jeremiah, most of the 30s, jazz is a kind of has a lineage. The early jazz era doesn't ever just die out and then people ignore it. Most of the standards in the real book that we're talking about
are from the 30s. Those songs are incredibly, the jazz songbook and the standards, those songs are amazing. So body and soul, people still play it. Esmeralda Spalding plays it and still sings it, of course, in a different style, in a more modern way.
And so for them, I don't think they didn't suffer from, you know, having a sort of bias. For them, it was all the same thing. I mean, if they could get Benny Goodman, they'd listen to that. If you get some old Fats Waller, they'd listen to that. And of course, Miles Davis. And then there was a DJ named Yodai.
who still is a DJ, who would play real avant-garde jazz on the radio during the late 90s and early 2000s. I couldn't believe it when I turned on the radio. I said, this is it. China is playing this kind of jazz on the radio? It was amazing, right? So that was a very wonderful time, the late 90s, early 2000s, this kind of golden age.
when people were accepting it, and especially jazz, because jazz supposedly has no political ramifications, right? Even though people will tell you that it was probably jazz that partly brought down the Berlin Wall. We don't talk about that too much, but jazz musicians were very well aware of that, that jazz did have a kind of ethos, sort of freedom of the artists to express whatever they wanted to express. So the players just sucked it up because this was a new kind of music.
Another thing that we need to mention is that the new generation that began to take part in the music in the late 90s and early 2000s was the first generation that actually heard it as children growing up.
And that is so important. Liu Yu'er, the famous saxophonist who just passed away, was thought of as sort of the godfather of jazz, of Chinese jazz. But of course, he never even heard jazz until he was in his 30s. So he played jazz pretty well for someone who had started so late. But it was like listening to a non-native speaker try to speak complicated things. It's so obvious that you didn't grow up listening to those sounds.
And suddenly, or gradually, in the late 90s, early 2000s, you began to get these very young people, kids, who were just astonishingly good. I mean, world-class kids.
And it was because they grew up listening to this stuff and they liked it and they had the advantage of getting classical training because that's where they would start. And I can give many examples, but one is probably the biggest example is this young pianist named Abu who was classically trained.
took part in overseas festivals when he was 14, but then got obsessed with jazz. And, you know, we would go to the clubs and he would say, his father would come along and say, my son likes jazz, can he sit in? And we'd watch his amazement at this 12-year-old, 13, 14, 15-year-old kid playing, you know, with a, just like a, you know, in a very, very
what we call didau, a very authentic style, you know, jazz. And with the chops to really play it, you know, that's probably been one of the biggest changes. And there are several musicians now that are in their 30s and 40s who benefited from that early experience.
And they've gone overseas. Some of them are playing here. And I would say at that point and somewhere along the way, I lost the role of being teacher to any of those people. At this stage, there's nothing I can teach them. They teach me now. I mean, they're the ones who tell me about what's new.
give me tips on how to play this or that. I'm no longer needed for that. And it's great. It was really gratifying to see that happen. And we're at the stage now where I say, a lot of these players could sit in at any international festival and be just indistinguishable from, their level is indistinguishable from the other players in the West. We often hear about jazz musicians from Japan who are performing around the world. They perform at festivals.
What about from China? Who are the Chinese musicians who are starting to make or have already made a splash on the worldwide jazz scene? And are there, you mentioned Abu, are there any waiting in the wings who you think are poised to break out? Yeah, I would say it's a mixed bag. You know, there are those who have sort of actually just deserted China and just are living overseas and playing there, some of them in New York.
There's a pianist named Xiao Jia who goes back and forth. And I think a breakthrough for a lot of these people is they went overseas and studied at the conservatories. Xiao Jia went to, I think it was Eastman School of Music and got real jazz education. And other people have done that too. There's a Xinjiang pianist named Luo Ning who is very classically trained but loves jazz. In fact, I was kind of his first teacher. He was like a kid.
I don't know how old he was, 15 or 16 when I met him. And he's now just an amazing person. He has put out a, I guess it's a tribute to George Gershwin. He plays Rhapsody in Blue.
and then plays other kind of jazz tunes and stuff like that. He's very big in China, and also he's appearing overseas. I think it's hard to break into the foreign market. I mean, you have to be really good. There's also a lot of Chinese Americans who I'm not quite sure have their relationship to China, whether they grew up in China or whatever. There's a jazz pianist named Connie Han who dresses like a...
I don't know what to say, a stripper almost, dresses in extremely provocatively, but plays the shit out of the piano. I mean, she is unbelievable pianist. And I think people like her
her, it almost doesn't matter at this point where you're from. But you raise an interesting thing if people ask this question, is there such a thing as Chinese jazz? I mean, people ask this question and it's kind of controversial. We've had this discussion among friends, music friends and a group, among our groups, whether
whether there is such a distinctive sound of Chinese jazz, or if that's just kind of a worthless kind of question to ask, because everyone is different. You know, we look at those, people will say, well, European jazz from Norway, Sweden, France, everything has a kind of a vibe to it that's kind of classical influenced. The Japanese have a certain style, maybe
But I think at this point, it doesn't really matter. Wynton Marsalis came here to China in the year 2000, and he recently came back again. But he was very, very evangelical about this whole thing. He was saying, jazz is jazz. You take it and you make what you want to make out of it. Don't worry that it will sound like your culture. It will sound like no one cares. It just has a swing. It has to feel good.
It has to be fresh. It has to blow your mind. That's all we care about. So he was the one that said, learn the tradition, but I don't expect you to follow it.
take your own path, right? And he was very, very, very clear about that. That trip in 2000 was pretty influential because it was the first time that people of that burgeoning generation who were still very young got a chance to see up close a real jazz virtuoso and then actually interact with him too because he was really
He was really willing to sit for hours with students and talk with them and share the secrets of jazz. So yeah, I think it's a stage now where international boundaries don't matter so much. We have the internet.
You can put out an album on the internet and people all over the world will buy it. So right now the question is just, can people sustain it as a way of making a living and make money off of it? That's almost a bigger problem right now because jazz, as great as it is and as popular it is in the world, it's still hard to make a living as a jazz musician, even today.
in the West, not to mention China. One last thing I wanted to ask about, because you brought up Wynton Marsalis. I think it's so important, too, that you have that cross-pollination. You have people, artists, coming into China and playing gigs. And there was, we've talked about this in the podcast before, there was a time, particularly in the 2000s, early 2010s, when there were a lot of musicians coming into China playing concerts. You mentioned that jazz is often seen as non-political, although
I had an experience where I went to see, and whether this is jazz or not will probably get me into some kind of fight in a bar, but Harry Connick Jr., who performed with his band in Beijing about 10 or 12 years ago, the problem was that the set list that they were going to play was not the set list that had been sent to the Ministry of Culture. This is a story I heard. And so as a result, the band had to kind of revert back to the old set list, not having completely rehearsed it,
And I was telling this story to somebody later on and I kept wondering, like, what are they so worried about? This is Harry Connick. It's not like it's Rage Against the Machine. Were they worried he was going to be saying like, hello, Dolly. Lama. How are you, Dolly? Lama or something like that. I don't know. The show was great and these are professional musicians, but it did speak to a challenge that musicians often face coming into China that may not be the same as playing in other international venues.
We had that huge dip in the middle of the 2010s, you know, reaching a nadir, obviously, during the COVID years. My understanding, though, is that's picking back up again, that there are more international musicians, international concerts being booked and performing in China, in Beijing right now. And I was just curious if you on the street have heard about people who are coming in or if there are acts that are going to be
restoring these connections between musicians and fans on, you know, between China and the rest of the world? Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's been a kind of a phase transition. I mean, I think that the people who oversee bookings and oversee, you know, foreign entertainment that comes into China
are sort of more savvy now and they realize that this is a very good cross-cultural kind of mix. And, you know, it's money-making now if you can get a big act. There's Blue Note Club in Hong Kong, probably in Hong Kong too, but Shanghai and Beijing. Yes, they've got some absolutely amazing acts, you know, from Diana Krall, I don't know, Robert Glasper, all these people, they're really big right now.
come to China. That was kind of rare back. There was a Chinese jazz festival in the late 90s and I guess early 2000s. And some really famous musicians came, but they came in kind of a, I don't know how to put it,
the audience were just literally not acquainted with their music whatsoever. So, I mean, it was great that they did these jazz festivals early on. I think Betty Carter, a famous jazz singer, did her last performance here in Beijing. And there were other, you know, amazing performers. Mike Stern was a famous jazz guitarist that came here a couple times. But, you know, the audiences came out, but more out of curiosity.
they didn't really know the music. Nowadays, if you have Diana Krall in Shanghai, you will get a sold out audience and they know her music. And that's a huge difference, right? So people are realizing that jazz is harmless. It's not like Bjork who came and said some really inflammatory things in her concert. Jazz musicians by and large are apolitical. It's all about
cohesion, unity. It's pretty good now, I would say. If you're a jazz fan, not only can you get it on the radio, on the streets, but you can also get it, you can see some of the best jazz musicians in the world playing. It's expensive, but it's worth it. And I don't know, if I were a parent, I would not hesitate for a moment to encourage my child to go ahead and take up the saxophone instead of the violin.
and go into jazz because I think that, you know, the era, China is ripe for that. People accept it. I have a couple of piano students who grew up with jazz, who actually play better than I do. They love it and their parents are very, very supportive. They say, this music is great. The parents are often fans of jazz too.
And they say, yeah, if my son or daughter could be great, then we would love that, right? So it's totally a part of this culture now is accepted as a legitimate type of music, which children can pursue. David, thank you for sharing your insights into the jazz world in 2020.
Beijing and the jazz, a little bit of the history of, or modern history of jazz in China. It's something I've always wanted to ask you about. I've gone to see you play on several occasions, and you're going to put together a Spotify playlist of some of these musicians that we've talked about. If you're interested a little bit in the development, the past, present, and future of Chinese jazz, you can take a listen to this playlist. And David, when is the Ah-Q orchestra going to perform next? How is the band going?
A little plug here. Every Friday night, we play at an Italian restaurant called Ponte in Beijing. You can just look that up. It's probably one of the best Italian restaurants. And we play there every Friday night. And playing with this band, three foreigners, the drummer, Scott Silverman, and Matt Roberts and me, and then the two Chinese guys in the band. Oh, and we all, Butch Ford. We have a guitarist named Butch Ford who sits in with us.
But then the bass player, Da Zhong, and Liu Xiaoguang, the sax player, those are two people that I've seen appear on the scene, improve, and keep working very hard.
They are now teachers, players, very professional. They play better than I do. There's nothing I can teach them. They're fantastic players. I'm honored to even be in the same band with them. And from every time I play with them, I'm just gratified to see, you know, this is, you know, the quality of musician that the Chinese jazz scene has been able to develop. So that's my plug for the Akiu Jazz Orchestra. Well, thank you, David. And thank you all for listening. You can find...
Barbarians at the Gate, wherever fine podcasts are distributed for free. And this is ordinarily the part of the episode where I would say something like, cue the drums. But today, special treat. Strike up the band. Play us out with a little Accu-Archestra. ♪