Shanghai Nights of Blues and Jazz

Shanghai has a reputation worldwide--or had one at least--as a Jazz Age metropolis.  Back in the 1920s and '30s, the city attracted great jazz musicians from all over China, Asia, Europe and the United States who played in dozens of ballrooms and nightclubs around the city.  Back in that age, jazz was an integral component of mainstream nightlife in the city, and it was meant for dancing.

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Shanghai’s Nighttime Phantasmagoria: Haunting Nightlife Spaces Old and New

The other night (Thursday March 17) I took my Global Nightlife students and a few of their friends from the NYU Shanghai program on their second tour of Shanghai’s nightscapes.  This time we started at the famed Paramount Ballroom, the finest and most celebrated ballroom of the Golden Age of Shanghai nightlife, the 1930s.  The ballroom is the only one from the 1930s that today is still operating as a commercial dance establishment.

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Dancing at the Majestic Hotel to "Nightime in Old Shanghai" by Whitey Smith

Yesterday I noticed a blog that referenced my book Shanghai's Dancing World along with some other clips and images of 1920s-30s Shanghai (the blogger also had some nice things to say about an  interview podcast I participated in for the Shanghai Lit Fest in March 2010, which I greatly appreciated).  Among them was a British Movietone Newsreel from 1929 showing elegantly dressed Chinese couples in a garden cafe dancing to a Western jazz orchestra.  I immediately recognized it as the Majestic Hotel outdoor garden (I am not quite 100 percent sure of this, but sure enough to make that claim) and the orchestra would be Whitey Smith's, even though the conductor's head is cut off in the clip (you can see his body and up to his neck, but I couldn't identify him as Smith).  Whitey features prominently in my book, and most of the information I found about him comes from his own memoir, I Didn't Make a Million.  

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An A-Muse-ing Weekend in Shanghai or Sexing the Foreigner in the Nightlife Scene

Astute readers of my blog (if there are any) may recall an entry I posted a few years ago about a visit to the Muse Nightclub in Shanghai.  That was back in 2007.  Today there are three Muses operating in the city.  In our book Shanghai Nightscapes:  Nightlife, Globalization, and Sexuality in the Chinese Metropolis 1920-2010 (currently under review by a major university press) James Farrer and I write about the city's nightlife over the past century and how nightlife has come to play a central and defining role in the cosmopolitan identity of the city.  While we don't have time or space to cover all the multifarious twists and turns that nightlife has made over the past few years of explosive growth, nor all the clubs that have ebbed and flowed over the city's nighttime landscape, Muse is definitely central to our story of nightlife's revival since the 1990s.  In the book we discuss the Muse epic in some detail--I'll leave it at that for now, not wanting to spoil a good story.  

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Nightlife in China: A Special Issue of _China An International Journal_

We are pleased to announce that our collective research project on nightlife in contemporary China, after some trials and tribulations, has finally been published. Below are the article titles. This issue of _China: An International Journal (CIJ)_ is now available online and may be accessed through university library websites. I uploaded my own essay onto this site and it may be downloaded by clicking on the link below.
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