May 31.

I feel like I’ve been walking non-stop for 2 weeks now. After the rigorous schedule I kept in Beijing with my sister (Forbidden City, Great Wall, Summer Palace…) I thought my legs would toughen up, but all that walking (China is big!) felt like I’d been worked over with a veal hammer. I kept telling myself “How often will you get to see all this stuff? Get with the program: Shuffle along, gawk, take pictures, shuffle, gawk, more pictures…”

Then I hit Shanghai which has its own grand scale. Not so much thousand-year-old architecture but more the juxtaposition of traditional and modern aesthetics. Small and aromatic sidestreets, reminiscent of the Beijing hutongs, abut ridiculously huge and eye-popping skyscrapers. Beautiful spacious parks alternate with Bladerunner blocks of vertical concrete and hyperbolic neon. Shuffle, gawk, take pictures…

I had a list, which I managed to follow somewhat. I checked out the Bund. I checked out the music stores on East Jinling street. I checked out the bars on Hengshang Road. The Melting Pot (the sister club of the Melting Pot in Hong Kong) had a cool vibe and a good house band from L.A. Sunday nights is an invitational jam, so I had the pleasure of playing with a variety of great local players & singers, everything from slo jamz to hard bop to avant funk.

Monday evening I checked out the House of Blues & Jazz, which is in a beautiful historic building near the Bund. The aesthetic is old Shanghai and the jazz has a vintage quality. B&W photos of jazz legends like Miles, Dizzy and Billie adorn the walls, and the clientele is largely European ex-pats. One wouldn’t be surprised to see a monocle or two and maybe a pearl-handled cane.

Finally, I ended the night at the JZ Club which has the well-deserved rep of being the main jazz club in Shanghai. The decor is hip, the acoustics are great, and the musicians come to play. Most of them are also teachers at the affiliated JZ music school. It is an exciting and logical development which I hope becomes a trend elsewhere: A nightclub has a pool of talented players, and opens a school where these players can teach interested students. The teachers share their knowledge by day and showcase their talents by night.

I have one more day to soak up the Shanghai scene. If I can get it together I might check out the World Expo even though everyone says it’s a crowd-a-thon. But everyone who has gone says it is worth the hassle, so break out the veal hammer, it’s time for more shuffling.

May 26. Shanghai.
I took a late afternoon flight from Beijing to Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, sandwiched between two Chinese businessmen. It was a fairly typical experience, which is to say a mind-bending pairing of contrasts. The gorgeous flight attendants in their blood red Jackie-O style uniforms pampered us with food, drink and soothing admonitions, while the businessmen coughed and sneezed in my face, elbowed me casually as they reached for magazines and PDAs, and I tried to eat my beef noodle airplane snack under their watchful gaze. Just another day in paradise.

I arrived Shanghai around 6:30, survived the push-a-thon at baggage claim, got the number 2 subway west to Xujing, where my friend Rick had told me to hail a cab and give the driver my cellphone so Rick could provide directions. A simple maneuver, except that several other cabbies wanted in on the conversation, including unmarked private cabs, and a couple guys on motorcycles who seemed to think my luggage and sax case would fit between their legs and I could ride on the back tire. After a long exchange on the phone, my cabbie nodded to me & we were off through a range of new construction and old villages, arriving at my friend’s swank apartment in a subdivision of the Shanghai American School. After all the hostels, kooky hotels and funky workers paradise apartments I had flopped in over the last 3 weeks, it was quite a change. No strange sounds, sights, smells. Quiet. This morning I found myself sipping coffee in a spacious livingroom with just the ticking of a wall clock for company. Rick & family were all up and out the door by 8am, on the academic schedule.

Over the last two years, Rick has put together a range of jazz classes here. A great vibraphonist, he and his wife, both teachers, relocated to Shanghai from Austin and after the initial culture shock they have grown to love it. I wanted to see what his music classes were like, and he graciously invited me to sit in as his students prepare for their end-of-semester concert.

Rick keeps asking me questions about Austin and I have to stop and think because that world has been crowded out of my head with all the sensory input of the last 3 weeks. I know that once I return to Texas the reality of China will start to fade. It’s always that way with travel; where you are is real, and where you were spreads into dreamlike vignettes.

May 24. Images of Beijing.
In the hutong: old woman sitting in a tiny convenience store. At her feet a white rooster pecks at the floor.
middle aged couple walking down the street in matching striped pajamas. The authorities in Shanghai have clamped down on public wearing of pajamas, but here in Beijing it seems to be a statement of cultural pride, and everyone seems to be cool with it.
A man with pet goose walks down the hutong street. The goose has a lanyard and badge around his neck. The man talks to it in a low conversational voice and the goose seems to be listening. Every now and then the goose waddles a little faster than the man, then looks over its shoulder and waits for the man to catch up.
I found a music store on Drum Temple Street East, near my hotel, and tried out a Chinese alto sax. I had a bad cultural moment when the clerk put on his own mouthpiece replete with funky food-stained reed, but I manned up and jammed it into my chops. We’re both musicians after all; germs can’t compete with that, right? The horn felt pretty good, not bad tone and intonation. Easy to get the harmonics, although the key action was a little stiff on the low notes.
My hotel, the Hutong Inn has a bar with an outdoor deck looking out over the huton and beyond, the city. And the give you a free Tsing Tao beer at check-in.
In the trendy hutong i ate a mediocre meal of tofu, soybeans and green peppers, surrounded by other Westerners. I knew it was probably a tourist trap joint, but I wasn’t sure I could find another restaurant close by. Then as i walked back to my less trendy hutong i saw all kinds of great restaurants, where the locals were eating. C’est la vie.

May 23.
Sunday evening in Beijing. The last 2 nights I went to the East Shore Jazz Club, a jewel of a bar in the Houhai lake area. Friday night had a great trio, and Saturday night soprano saxophonist Liu Yuan led a great quartet through straight ahead jazz standards. It’s a beautiful area, layered with history. Some of the bars & restaurants are a little touristy, with bad pop music and overeager shills working the scene. But mostly it’s a relaxed and friendly mix of strolling couples, families, foreigners just out for a nice evening.

By day there are so many historical places to visit that it’s overwhelming. The Forbidden City, The Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven. But Beijing isn’t just a city of museums and monuments; the people use the public spaces. The parks and pavilions that hundreds and thousands of years ago were the exclusive provenance of royalty are now the common property of everyday people, and they aren’t shy about enjoying it. One of my favorite experiences is the informal groups of amateur dancers who just take over public spaces, crank up some pop music on a portable sound system, and go to town. Some do formal ballroom steps, some do line dancing, some just look like they threw together bits from an aerobics class. We passed one gathering getting down to a club remix of some 70s rock song. Then a little ways on they were doing the tango to a scratchy patriotic number, my Chinese friend explained, dating to the war with Japan. The lyrics didn’t seem to matter, as long as there was a beat you could dance to. Pretty much the same around the world.

There are a number of lakes in Beijing, and people congregate there in the warm weather as the city starts to swelter. The crowds, a chaotic mix of young and old, pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, ebb and flow with an organic rhythm which can be exhausting but which is so real and accepting that you somehow feel at home, no matter what part of the world you came from.

The city is changing fast, and one of the things that is disappearing are the hutongs, little neighborhoods made up of small sidestreets, almost alleys, just oozing history. Tiny shops, restaurants, shacks, hostels and hotels are jammed up against each other. It’s funky, and yet mostly quiet and mellow compared to the bigger bustling streets. But like all cities, verticality is more profitable, and the hutongs are being replaced by highrise apartments, hotels and stores more and more. If they can generate enough tourist money, some of them may be preserved, but who knows for how long.

May 19.
Finally have some time to reflect on the last week. After Dongguan, I flew to Zhengzhou where I met my sisters Wendy & Joyce. Wendy & her s.o. Steve Brower were invited as visiting artists to do projects at Sias University in Xinzheng, near Zhengzhou. Joyce, who has been developing her videography skills over the last decade, went along to document their work (check out her blog at joyceklemperer.com). I finagled myself into the mix, giving a lecture on American music at the music department, as well as a workshop for saxophone students there.
Sias is a marvel. Started in 1998 with 400 students, it has grown exponentially. Each year there are new buildings, new departments and degree plans, and many more students.
I’m hoping to come back again and work on jazz with the students as the music department continues to grow.

We took a few days for an excursion to the ancient city of Xi’an, the capital of one of the early dynasties (don’t ask me which until I have gone over my notes on Chinese dynasties, but I know it was about 5000 years ago), and saw the terra cotta warriors. The most amazing thing is not that there are thousands of them, or that excavation has only uncovered a small portion of them, or that they are so old, or that they give us a glimpse of what life was like back then. The amazing thing is that the archaeologists have done such an incredible job reassembling them from the countless shards they broke into when the dirt roof hiding them collapsed. You walk into a huge domed area covering excavated pits, and see, next to the reconstituted standing phalanxes of statues, other pits full of broken statues, basically pits of rubble that will have to be painstakingly cleaned, organized and rebuilt. It’s like a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, all in brown.

Adjoining the pits is a museum that contains the bronze and silver accoutrements of the warriors, and from the tomb of the emperor, lots of weapons, jewelry, tools and such. The piece I really liked was an ancient silver pick, for a musician to pluck some ancient stringed instrument. Maybe they buried some singer-songwriter in the emperor’s tomb 5000 years ago, to entertain him in the afterlife. A gig’s a gig…

May 10.
It rained in Hong Kong as I left Sheung Wan and clumsily wheeled my rolling sax case and various other bags down & down into the bowels of the MTR. The plan was to meet Ojie, one of the musicians who play in Dongguan, and he would be my trusty native guide back into the mainland. Turns out I knew him: he was one of the Filipino musicians I had jammed with two years ago the first time I visited Hong Kong. Great keyboard player. We took one train, then met up with Dito, the drummer, who looked, sounded and acted like a short Anthony Quinn.

The MTR actually has a subway train that goes all the way to the border at Shenzhen. From there you go through immigration, then board a coach bus to wherever. The Filipinos all have wives in Hong Kong that they visit on Sunday, then they make the trek back to Dongguan to play at the club Monday-Saturday. I guessed that their wives are domestic workers in HK, because Sunday is the day off for all domestics. They congregate in parks all around HK, eating and socializing. Then it’s back to work for 6 days.

The whole journey took about 3 1/2 hours. When we reached Dongguan, we took a regular bus to the city center, then walked to the Vibe Jazz Cafe to meet Freddy, the manager who had invited me. The club was very swank, nice decor & lighting, great stage & sound system. Freddy is on a mission to bring upscale jazz to southern China. The industrial belt that stretches from Dongguan throughout the New Territories is in some ways an international community. Business executives and workers from many countries spend a lot of time there. They patronize bars and restaurants. But so far the music is not what you’d call highbrow: DJ’s, rock & pop bands… music to drink by. The Vibe is a unique experiment. It could be a case of pearls before swine, or it could catch on as people (especially the 30 & over crowd) realize they can have a more culturally satisfying nightlife.

May 9
Last night, Saturday, I got to play with some old friends here in HK. Tommy Chung, blues guitarist, was rocking the house at the Melting Pot, and after a ginger beer, I broke out the tenor and joined him on a few classics like The Thrill Is Gone. Then I went up to Peel Fresco, a hip hang that features straight ahead jazz as well as blues, pop & rock.
Today, Sunday, I was slow to pry myself out of my cozy little room at the Mingle On The Wing in Sheung Wan. But since it was really my last full day here I figured I should explore a little. None of my friends were on the radar so I took a random ride on the purple Po Lam line of the MTR and checked out Yau Tong, Hau Tak and then back to Wan Chai.

It wasn’t the best plan for a touristic experience, but it was educational. Yau Tong, on the eastern part of the Kowloon side of the bay, was not pretty. The same was true further in at the Hau Tak stop. It was a challenge to look at all the huge drab highrise apartment buildings, concrete everywhere, unbuilt spaces serving as junkyards and dumping grounds, and not see it through my Westerner filter. In other words it reminded me of areas of the U.S. where urban blight spreads, where poor people are contained, out of sight of the wealthy. But that view is misleading.

When I ventured out and walked around I started to see a pattern. The highrises border large and modern shopping malls. You step from an aesthetic dystopia of dirty concrete into a clean and bustling indoor world of consumer culture. Also, when I walked into the courtyards and walkways bordering the godawfully huge apartment buildings, I noticed some effort was put into landscaping, albeit usually minimal: Little gardens in the common areas, with shrubs and benches, a tree here and there. Nothing too extravagant, but it revealed that dense urban Chinese housing wasn’t just a malevolent sci-fi movie, where people are stored in Matrix-like pods.

Rather, it is a compromise between individual comfort and sheer numbers. How do you give every family a decent place to live when there are just so many people? There are interesting choices made about how to develop public spaces, how much money to spend on looks vs. pragmatic use-value. In some parts of China, the public spaces are extravagant statements on the collective will of the people. In other parts, public space is just a means to get from one place to another.

May 7, Hong Kong.

I was going to stay with a friend in the Mid-Levels area on HK island, but her yappy pug dog had other ideas, growling and barking nonstop for 8 hours. So I, like many travelers on the cheap, found a guesthouse across the bay. I had stayed at some funky places the last time I visited HK, but Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui is a world unto itself. It’s a ginormous building with shops on the ground level and about 80 different guesthouses above, divided into blocks from A-E. I was in cellblock C.

The location is not bad, just 2 MTR stops from Central in HK, and Tsim Sha Tsui has a lot of high end stores and the museum complex is a short walk, sitting on the waterfront. But Nathan Road, the main boulevard, is exhausting. Indian men, looking like moderately successful businessmen but sounding like shady drug dealers, accost you constantly. “Watches? Rolex? Suits? Armani? Come, good deal!”
I had flashbacks to high school, walking through the Combat Zone in Boston, but instead of Mexican Brown and Thai Stick, it was the seamy underbelly of the fashion world.

Inside Chunking Mansions, you are struck by the mix of sights and smells. Foodstalls with Chinese, Indian, African edibles (seemingly all deep fried) flank the walkway, interspersed with high tech toys and cheap clothing. Wizened Chinese men push trolleys of food, technology, garbage in all directions.

People are everywhere, trying to squeeze past each other. Maybe 1% of the folks are European or American. Big, short, thin, fat, all talking in different languages and all, it seems, needing to get in the same elevator as me. It’s a tight squeeze. An aromatic tight squeeze.

My room was supposed to be in one guesthouse but at check-in there was some sleight of hand (”your room not ready; I give you another, cheaper”) and I ended up in a tiny windowless cell, but it had ac, a bathroom, and no yappy dogs. I slept.

Feeling human once more, I wandered the streets behind Nathan Road, chose a restaurant at random and went upstairs. The waitress put me at a big table with three Chinese businessmen. Homestyle seating. They looked at me. I smiled at them. They moved to another table. Two Chinese meter maids took their place. I smiled at them. They smiled at me. Then we ignored each other.

The waitress gave me a menu in English which nobody else was using. All the items were in the $10US range. I asked if there was a lunch special. She looked at me askance and handed me the Chinese menu, with lunch sets for $32HK (about $3.80US). I asked if one had seafood. “Yes, seafood,” she said and pointed at some Chinese characters. Then she brought a plate of sliced beef and cabbage. But it was good, and came with a vegetable soup and hot tea in a plastic glass.

Before I went back to HK Island I checked out the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It’s a great deal, just over a dollar US, and has 4 floors, with Chinese art extending from the Neolithic period to contemporary. First floor is jewlery and ornamental art, mostly gold. Second floor is scrolls. Third floor is ceramics. The Fourth floor is contemporary and seemed to be devoted to one artist: Wu Guanzhong. Great stuff, especially after having looked at the ink & color techniques on the scrolls, because his technique draws deeply from that tradition. The only thing that bothered me was his poetic hyperbole, painstakingly translated into English, explaining each of his works. But there was one bon mot that made me smile, a paragraph explaining a painting of a waterfall that went something like: “The pristine water reflects man’s essential filthiness.” Right on, brother!

May is when the rainy season starts and the day had been grey, the air heavy with moisture. I took the MTR back to Central and by the time I got up to the street again it was raining steadily.

I ducked out of the rain for a bit into the Harvest Coffeeshop on Lyndhurst Terrace in Mid-Levels. An intriguing retro-futuristic set-up, like if Stanley Kubrick had put a Dunkin’ Donuts on the moon). One presses a button to activate a sliding glass door and suddenly you’re a world away from wet winding streets and loud Anglo businessmen barking into their cellphones in the doorways of pubs.

A polite white-capped barrista helped me select an overpriced coffee and, again like Dunkin’ Donuts, he asked if I wanted milk & sugar (growing up back on the East Coast it was always tricky; the counterman would say “Ya want it white or black? Sugar?” and then he’d dump as much in as he thought best and you’d better like it or tough). He said he’d bring it to me and I went upstairs to the second level. True to form, the coffee was perfect, not too light, not too sweet.

The walls of Harvest were painted canary yellow, to offset the bright orange faux leather benches, white modular plastic chairs and fake wood tables. Black & white photos of 1940s Manhattan adorned the walls, interspersed with giant ad photos of beautiful young contemporary Westerners eating bagels while grinning like idiots (now that would be a tough shoot for an aspiring model: “Hold the bagel higher. No, use two hands! Now smile. Bigger! That’s the best goddam bagel you ever had in your life so smile like your face is gonna break!”).

All of that is just typical Hong Kong aesthetics. But there was also a history of the bagel printed on the wall, and while I’m sure similar histories are on walls of similar bagel emporia in the U.S., I had to come to Asia to learn my bagelology:

In 1683, as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, King of Poland and renowned equestrian, a baker in Vienna, Austria baked yeast dough in the shape of a stirrup. Sobieski had successfully repulsed an attack by Turkish invaders. The Austrian word for stirrup is “beugel” and so the legend of the magical ringshaped comestible began.

What my coffeeshop didn’t mention was that the Turks, while besieging the gates of Vienna, introduced coffee to Europe. So now we hold the mementos of two warring entities in each hand. In fact they have become one, united through the ordinary working stiff: “I’ll have a bagel and a cup of coffee.”

But who invented the schmeer?

May 5.
After a full day of touristification in Shanghai yesterday, I am now sitting in Hongqiao Airport awaiting a delayed flight to Shenzhen, and from there to Hong Kong. The weather was too good to last, and I woke up to pouring rain. Of course I had packed everything but an umbrella, so by the time I got to the airport I was pretty moist. However, the plane was cancelled anyway and I had to rebook on a later flight, which gave me time to eat at a fast food noodle place called “Kung Fu” with art & color scheme suspiciously similar to KFC (except a Bruce Lee-esque icon instead of the Colonel). Not bad noodles and bbq pork buns. Breakfast of champions.
The airport at Shenzhen was also surprisingly modern and clean. The only depressing thing was the miles & miles of shabby highrise apartment buildings and factories stretching into the distance as we rode to the border of the New Territories. Shades of Soylent Green, but that’s progress for ya. The reassuring lush jungle flora all around took the edge off. It was a reminder that when the human race is done carving up the planet’s surface, mother nature will reclaim it pretty quick.

May 3.

I arrived Pudong Airport in Shanghai after a 14 hour flight from Chicago. American Airlines spared every expense, but they got me there and that’s what mattered. My mission now was to meet my friend Rick in the heart of the city. In our modern 21st century world nothing could be simpler. Simply activate your unlocked cellphone with a sim card from your host country, make contact, then take a high-speed transport to a designated rendezvous. Like Kirk meeting McCoy for some Rigellian brandy…

I was going to get a sim card (the little memory/activator card that goes in the cellphone) at the airport, but they were charging $25 (usually the card is $5-10), so I thought I’d just get one when I got into Shanghai. My friends all said you could buy one anywhere. They also said you just take the #2 metro into the city. Much cheaper than a cab, only 7 Yuan, about a dollar U.S. But they didn’t know that there are several #2 metros and some of them only go half way and then just reverse. So I’m 30 minutes into my metro ride when I notice the train is going backwards. “That’s odd,” I said to myself, but I assumed it was perhaps a little dogleg the train makes before proceeding in the right direction since the map on the subway car clearly showed the #2 goes directly to the city.
But when we came back to the previous stop I knew something was wrong and I grabbed all my bags and made a dash for the doors.

Of course all the attendants and guards speak almost no English, but one of them pointed at the map and said “Change.” I got the idea, having been well-trained in the Boston MBTA, and made my way up and down the stairs to the opposite track. The stop I had reached before the train reversed, Congshua road or Long Yang road, was the exchange stop, so I would switch there to some mysterious other #2 train not on the map.
But when that stop came and I started to get out, an attendant came running through the car waving his arms. I made the mistake of pausing to watch. Everyone started running across the platform to a train on the opposite track. This evidently was the mystery #2.

The doors began to close. I leaped in, but my big rolling back got caught. I pushed hard on the doors, but they were efficiently designed People’s Republic doors and pushed back. I had a moment of panic. A deafening warning buzzer kicked in. The thought the train might start gave me an extra jolt of adrenaline and I got the door to back off enough to pull my bag in. A woman ducked inside at the last moment just after my bag. She looked at my bag, then at me with an expression I couldn’t read: Thank you! or maybe, Don’t block the door, you idiot!

After that the train went all the way to my designated stop, Jing’an Temple, which my American friend Rick told me was just a quick cab ride from my real destination, the French Concession area. What he didn’t tell me was that no cab drivers speak English (it’s sort of like NYC). So after I failed to communicate with two cabbies using broken English and hand gestures, I decided to get the elusive sim card, activate my unlocked cellphone and call Rick. Except no store signs were in English, and all the likely suspects, corner groceries, technology stores, had no idea what I was talking about. One salesgirl did wave her arm in a forward direction and said “Ten minutes,” so I went thataway. I walked for maybe a quarter mile, until I found a supermarket that looked promising. I attracted a small crowd of clerks and cashiers as I repeatedly said “Sim card” and made a pinching motion to describe a very small object. Finally a supervisor arrived and with his more extensive training was able to decipher the gibbering foreigner. He pointed across the street from where I had come, to a blue sign. “Cell phone repair,” he explained. A-ha! That sounded very promising. I thanked him and retraced my steps. The only problem was getting across the street. I had taken the easy crosswalk which only spanned four lanes of cars, buses, mopeds and bicycles all of which seemed to have special exemption from the traffic lights. The crosswalk, I now realized, formed a T in the middle of the street. I had crossed the short ways but, judging from the white hatched lines, I was supposed to go half way, then wait in the middle of the street until the “walk” sign turned green on the long side. This made very little sense to my animal survival instincts and I didn’t see any other pedestrians attempting it. Finally I decided to walk back the way I’d come until I found a less suicidal crosswalk.

Miraculously, on the way I noticed a tiny kiosk set up randomly in front of a doorway and sure enough he had sim cards. He didn’t speak English but from my helpless expression he realized I wanted him to do the heavy lifting and so he took my phone, inserted the card and proceeded to press a long series of numbers on the keypad, something like 10 the 4th power, I think. Anyway, it worked. I gratefully paid the man, got a call through to American Rick, flagged a cab, gave the driver the phone, and let Rick talk him in.
I got in the front seat since my luggage took the back, started to put on my seatbelt, was waved off by the driver, and realized it was just for show, there was nothing to clip it to. What the hell, I figured, at least we’re moving. And move we did. To the credit of the Chinese, their cabbies are not as scary as ones I’ve ridden with in Peru or Instanbul, but he kept the ride quite exciting and gave a number of pedestrians and bicyclists something to reminisce about.
Finally we arrived at my destination, Yueyang Lu, a sycamore-lined boulevard in the French Concession, and American Rick took me to the apartment of a musician friend where I was graciously given a room with a bed, upon which I soon collapsed. Later, I awoke around midnight to see the lights of Shanghai magically winking at me outside every window.

May 4, morning. Somewhat recovered from the flight, I walked the winding tree-lined streets of the French Concession, sort of like a dog investigating new surrounds, except I didn’t pee on everything.
Met a friend for lunch who agreed to play tourguide. We ate at a place called Simply Thai, very clean & trendy. We had fried fishcakes and a stirfry of mostly peapods, very mild for Thai cuisine. On my walk I had noticed the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, so we checked that out after eating. They had an extensive gallery on the second floor. Very interesting scrolls, mostly ink & color, done by 20th century artists, blending traditional techniques with modern themes. The relation between form and content, technique and subject, resonated with questions I often have about music. Such as expressing new ideas in old styles, or hinting at older techniques within a modern form.