Since the news of the pandemic first broke out in January of 2020, live music worldwide has taken a big hit. Live concerts and performances have been canceled. Bands and musicians have been forced to perform remotely online via live-streaming or else to record their songs from their own homes or from studios. Bands have come up with clever and ingenious ways to stitch their individual parts, often delivered from their own homes, together into seamless compositions. And with the proliferation of home studios and advanced recording technologies, they have been able to continue to hone and develop their art and their craft, as demonstrated most remarkably by Sir Paul McCartney, who just release his latest one-man album McCartney III. In these ways, despite no opportunities for live in-situ performances since at least March of this year, musicians have sought to stay connected to—and even to expand—their audiences. These efforts have been heroic, and they have been very well-received by audiences around the world, in a time period when we need music and musicians more than ever to keep us in good spirits.
Live music in China has also suffered this year, just as it has elsewhere around the world. Yet, unlike much of the rest of the world, which is now struggling more than ever to keep the virus under control, China has largely subdued it. Despite a rather slow and tragic beginning, China’s systematic efforts to control the virus and to stop its spread began around the time of Chinese New Year in late January 2020. In my previous post, I wrote about how grateful I was to be able to participate in a live music performance along with our group the Jazzy Tuesdays at Duke Kunshan University’s annual CNY gala. Right after our performance, news arrived of the outbreak in Wuhan, and by the next day the university was locking down.
Over the next few weeks, China systematically shut down businesses and schools, and much to everyone’s shock and dismay, the government ordered the entire region surrounding Wuhan to be blocked. At the time, we weren’t sure if the government was over-reacting, but events over the next few months seem to have affirmed their grim decisions. While I sojourned for several months in the USA, China’s heavy-handed hard shutdown followed by a very systematic campaign of testing, tracing, and quarantining people eventually brought cases down to practically zero. The campaign still goes on, but for the most part, since summer at least, society in China has opened up once again and returned to a level of normality that is the envy of many other parts of the world.
So, what has happened to the live music scenes in China? Since I returned to China in September and went through the necessary period of quarantine, I have been able to explore the live scenes in Kunshan, Shanghai, and Suzhou, and I can report on what I’ve seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. I can’t speak for the entire country, but I think that what has happened and what is happening now in these cities is fairly representative of China as a whole.
First, during the lockdown in February, live music establishments all over China shut their doors for a period of at least three or four months. This had a devastating impact on music venues and on musicians. Moreover, most if not all of the foreigners who were in music scenes left the country during that period, and many of them have been unable to return to China. Meanwhile, foreign musicians and bands who were scheduled to visit the country had to cancel or postpone indefinitely their tour plans. This has led to a scenario where the relatively small number of foreign musicians who remained in China are finding themselves in even greater demand due to the scarcity of foreign talent in the country (this is true in many other areas as well such as education for starters). At the same time, the Chinese musicians in the various scenes have also been able to flourish as never before.
Not all live music venues in China were able to survive the lockdown period. Some crashed and burned, while others managed to get through it intact. From what I’ve heard, many live bars in Suzhou had to shut down, both because of the lack of revenue during that period, but also because of the scarcity of both musicians and their audiences. Those that did survive have had to rely on a larger Chinese audience base, since most foreigners left the country and have had a hard time getting back in since it started to open up again to foreign visitors and residents in September.
One case in point is the Filipino musical community. There are at least several thousand Filipino musicians working in bars, restaurants, and hotels in China, or at least there were until February of 2020. While I don’t know the total number of musicians who returned to the Philippines after the news of the outbreak in January, I do know enough about the Filipino musicians in Kunshan and Suzhou to say that it must have been a significant number. Most of the Filipino musicians whom I came to know in the Kunshan live bar scene over the past five years flew the coop in February.
On December 18 2020, I had the honor of jamming with the Eagle Bar Band on my birthday. Robert is to my left. Melody is to my right. Flash is on drums and Ryan is on bass.
I know of only one Filipino singer in Kunshan, Melody of the Eagle Bar, who managed to stay in China. She told us how she suffered through the four-month lockdown period on her own after her bandmates left the country. By June, the clubs were beginning to open again. Melody is now grateful that she remained in China, because she was able to resume her job and continue to earn money to support her family back in the Philippines. Those who returned home were not so lucky. Due to the difficulty of getting visas to China along with the expense of flights, which are up to twenty times what they originally cost, they have been stuck in their home country.
In the case of the Eagle Bar, in order to reconstitute the band, the bar owner hired some Filipino musicians from Suzhou, who had also stayed on in China despite the lockdown. With the shutdown of many establishments in Suzhou, these musicians were fortunate to be able to move over to the neighboring city of Kunshan (actually it’s part of the Suzhou Municipality) where their skills in covering western and Chinese pop music were easily transferable. Now, one of the top guitarists in Suzhou, Robert, is with the Eagle Bar band in Kunshan, and I daresay that the Eagle Bar may now have the best cover band in the Suzhou Municipality.
In Shanghai, based on my own impressions, those bands and musicians who stayed in China or returned quickly enough and braved the lockdown period in early spring are now thriving as never before. One case in point is our extraordinary saxophonist, wind instrumentalist, composer and bandleader, Alec Haavik, who seems to be doing more than ever to provide the city with jazz and swing dance music. I’ve been keeping up with Alec’s performances on Wechat and Facebook since the summer, and he has been very active on the jazz scene, playing at the various JZ clubs and other venues.
Alec Haavik performs swing and early rock’n’roll tunes at Shake in Shanghai on the night of Nov 27 2020. Behind him on upright bass is Michael Hicks.
Recently my wife and I attended a performance by Alec and a hot swing band at a bar called Shake, which encourages dancing, and we had a great time trotting out our old swing dance routines along with a crowd of veteran sockhoppers. I recall that the bassist for the band that played at Shake, Michael Hicks, was in Southeast Asia for part of the early lockdown period, but he returned to China just before the country closed its doors to foreigners. He was one of the lucky ones who made it back just in time. And now he too seems to be getting a lot of gigs these days.
Needless to say, Shanghai had and still has a much larger population of foreigners than Kunshan or Suzhou. Moreover, the Chinese citizens living in Shanghai are probably more inclined to frequent live music scenes of various sorts. Thus, it’s hard to see a significant impact on the live venues in Shanghai as a result of the lockdown period. The verdict is out on this though, and I need to talk to more people to find out what the impact has been.
Kunshan had such a small live music scene to begin with, and it was already transitioning to a largely Chinese client base, so the impact also doesn’t seem to be that great. After losing many of its musicians in the exodus that followed the initial lockdown, Kunshan was able to siphon off musicians from the neighboring Suzhou scene, at least in the case of the Filipinos who play cover songs in the city’s live bars. Of the three cities, Suzhou seems to have been most greatly affected the lockdown period. On the other hand, you can also say that Shanghai’s scenes are not nearly as diversified as they were, in terms of the inflow of musical talent from abroad.
My filmmaking partner Jud Willmont and I did make it to Suzhou the other weekend to see the band Carsick Cars, now a legendary band in China’s indie rock scene. I had last seen them perform back in 2007, when they were just a fledgling band in the indie scene that Michael Pettis was helping to incubate at club D22 in Beijing. That was of course the subject of our film Down: Indie Rock in the PRC. Now they are veterans of not just China, but of the global indie rock scene as well. Back together again after many years, the original trio gave a flawless performance of their high-intensity, gritty, guitar-driven style at Wave Livehouse in the Suzhou SIP district. The house was jam packed with hundreds of Chinese youths, many of whom were likely attracted into this scene by the successful TV series sponsored by Modern Sky Records that pits indie bands in a contest, 乐队的夏天. There was also a small scattering of foreigners, no more than you could count with your fingers.
Kang Mao of the band SUBS performing at Modern Sky Lab on Nov 20 2020.
Another indie rock band from our film Down that we saw recently in Shanghai is SUBS. They performed to a sizable crowd of Chinese and foreigners at the Modern Sky Lab along with two all-girl bands, the Hormones from Chengdu, and South Acid Mimi from Yunnan. With Kang Mao on vocals and keyboard and Wu Hao on guitar, backed by a fairly new drummer, SUBS rocked the house down and got the crowd moshing and pogoing to their hyper-intense and dramatic music and performance. Kang Mao even put on a hijab-like scarf that veiled her face at one point in the performance and chanted like a shamaness. It was certainly a cathartic concert, and you could tell that after months of pent-up solitude, folks were out that night to rock’n’roll as never before. Afterwards, we crowded into a back room with SUBS and the other bands along with their sponsors from Jing-A, a Beijing-based craft brewery. It sure felt like old times as we snapped photos and caught up with Kang Mao and Wu Hao after all these years.
All of these experiences have led me to believe that the music scenes in China are picking up and reviving after several months of morbidity. Even so, it is far from an ideal scenario. With the rest of the world still locked out of China, the usual flow of talent in and out of China from abroad has stopped, and this will certainly make a big impact on the music scenes.
For those who remained in China, it’s been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, musicians here in China have more opportunities to perform. They are getting more gigs, and have more chances to develop their craft, expand their networks, and extend their collaborations with other musicians. Nevertheless, modern music is a global entity, and it needs that ocean of talent from all over the world to thrive. Live music scenes that are cut off from the world run the risk of stagnating, and people might tire of seeing and hearing the same talents week after week and month after month, no matter how good they are. Thus, until the world gets back to normal and China opens its doors once more, the status of live music in this country, no matter how lively it may be, is a precarious one indeed.