East-West Jazz Link : Chinese reed player, visiting UCSB, will perform with the campus band.
Jazz is fundamentally a product of the American experience, forged from cultural forces that date to slavery and epitomize the profound African influences on this century’s music.
But its sound has long been disseminated around the world, and musicians far and wide have responded to the music, even behind the bamboo curtain.
It may be surprising to hear that Chinese musicians have also heeded the call of swing, but Chinese musician Fan Shengqi has come to town to demonstrate the cross-talk. Shengqi, a veteran reed player in China, is in Santa Barbara for a residency at UCSB, during which time he has played at SOhO with local pianist Frank Frost and has been part of a lecture and seminar.
He’ll perform Saturday night at the Multicultural Theater on campus as the featured player in concert with the UCSB Jazz Ensemble, led by Jon Nathan.
Shengqi came to town through the efforts of Shirley Kennedy, a lecturer in the black studies department, who heard him while doing research in China.
She found a jazz scene there that was both vital and retro, but for different reasons than those guiding the current neoconservative trend in American jazz.
In China, jazz was banned for many years, deemed corrupt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The music has reemerged in recent years, but has picked up where it left off, with a ‘40s sensibility embracing swing-era and bebop styles.
For Shengqi, the musical goal is more forward-leaning, as he seeks to find a balance of jazz and its sub-idioms and indigenous Chinese music.
Born in 1933, he picked up the saxophone at age 11 but had to shelve it in 1949 as the Communist agenda swept out Western cultural influences. Ironically, he was only allowed to play the sax at Chairman Mao’s private dance parties, otherwise focusing on Chinese reed instruments such as the reed pipe, suona and bamboo flute.
Things changed in 1990 when he visited New York and returned to his homeland determined to delve deeper into jazz and a personal approach to it. By then, jazz had been allowed to return to the public sphere. Now the 5-year-old Peking Jazz Festival has become one of the most respectable new festivals on the scene.
Could China be a new source of inspiration for the malleable idiom that is jazz? Ambitious players such as Shengqi may have an answer to the question.
* Fan Shengqi, in concert Saturday at 8 p.m. with the UCSB Jazz Ensemble at UCSB’s Multicultural Center. $6 general admission, $5 students; (805) 893-8411.
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CINEMATIC TONES: This is the week the New West Symphony goes to the movies, if not with the grandeur originally planned. Budgetary boll weevils have intervened this season, and the logistics of presenting the West Coast premiere of Shostakovich’s live orchestral score to Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” proved forbidding.
The symphony was down but hardly out. It has replaced the Russian opus with Charlie Chaplin’s wonderful film “City Lights.” It may be lighter fare, musically, but the 1931 film is a sure-fire charmer with an integral musical component.
A silent film whose score supplants live dialogue, it’s also a great and rare example of a film whose score was written by its auteur. As it happens, today is also Chaplin’s 109th birthday.
The event promises to be worth catching, the young symphony’s first foray into the practice of live orchestral film screenings.
That tradition has a particular poetic resonance in Southern California, a short jaunt from Hollywood. The concert-screening will be performed at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza tonight, to be repeated next Thursday at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center.
* New West Symphony, performing the orchestral score to “City Lights,” tonight at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. For tickets, call 449-ARTS (449-2787). Show repeats April 23 at Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 800 Hobson Road. 8 p.m. $12-$55; (805) 497-5800.
