By David Newtown
DAVID NEWTOWN
This is Telling True Stories in Sound. I’m David Newtown.
Gordon Au sits on a red-lit stage, trumpet at the ready. Black coat, burgundy vest. The other musicians hold their instruments up, waiting for his countdown. A singer in a flapper dress, green and silver, looks back, microphone near her face.
Welcome to opening night at The Red Pavilion.
[NIGHT FRAGRANCE by THE RED PAVILION JAZZ BAND]
Swing dancers in beige and patterned dresses groove next to Brooklynites in furs and skintight leather. The space is the brainchild of event planner Shien Lee and Traditional Chinese Medicine chef Zoey Gong. It’s a Chinese apothecary by day and a neo-noir nightclub out of 1930s Shanghai once the sun sets. The two of them brought in Gordon to make the music.
GORDON AU
I’m Gordon Au. I’m a professional jazz trumpet player and bandleader here in New York City.
NEWTOWN
Gordon is in his early forties. He has a pencil-thin mustache, finely-tailored suit with clean lines, and an ever-so-slight smile on his face. See, this isn’t just an ordinary gig… It began with a phone call from Shien Lee.
AU
Hey, I have this new venue, and I’m looking at bringing live music to it. I’d like to collaborate and talk about doing something with Shanghai jazz together.
NEWTOWN
Sometimes it’s called Chinese Jazz. And yes, that’s Mandarin you’re hearing, sung by singer Malaya Sol.
Gordon had never heard of Shanghai Jazz before that call, but he started doing some research. The genre has its roots in American musicians who traveled to China in the 30s. They played in Shanghai clubs to rich patrons, and the music started to spread. Chinese musicians collaborated with their American counterparts, took inspiration from folk melodies, and iterated into something new.
AU
I was pretty immediately fascinated by Shanghai jazz as it’s kind of, like, to me, this long-lost distant cousin of, for example, New Orleans jazz.
NEWTOWN
New Orleans jazz, or trad jazz, is a style Gordon is intimately familiar with. He’s been playing it for decades. But what he’s doing at The Red Pavilion stretches in a totally different direction.
AU
Well, I can say definitely, this is the first time I’ve played a style of jazz that has, you know, definitive ties to my ethnic roots. That’s, that’s a bit of a rarity, as you can imagine.
NEWTOWN
His uncle, Howard Miyata, is a professional musician. Gordon listened to his jazz records in the womb. He learned how to blow a cornet, and, in middle school, his parents started taking him to monthly meetings at the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society.
[SACRAMENTO TRADITIONAL JAZZ SOCIETY RECORDING, 1986]
NEWTOWN
But he wasn’t like the other musicians there.
AU
It was me, a little, little boy with black hair. You know, my family, an Asian family, in a sea of white haired, elderly, white men and women, sticking out like sore thumbs.
NEWTOWN
Gordon didn’t notice it at the time, though. He just wanted to play music. But his parents were much more aware of the racial politics at play.
AU
My mother recounted to me that, I think the first time we went to that meeting, she was introduced to a musician, who, who upon meeting us very, very solemnly, clapped his hands together and bowed.
NEWTOWN
As he got older, though, he started to notice it. He’d play for an audience, and they’d be surprised—partly at his age, and partly at his race. He kept playing. He went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and he was part of the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in New Orleans. He dove into the story of jazz.
AU
So really, jazz histories have to, have to start with, with Black Americans in New Orleans. And it’s—you know, the music of the enslaved peoples and, and influences from Central America, Latin America, Africa.
NEWTOWN
What he found was that those old white people from The Sacramento Jazz Society weren’t the arbiters of what jazz was. There was so much more there.
AU
Not only myself, but we were all technically kind of visitors. Right. So cultural guests in this jazz phenomenon.
NEWTOWN
A part of what allows jazz to invite so many guests over is how easily it can be molded. For the past thirteen years in New York City, Gordon has fully experienced the range of what jazz has to offer. In a week, he might play trad jazz, Brazilian choro, American Songbook standards, and, now, Shanghai Jazz.
AU
I’ve yet to run into a style of jazz, you know, whose creators intended it to be exclusive, right, and not shared.
NEWTOWN
When Gordon took on the gig at The Red Pavilion, he was gifted some music from a previous band Shien Lee was in, called Shanghai Foxtrot. He adapted that music to fit his band, but he needed more music for the sets.
AU
One original arrangement I did for this group, the other week, is an old song called Mo Li Hua, or usually translated as “Jasmine Flower.” And this tune is a Chinese folk melody that dates back to the Qing Dynasty from the Jiangsu province in the Yangtze Delta region.
NEWTOWN
It’s a folk melody with no chords. Simple. Unadorned. Just using a pentatonic scale.
[CELLO PLAYS PENTATONIC SCALE]
NEWTOWN
To adapt it for the group, Gordon looked for chords to put under the notes. He looked for a style that fit it, but made it new.
[GORDON AU SINGING MO LI HUA]
AU
What I finally settled on for the song was a, was a samba beat. So this is a—we wound up with a samba jazz fusion version of Mo Li Hua, this song that is over, you know, that is hundreds of years old.
NEWTOWN
Just like those composers in Shanghai did, Gordon’s iterating. For The Red Pavilion, he’s making music by combining what he knows with what’s new to him.
AU
So in this case, I’m kind of making my own polyglot, kind of, modern jazz versions of, of these Chinese folk songs.
NEWTOWN
One of Shien Lee’s goals when they started The Red Pavilion was to expose the people of Brooklyn to this genre that they loved. But in order for Gordon to spread that genre, he has to create. He has to make something new out of something old, he has to adapt what came before, he has to be intimately aware of the influences, and he has to put a bit of himself back into the music.
AU
What we’re doing here now is there’s so many layers of reinterpretation. Right? Because this is this is our version, our remix…
[TEA LEAVES GREEN by THE RED PAVILION JAZZ BAND]
AU
…of a Chinese composer’s impression…
[等著你回來 by 白光, or DENG ZHU NI HUI LAI (WAITING FOR YOUR RETURN) by BAI GUANG]
AU
…of American jazz…
[ORIGINAL JELLY ROLL BLUES by JELLY ROLL MORTON’S RED HOT PEPPERS]
AU
…filtered through motion pictures and recordings and touring American musicians…
[DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS COTTON CLUB ORCHESTRA from the movie BLACK AND TAN]
AU
…which is in turn, right, an interpretation of really the original Black American jazz in New Orleans.
[ST. LOUIS BLUES by PRINCE’S ORCHESTRA]
AU
…There’s just so many layers that—that this is built upon.
[NIGHT FRAGRANCE by THE RED PAVILION JAZZ BAND]
NEWTOWN
Up above the packed crowd, trumpet in hand, Gordon stands on decades of history. Maybe they can feel it, surrounded by decor that hearkens back to a bygone age. Maybe they’re just there for the experience, sipping sesame cocktails inspired by Traditional Chinese Medicine. But outside the club, the line stretches around the block, and it’s clear Shanghai Jazz has an audience once again.
[APPLAUSE]
Telling True Stories in Sound 