The songbirds of China

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The 1930s Shanghai’s Jazz scene rivalled those of Paris or New York  but it was the female vocalists who defined the era. Glass speaks to two living legends. In 1934, jazz composer and pianist Duke Ellington bid farewell to a fellow musician and young trumpeter, Buck Clayton, as Clayton along with 13 band members boarded a ship headed for Shanghai. On their arrival they were greeted by Mr Tung and Mr Vong, proprietors of The Canidrome Ballroom on rue Lafayette in the French Concession, who became the latest employers of Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen.

Though Clayton had arrived from the burgeoning jazz scene in Los Angeles, he named his band in a nod to his renowned contemporaries who put Harlem, New York on the map for jazz. The Mr Tungs and Vongs of Shanghai’s first-class nightclubs and ballrooms were willing to pay top dollar to import the sounds of Harlem and New Orleans – American jazz was all the rage the world over and Shanghai was the melting pot.

In the late 1910s and early ‘20s however, jazz was still a foreign sound for Asian listeners. To the local Chinese population, who numbered over two million, traditional folk music and opera were still the preferred genres until one man, Li Jinhui, penned the first form of a new kind of music which came to be known as shidaiqu, literally meaning “songs of the era”. Born in 1891 to a wealthy and prominent family in Hunan province, Li came of age at a crucial period in Chinese history, the birth of the Republic (initiated by Sun Yat Sen in 1911). The tumultuous transition from the Qing Dynasty to the new government resulted in a deeply conflicted and divided nation largely controlled by warlords.

By 1919, frustration at the ineffectual central government grew to a fever pitch and quickly led to student protests that started in Beijing and sparked labourer uprisings across the nation, igniting the New Culture Movement with which Li would become heavily involved. Along with general principles of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism for the infant nation, Li was particularly concerned with the need for a common, vernacular language (Mandarin) to unify a land as vast and diverse as China.

In 1922 Li relocated to Shanghai for a ministry appointment at the National Language Institute. As a personal project he assembled a group of young musicians, singers and actors to promote patriotic sentiments and the Mandarin language to the youngest citizens of China. Li wrote dramatic acts and composed music that fused traditional folk songs (with colloquial Mandarin lyrics) with Western instrumentation like the piano and violin. The song and dance troupe would provide “a ‘music for the common people,’ like the bright moon in the sky, shining across the land for all the people to enjoy.” He called the group Bright Moon.

Bright Moon travelled and performed children’s songs and plays at local theatres and universities across the nation. The simple tunes of the musical acts were modern (Western) but still familiar and extremely catchy. The group was a runaway sensation which quickly led to new mass media outlets – records and films. Similar song and dance troupes sprouted all over and began to include older, teenaged performers. Originally conceived as a soft tool to push the New Culture Movement’s agenda, Li did not anticipate such a rapid evolution of his innocent children’s song and dance troupe or the intense reactions of the public to his “new” music.

Meanwhile Western expats, the main Jazz clientele, were a relatively small population, and the growing number of cabaret clubs and ballrooms were quickly exhausting their existing customers. Looking to expand, club owners commissioned their musicians to incorporate a more familiar sound to attract the locals. Band leaders like Whitey Smith at the Majestic Hotel “scouted around and found the music to old Chinese folk song melodies adaptable to band treatment”.

He recalls, “A couple of the boys [in the band], assisted by interpreters, worked out arrangements based on Chinese music with – to them – familiar melodies. The saxes, trombones or flutes carried the tune, the only variation being by octaves. Sometimes the violin would take over. Guitars and traps were worked into the background, softly…. More Chinese began to drift in. At first it was out of pure curiosity. Then they began to flock in for enjoyment. Of course we didn’t play Chinese music exclusively … We calmed down the Charleston and brought out the melody in it. We played Dardanella and the Missouri Waltz … We alternated with our Chinese adaptations and gradually got something of a dance beat into them … At Sunday afternoon dances, the Majestic ballroom began packing to capacity – eighteen hundred people.”

The westernisation of Chinese folk and opera songs, and the melodies of Sinified Jazz, met harmoniously in a middle ground and shidaiqu became the music du jour. The distinctly Chinese melodies (pentatonic Chinese scales adapted to Western ones) were set to jaunty, big band arrangements, drawing the crowds out at night into the cabaret clubs and onto the dance floors. Shanghai was considered a world-class jazz capital by the 1930s, touted as a “seventh heaven for the jazz musician” in the music trade journal Metronome. Shanghai’s insatiable appetite for jazz brought in talent from Russia, Japan, the Philippines and the United States, and was a relative safe haven amidst the political turmoil of China.

Sheltered by a bubble of prosperity, Shanghai became the hotbed for the glamorous new music. Li and Smith had unwittingly created the soundtrack for Shanghai’s Golden Age, epitomised by the singers of shidaiqu who lent their matchless voices and beauty to the music. In elegant, form-fitting qipaos, crimson lipstick and coiffures of glossy dark pin curls, these women dominated the screens and radios all over Asia for nearly five decades, capturing the imagination and providing a welcome respite from the grim realities of post imperial China.

As a little girl in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, Yao Lee (who later became known as the Silver Voice, and went on to become arguably the most prolific – with over 400 records – and beloved singer of shidaiqu) was influenced heavily by Li’s “Bright Moon” troupes, in particular his young star Zhou Xuan (Golden voice). “I was too poor to afford records. But I would hear Zhou Xuan on the radio … Her voice was so nice, so clear. I loved her. She was the number one in Shanghai.”

At 13, still a young girl dreaming of meeting her idol, Lee was invited to sing on her uncle’s radio programme. The first order of business was to create a stage name. “At the time, singers didn’t use their real name because it wasn’t good [reputation] for their families. My uncle came up with the name Yao Lee and Yao Ming for me and my brother. You see, Yao sounds like the word ‘need’ [in Mandarin] and ‘li’ means money so I became Yao Lee. My brother (also a singer, who would become a notorious shidaiqu composer) became Yao Ming, ‘need fame’.” Chuckling, Lee adds, “Also it would’ve been difficult to become popular with my given name, Yao Sou Wen. Two characters were catchy, like Zhou Xuan.”

Yao Lee continued to perform live on radio stations and stages throughout Shanghai with her brother, consciously emulating the voice of her favourite star Zhou Xuan. By 1936, Lee was a recognisable name and was invited to perform on a radio show for charity alongside her idol Zhou Xuan – a moment she now pinpoints as the definitive break in her career.

“I was so happy but so scared,” Yao Lee remembers. “She was so beautiful and so lovely. She was such a big star. And I was so” – bringing her thumb and index finger closely together, Yao Lee gesticulates her insignificance. When asked what her idol was like in person, Lee pauses to think, “She was a little shorter than me. And she didn’t like wearing make-up.”

Accompanying Zhou Xuan was her first husband and a composer at the Pathé Record Company (later EMI), Yan Hua. Impressed with Yao Lee’s singing prowess, he invited her to record a duet with him, her first recording, “The Little Cowherd”. Soon after, he specially composed a song for her, “Peddling Lovesickness” (Mai Xiang Shi), Yao Lee’s first hit which would catapult her to stardom.

By 1938 the 16 year old had a contract with EMI and was the main act at Ciro’s Nightclub. The newly constructed Ciro’s was a monument to Art Deco on Bubbling Well Road (the western extension of Nanking Road) and adjacent to the commercial heart of Shanghai. A long driveway cut through a well-groomed lawn with a large fountain centrepiece led automobiles chauffeuring the city’s elite to the entrance of a white concrete building, on top of which a tall obelisk projected from the roof and lit the name “Ciro’s” in neon.

Yao Lee recounts her early performing days. “I was sixteen years old when I signed a four-year contract to sing at Ciro’s. I was the first Chinese girl to perform there, because I was so popular at the time. I performed every seven days a week. I had no holidays, no Saturdays or Sundays off.” Lowering her voice to a tone reminiscent of her sophisticated rendition of “This Love is Not for Me”, she adds, “Big movie stars like Li Lihua would come every Sunday to watch me perform and request specific songs.” By day, Yao Lee recorded songs with EMI or sang live on radio stations and by night she performed shows at Ciro’s or the Yangzi Ballroom. “My fans would wait for me outside the station after radio shows. They brought me snacks, worried that I would be hungry after performing.”

In a mixture of pride and guilt, Yao Lee shares one particular example of her success, “At the EMI offices, they kept bi-annual charts of record sales. My song Rose, Rose I Love You was at the top of the charts that year, beating Zhou Xuan’s numbers. Yan Hua told me that Zhou Xuan was not too happy about that and was a little bit jealous.” Shaking her head, she says, “I felt so bad and so apologetic to her. But Yan Hua said to me, don’t worry about it.”

As Yao Lee’s career continued to peak, China was already well into a civil war. In the late 1940s, General Chiang Kai-shek of the nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) – and an ally of Sun Yat Sen, and the Communist Party of China (CPC) were vying for control of Shanghai. The CPC eventually wrested power from the KMT, and the People’s Liberation Army marched into Shanghai on May 27, 1949.

By then, much of the recording had ceased with the exception of heavily propagandist leftist films or music. Celebrities and entertainment executives scattered; many fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan while others chose to undergo “re-education” and continue their singing and acting careers under the Communist regime. Yao Lee, fearing for her life, left Shanghai with her family in 1950. “I was so scared and very sad. I thought my life, and career, were finished.”

But in 1952, EMI re-established its offices in Hong Kong and re-recruited many of its old stars, including Yao Lee. Along with the established names, a cluster of rising stars, including a young girl from Malaysia named Poon Sow Keng, were navigating the newly established recording industries in Hong Kong and Singapore. Keng describes the beginning of her shidaiqu career; “It all began when I recorded a few songs in Singapore. A record manager from Hong Kong heard it, flew over, signed me up and held a mini-press conference to announce it as well. At the time, EMI weren’t really sure if I could make it in the business, so they gave me cover versions of songs like Bengawan Solo and China Doll to sing. Once the records hit the shops and began to sell, they began to see my potential as an artiste. They asked my vocal coach, Mr Yew Man, to compose songs especially for me, and one of those songs was Lover’s Tears. That’s when I really began to sell a lot of records.”

Keng moved to Hong Kong soon after signing with EMI “because there were more night spots there, the opportunity was there to make more money and be on stage.” By the 1960s and ’70s, she was an established shidaiqu star. “At the time, the fans were really on their best behaviour. They wouldn’t have torn at your clothes or chased you down the street. They liked to write letters to me and if they saw me in public, they would nod or wave or smile and ask for my autograph.”

According to Yao Lee, after the move to Hong Kong the songs lost some of their former jazzy lustre as many of the elaborate, “first-class” and classically trained Russian bands (many of which had been solely devoted to the recording studios who demanded the highest quality of musicians) had not immigrated with the singers. The arrangements thinned out and lost their rich, layered quality as smaller, ten-man Filipino bands took over both the nightclub scene and recording studios.

But this new period of shidaiqu was not without colourful inspiration. In the 1950s and 60s, American Rock and Roll and Country & Western music was at the top of pop charts, and like jazz in the 1930s and 40s, deeply influenced shidaiqu. “I loved listening to English songs,” says Keng, “My idols were Nat King Cole and Andy Williams – the former had a very low tone while the latter, a very high tone. I really enjoy listening to their voices.” Yao Lee recalls, “I sang a lot of English songs, like Patti Page’s, with Mandarin lyrics. I liked the melodies of these songs so I asked my brother to write the songs for me in Chinese.”

By the late 1960s and 70s though, shidaiqu had been almost entirely replaced by Western, Taiwanese and local (Cantonese) Hong Kong popular music. There was a resurgence in the 1980s and 90s when old Shanghai classics were revived with covers by popular Taiwanese and Hong Kong singers. More recently, hugely popular projects like music producer Ian Widgery’s Shanghai Lounge Divas compilation CD remixed the classics with electronic beats ostensibly to attract younger audiences.

When asked for her thoughts on the remix Yao Lee wrinkles her nose in distaste and shakes her head. “I don’t like it,” she states emphatically. “Why change something so beautiful?” She promptly called the manager of EMI Hong Kong and insisted that he “never do it again”.

There is something to be said for preserving the original songs of shidaiqu. The days when music was about the quality of the arrangement, the clever composition of the songs, the skill of the musicians and especially the signature style of the vocalist. “Singing was strictly about singing,” recalls Keng. “From the 80s onwards, the image of artistes became more important than the artiste … But back in my era it was all about the talent. The public who came to hear us sing didn’t have any expectations on how they wanted us to look. We did our own hair and make-up.”

To Yao Lee, popular music has changed for the worse with over-synthesised sounds and emotionless singing. “They now dub the music and record the singing separately. They can’t share the feelings [of the music] with a band. There used to be a connection, a relationship between the singer and the band.”

For shidaiqu luminaries Yao Lee and Poon Sow Keng, the popular music of Asia from the ’30s to ’60s brings back fond memories and nostalgia for a more honest time. “Any time I was on stage or had the chance to release a record or album was when I was most happy,” says Keng.

When asked about her days as a famous recording star in Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s, Lee releases a girlish giggle and clasps her knotted, jade and diamond-ringed hands. “I was so happy. Everything was simple.”
 
by Sandra Hong

Poon Sow Keng interview by Robert Chan

From the Glass Archive – Issue Four