Looking out over the Huangpu River and the Shanghai Bund from a Pudong-side cafe as I write this post.
It has now been over four months since the Big Lockdown in Shanghai was officially lifted on or around June 1st. In this post, I discuss how life has returned to “normal” since that time (note: nothing is truly normal since COVID began in 2019.) I focus especially on some of the live music scenes I’ve been participating in lately, which for me are a barometer for city life. The week-long holiday following the 73rd anniversary of the birth of the PRC on October 1 provided me the opportunity to spend a healthy chunk of time in the city and reconnect with people and scenes, including of course my own Shanghai family. Thankfully, the sauna-like heat and humidity of summer are long gone, and except for one sweltering day, we experienced some refreshing rain and mild and cool fall weather. Here are some highlights of the past week.
After teaching my last class of the week at Duke Kunshan University, I returned to Shanghai on Thursday evening, driving through the usual barrage of city traffic towards the Old Docks along the waterway known as the Bund. Arriving there around 7:30 pm, I made my way up to the rooftop where Kathleen’s restaurant is located, where my wife and I attended a party to welcome the new Head of School for Shanghai American School. Since our daughter graduated from the school in June, I don’t currently have ties with the school, except for my legacy as a Board member. It was on that basis I was invited by the other members of the Board to meet the new HoS. It turned out to be a big party with maybe 200 people in attendance, mostly parents of course. We enjoyed the evening overlooking the Bund and the Pudong nightscape, and we met a few other parents as well as catching up with some of the Board members and school admin folk with whom I worked on the SAS Board from 2016-1019.
The band backs a singer (Paul) on the stage of Chair. “I can’t get no….satisfaction!”
Later that night, I attended an event at the Chair, a live music club in the Tonglefang neighborhood, a converted factory district that features bars, restaurants, and clubs (it used to be home to the original Muse 1). That night, the club was opening its stage to “amateur” musicians and singers. Apparently, this was being promoted as an acoustic or unplugged music night, but the musicians were amped up as usual. The house band consists of a drummer, a keyboard player, and a bass player. They backed up a range of artists, including some talented musicians as well as quite a few singers. Some of the singers had their songs down while others relied on their phones to conjure up the lyrics. My bandmate Jud and I pay attention to this, since we’ve been striving to go “off book” in our playing. When it was our turn to mount the stage, we encountered some technical issues, namely that there wasn’t a cable to connect Jud’s acoustic guitar. Lesson learned: always pack a cable or two in your guitar case, as well as spare strings and a device for changing them at a moment’s notice. We played the Led Zep song “Hey Hey What Can I Do” which has become a staple of ours over the past few months. Then our singer Tammy, who recently joined up with us, sang “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie while I accompanied her on guitar.
Musicians and guests hanging outside of the new Magpie cafe, a late-night hangout on Xiangyang Road
After that event, we rode bikes over to the new Magpie, a small café bar on Xiangyang Road, which has become a nightlife hotspot over the past couple years. We’ve been going to the new Magpie quite a lot lately, and usually we end up on mikes with our guitars plugged into the amp, regaling the small and mostly Chinese crowd with a mixture of English and Mandarin pop-rock songs. The owner Jackie and his wife, who runs the café, seem to appreciate our act. Jackie is a good musician, and he often plays guitar and trumpet in his café. He runs a larger café on Kangding Road where we have also spent some time, but nowadays we seem to be gravitating more to this small venue. We were joined that night by Ginger, a well-known singer here in Shanghai who used to sing at the Cotton Club with Greg Smith and band.
On Friday evening, I went to the Xintiandi complex with my wife and daughter to see the Chinese holiday film, 万里归土 which could be translated as “The Long Road Home.” This was the first film we’d seen in theater since the lockdown began in March. Based in reality with some dramatic license, the film tells the story of an intrepid yet beleaguered group of Chinese foreign service officers in 2015, who go all out to get Chinese work crews out of a war-torn country in North Africa, which is in the throes of a revolution. The hero is an officer who uses his linguistic skills as well as a mixture of diplomacy, guile, and grit to get his people across the border and back to China as guns blaze and bombs blast across the inhospitable desert landscape. China is drawing on the Hollywood blockbuster thriller model for its own propaganda purposes, and while the film has a strong political message (unlike some other countries, ahem, China doesn’t interfere with domestic politics in other countries and used no weapons, China is a safe place in contrast to the developing world, etc.) it does seem to work on the dramatic level, even if the film focuses on its Chinese characters while treating most others as a backdrop (again, echoes of Hollywood there). There are a couple of sympathetic individuals from the war-torn country who help the Chinese, only to meet a bad fate at the hands of the revolutionaries. I shan’t spoil it any more in case anybody wants to see the film. My recommendation? Go see it, if only to learn how China is advancing its political propaganda efforts through the medium of film. I found myself appreciating the actor who plays the role of the hero, who goes through hell to get his people back to safety. I would want this dude to have my back.
After all that activity, I had a quiet Saturday, which I spent taking my daughter to her tennis lesson and cycling around the demolition ground of the Old Walled City surrounding the City God Temple (a sad fate indeed for such a precious historical sector of the city).
I stepped out into the live music scenes again on Sunday. That evening I met bandmate Jud, fellow guitar fiend Tom, and a special guest for a jam session at 521, a café restaurant off Suzhou River. We have been jamming there frequently for over a year now. After our warm-up, we headed over to another open mic session, this time at the I Love Shanghai bar on Xinzha Road. This old dive bar has a fraternity feel to it with graffiti art on the walls and a pool table. It has a small stage on one end of the bar, where they hold performances. I gave a film screening of my jazz film there a year ago. The open mic night is hosted by some Filipinos in the musical and F&B community and attended by a variety of musicians. Some of the musicians, such as Ray Dio, play their own original songs, while most others cover well-known pop-rock songs. There is some overlap with the scene we attended at the Chair. We got up on stage and played a small set, and later in the night, after they turned off the amps, we joined a group for an unplugged singalong.
On the stage of I Love Shanghai, we support a singer as we lose our religion
On Monday evening, the restaurant Cottons on Xinhua Road hosted a special live event, featuring Greg Smith on guitar accompanying two singers. The first was guitarist Dave Stone, an Aussie who has been a feature of Shanghai live scenes since he landed here for the Expo in 2010. Following Dave’s set, Greg was joined by Ginger, who gave a lovely vocal performance that included Lou Reed’s song “Satellite Love”, the John Prine tune “Angel from Montgomery” and many others. It was truly a special event, and well attended by a mixture of Chinese and foreign guests. While enjoying the performance I had the chance to catch up with an old mate or two and talk to some other internationals about the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns on China and its precarious foreign communities. Needless to say, the lockdowns dealt a harsh blow to the foreign communities of Shanghai and elsewhere in China and catalyzed another mass exodus of foreign passport holders and international businesses out of China. Those who remain here hope for better times to come. Or perhaps like me, they are willing to forgive the lockdowns long as they never happen again.
The lockdown of spring, which I experienced in the neighboring town of Kunshan (see my previous posts), wasn’t as traumatic as it was for people in Shanghai. Many Shanghai-based folks I’ve talked to over the past month or so, whether Chinese or foreigners, seem to be suffering from a condition that people liken to PTSD. People are still scarred and recovering from that dark episode in Shanghai’s recent history. If music isn’t the cure for this ailment, it is certainly a palliative, and Greg, Dave, and Ginger’s performance had obvious healing powers for a community exhausted from the ordeals of the past few months.
Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena, one of his artworks at the MAP
On Tuesday, I joined my wife and daughter for a tour of the new Pudong Art Museum or MAP. Located in a prime spot overlooking the Huangpu River, with huge windows looking out toward the Bund, the museum is a nice place to visit. The main event was the exhibition of the works of famed Chinese artist Xu Bing. Known especially for his experiments with Chinese characters, his work is stunning when seen in its full glory. In addition, the museum featured a special exhibition of the Tate Museum called “Op Art” which showcased experimental movements in 20th century optical arts by artists in the USA, UK, Europe and elsewhere. One of the highlights of our visit was having lunch on the rooftop restaurant, where we met Alessandro, an F&B entrepreneur who was attending to the needs of the guests. While on the pricey side, I recommend this restaurant with its view overlooking the river and the Bund, and the food is delissimo!
On Tuesday night, we attended yet another open mic session at I Love Shanghai. This time we were joined by musician friends Tom and Kyle, whom we met in August while performing at the Jerry Garcia birthday event in the club Real Shanghai. They had just returned from a music festival in Hangzhou and had some interesting stories to share. They performed a medley of Elliot Smith tunes and one of Tom’s original songs. We performed a couple of our more seasoned songs on stage, and after they turned off the amps around 11 pm, we joined the others for a rousing jam session, with Jud and I leading the way for a while with some party songs and medleys from our growing repertoire. We find that knowing songs well and having two guitars gives us an advantage in these situations, as does our experience playing unplugged in noisy cafes and bars over the past year or so.
Excavation site in the Guangfulin complex.
On Wednesday, I accompanied my wife and mother-in-law on a drive out to Songjiang on the outskirts of the Shanghai metropolitan area, where we visited the 广富林文化遗址，a complex of old-style Chinese buildings and temples surrounding the excavation site where artifacts of habitations from 6000 BC were found. The excavation site is replicated in a big underground space that also takes one on a journey through Chinese history. With its replicas of ancient old tombs, artifacts, and local businesses from Ming Dynasty, ending with the Bundscape of Shanghai, this space reminds me of the previous instantiation of the Shanghai History Museum in the Pearl Tower in Pudong. The complex was packed with vacationers from Shanghai and environs, and despite the masks, it did indeed seem for a moment that holiday life in China has returned to its normal frenzy.
Last night, my remaining bandmate and I ended up playing our guitars for quite a while under an outside canopy at Ray’s bar, a neighborhood bar on Changle Road, while the rain on the canopy provided a canasta for our songs. Owner Ray seems very happy to have us there, and we may end up playing a regular gig at this bar in future. One plus is that inside the bar has an electric piano, and I ended up playing the piano and singing a few songs to Jud’s guitar accompaniment, much to the delight of a very happy group of Italians who were celebrating a birthday. Thus, we are doing our part to reinject some merriment into the city’s musical nightscape and give our international residents more reasons to stay here. Or at least we hope so.