• We enjoyed Chinese New Year in Lingang in Nanhui Pudong
• Jenny found out that our baby is a boy and we’re going to name him Jake. Jenny is now 6 months pregnant. May is fast approaching.
• Our school bought a web server based in Shanghai, which means we can build online learning communities such as Moodle and wordpress blogs. This has been keeping me busy.
• We spent a fantastic Valentine’s day at a new Italian restaurant called Bacaro in Taikang Lu. Its pan fried salmon is really fresh and it melts in your mouth.
• We spent Jenny’s birthday with her friends at the ‘Special Dollar’ hotpot restaurant on Xujiahui Lu.
• I discovered Boduf Songs’ albums. I have not been moved so much by depressing folk music since I heard Caroline Martin at the Bristol’s Cube in May 2003. Enjoy this MP3.
• We watched Red Cliff 1, Red Cliff 2, Eden Lake, and lots of Planet of the Apes.
• Jenny is going part time, but she still makes clothes for musicians including Jiang Fan of canto poppers YFM. Here is a video of Jiang Fan singing wearing one of Jenny’s designs.

Denmark’s Mais Uma have been performing some shows at Shanghai’s JZ Club (46 Fuxing Xi Lu) since April 13th, which ends tomorrow night (April 29th). The video above shows Mais Uma at JZ last night performing Tao Feliz (So Happy). The song is taken from their excellent album ‘Caminho Do Norte’.

We have not been big fans of Latin jazz, because we find it too loose and frothy. However, Mais Uma performed two excellent sets of Brazilian jazz last night, which has forced us to reconsider. Jenny summed up everything she liked about them. Carsten was quiet and sensitive on the piano. Morten’s bass sound was very open. Janus was wild on the drums. Pelle was a bit mysterious on the sax and flute. The musicians had their own personalities, but gelled together as a team. We were really impressed with Mai’s vocals. She sang with a lot of emotion, but she still sounded tight and controlled like another musical instrument that tied everything together.

We liked the way Mais Uma made an old genre fresh and new, although they started to sound a little laboured by the middle of the third set. Maybe we were also a little jaded by this time.

Anyway, two enjoyable jazz shows in one weekend is challenging my preconception that Shanghai jazz shows are conservative and predictable. I should also take another look at Latin and Brazilian jazz instead of dismissing them as glibly as I have in the past.

Links: Mais Uma’s Website, JZ, Singing in the Chen

Jazz can be amazing when masters like John Coltrane take you on a journey to new places of creativity and emotion, but much of the jazz songs you hear in this city are standards designed to keep the bosses and their cigar toting clients happy. It’s really refreshing to catch a set when the musicians are given the freedom to be themselves.

Steve Sweeting and our friend Jasmine Chen have put on a couple of shows at Two Cities Gallery in Moganshan Lu. We really liked their set from March 28th, which had Chinese folk songs and passionate Latin tunes to mix up their performance. Steve Sweeting is warm and funny as a passionate showman, whereas Jasmine is cool and elegant. Somehow, they achieve a balance between musical traditions and personalities that makes it lots of fun to go to their shows. When I heard this, it dawned on me that decent Shanghai jazz should be a confident clash of Chinese and international influences. It is probably obvious that I am not a jazz aficionado. I’ll leave that to JQ Whicomb of Shanghai Jazz Scene.

Steve and Jasmine put on another show last night, but we only arrived in time for the final few songs. I regret not filming the audience as they used plastic bags and clapping as percussion, but I got my camera out in time to film their version of ‘Singing in the Rain’. As fine as it is, I prefer their more playful explorations away from standards.

Links:
Jasmine Chen’s Myspace Page
Two Cities Gallery

Counting Crows, Smashing Pumpkins, !!!, Foo Fighters, 范晓萱 (Bo Bo Mavis), Rihanna, REM, Kanye West, Ben Harper, The Verve, Mastodon, The Strokes, Interpol, Wolfmother, Massive Attack, Feist, Franz Ferdinand, Jack Johnson, Rage Against the Machine, MC HOTDOG, Gnarls Barkley, Against Me!, 黄立行 (Stanley Huang), 苏打绿 (sodagreen), Metallica, 林一峰 (Chet Lam), Kings of Leon, Cypress Hill

I’ll keep an open mind about the bands I don’t know, but there is a lot of old crap in this list from performers who are well beyond their sell by date. It’s an obvious list of boring student bands from the eighties and nineties. I’d rather sunbathe naked on Nanpu Bridge in January than endure The Smashing Pumpkins again. Spli-t earned lots of good karma for putting on Sonic Youth last year and I know they have to make their money back, but it would be good if they could spice up the list a little. Here are a few suggestions:

• Melt Banana
• Sufjan Stevens
• Nina Nastasia
• Princess Superstar
• Buck 65
• Beirut
• Four Tet
• Rapture
• Jonathan Coulton
• PJ Harvey
• Vialka

Good luck to Spli-t for putting their neck and trying to make this festival happen and I’d be happy if Massive Attack and MC Hotdog made it. Putting on a rock festival in Shanghai is not going to be easy given that Bjork was such a loose cannon at her recent show.

Tags: Shanghai, music, Yue Festival, Split

Personal Stuff
We started the year renting a flat in Jianguo Lu and we spent all of our weekends after Chinese New Year looking at places to buy in the Luwan and Huangpu districts. Eventually we found our dream home near Nanpu Bridge, but we had to deal with bankers being stupid about transferring money and the general house buying marathon. It didn’t stop there. Even though we bought our appartment in July, we didn’t move in until November after a team of workmen gutted and renovated the place making it the nicest house we have ever
lived in. Shanghai feels more like home than ever. I am enjoying getting around by walking, on bicycle and the wonderful new metro service that opened two days ago.

We adopted Chog the cat in the spring and he is enjoying the heated floor in our new appartment. It is an amazing feeling to have a cat greet you when you arrive home after a tiring day at work.

Jenny also moved her studio from Shanxi Nan Lu to Taikang Lu. More information about the new studio will be posted here in the next day or so.

Relevant Posts
Buying a House In 13 Steps
State of the Renovation

Learning
Education is my livelihood and I got turned on by the possibility of student created digital content and learning communities as engines for learning. This is still very much a concept and is something that I want to take much further in 2008 given that you need lots of bandwidth to make these things happen. The IBO Information Literacy and Shanghai’s Learning 2Cn really inspired me that learning can be fun, exciting and international.

Relevant Posts
Blogging For Schools
How Many Computers Does It Take To Turn On A Teacher?
Are You A Digital Immigrant Or Digital Native?

The Internet
This has been another great year for Internet tools including Twitter, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Reader, Firefox, Firefox extensions, the Flock browser, RememberTheMilk, Fring, Facebook, Shozu and blogging. It has also been a frustrating year, because the Internet offers the possibility to cater all my information, communication and entertainment needs in one big cloud. The truth is that DRM, censorship and bandwidth continue to be obstacles that prevent normal Internet users in China and elsewhere from getting everything that the Internet can offer. I don’t know how many hours have been wasted by slow Internet connections, blocked sites and timeout errors. I hope we have a much better year for connectivity in 2008 and that different services become far more inter operable.

My favourite website of the year has definitely been Lifehacker for excellent technology and productivity tips. Leo Laporte’s TWIT network continues to produce high quality shows, but I have also been enjoying Tekzilla from Revision 3. There is still a gap in the market for a child friendly Internet tech video show.

Gadgets and Desktop Software
I became an obsessive Windows Mobile user, because it kept me blogging and connected on long bus journeys, although it often crashes at inopportune moments making me curse it as much I enjoy it. I had a look at the Iphone and admired it, although I am not prepared to invest in one given that I spent a fortune on buying and renovating a house. I would love to buy a tripped out MacBook to run Windows, Mac and Linux on the same box, but I will keep that in check while I save up spending money for our planned European vacation. In the meantime, I bought my wife a fantastic Asus Eeepc for 3000 RMB and gave my old Dell more mileage by running Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy Gibbons on it. Ubuntu has served me well as a robust open source OS serving my everyday computing needs, although I screwed up an upgrade, which lost me a little data (and lots of time). I ended the year by setting up a robust and ridiculously cheap offline backup solution using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3.

Relevant Posts
Lifehacker on Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile Must Have Apps

Music and Film
I continue to enjoy my Emusic monthly subscription. $10 a month entitles me to 30 unprotected MP3 songs and it works on Ubuntu. Highlights of the year have included Fridge’s “Eph Reissue” and I am a Robot and Proud’s “The Electricity in Your House Wants To Sing”. We have access to more films than we could ever, which we enjoy on our new big screen projector that has turned our living room into a cinema. We have recently enjoyed “Rescue Dawn”, “Zoo”, “Shortbus”. Films is going to become an even bigger part of our life as we start to show our favourite crazy movies to friends in Jenny’s studio on a weekly basis. I regret not writing more film and music reviews, although it has been a busy year and I feel my blog lacks a focus.

I wish anyone who reads this has had a great year and can look forward with enthusiasm to an even better 2008.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Shanghai, culture, blogs

Banana Monkey sneaked in a live gig at the Logo Bar (Xingfu Lu) on Saturday night.

I like Banana Monkey’s sense of fun and raw rock and roll energy. To the unitiated, BM play garage punk rock not a million miles away from MC5 or Guitar Wolf. We even heard a hint of The Strokes. They are not quite as frenetic as Beijing’s Subs, but it is refreshing to have a Chinese rock band who is not trying to sound like U2 or Coldplay.

They played a good live set that worked well in the small club surroundings of the Logo Bar, although I liked the heavier guitar sound that they had a year ago when I last heard them play at the 1234 Festival. I’ll always have a soft spot for BM, because three of them used to be in the wonderful Marrow. Zhang Feng has great charisma as a singer, but he’s a really good guitar player and I’d like to him inject a little experimental noodling into the mix like he did with his old band.

I didn’t get in a good vantage point to take any pictures or video, but I recorded most of the set on my cellphone. It’s rough and in mono, but it gives you the idea and you can listen to it here.

I’ve had enough. It’s time to launch a one blog campaign to name and shame the biggest culprits in an effort to redirect them towards finer sounding alternatives.

The worst offender is definitely Maui Coffee on Jianguo Xi Lu near the corner of Shanxi Nan Lu. Not only they do insist on playing Celene Dion and Elton John at every available opportunity, but they pipe it out into the streets so that even non customers have to endure this torrent of sonic dissentry.

I like Vienna Café in Shaoxing Lu, but they lost countless brownie points for showing a Barbara Streisand DVD during normal business hours. I had to look at her as well as listen to her annoying nasal voice.

Norah Jones may be a talented singer song writer, but it is such a cliché to hear her in coffee shops whether it is Coffee Bean and Tealeaf or Starbucks. The latter is guilty of reducing formulaic background music into half a dozen CDs of predictable soft rock, muzak and obvious jazz that is played in constant rotation at every branch from Shanghai to Istanbul. The tracks are often inocuous in and of themselves, but the brand has reduced music into a marketing procedure, which numbs you into thinking that you’ve already died and been ressurected in order to be killed again ad infinitum.

I am not against background music per se, because I often like to hang out in coffee shops to write, read, plan or think. Nevertheless, coffee shop music does not have to lobotomise its listeners. Your latte deserves a better soundtrack and there are a few places that deserve honourable mentions for their choice of music.

Coolzey on Jianguo Xi Lu is opposite Maui Coffee on Jianguo Xi Lu and they play a mixture of ambient dance music and non obvious Euro pop. Arch on Wukang Lu, Spago in Nanjing Xi Lu and Wagas also play mellow electronic music, which is not full of cliché.

The best taste award has to go the Little Café in Shaoxing Lu whose jukebox plays the likes of Red House Painters and sparse modern classical music.

I would like a coffee shop to play Shannon Wright, Buck 65, Regina Spektor, Joanna Newsom, Boards of Canada and Will Oldham. I can not expect the establishments of Shanghai to cater to my niche tastes anytime soon, which is why the Ipod is the best thing ever. It allows me to sit in coffee shops without wanting to tear my ears off.

There should be a lot to like about The Go! Team. They have an enthusiastic and sassy rapper come singer called MC Ninja who was on a mission to whip up party spirit. She succeeded. The band have a collective ethos, swapping instruments at every available opportunity. They were clearly having fun, which is always good for winning over a crowd. They also have eclectic tastes embracing pop, hip hop and indie. They are set to release a cover version of Sonic Youth’s Bull in the Heather.

This is where The Go! Team started to unravel for me. Wearing your influences on your sleeve is a dangerous game when you are not as talented or creative as your musical heroes. I am all for mashing up styles and bridging the gap between pop and underground culture, but their treatment of eclecticism was just too formulaic and predictable. They start a tune with some scrawling guitar feedback and a cute syth motif before Ninja raps a bit as she urges people to ‘swing their booty’ or sing ‘Do It’ in the style of the Jackson Five. It is as if I’ve been transported back in time to bad nineties indie and hip-hop music without any edge or message. I don’t know if it was the PA or the venue, but the sound was really quite rough and it didn’t gel for me at all.

I am glad The Go! Team can work a crowd, but a set of identical songs was rather boring given that I was far too sober and in no mood to swing my pants even as everyone else in the room danced with happy abandon. The Go! Team may be the darlings of Pitchfork Media as they inflitrate the UK charts, but scratch beneath the veneer and you will find a rather average English student band.

Fair play to Spli-t and Absolute House for putting on another international touring band as part of the Bacardi Sino Sessions, but this was a disappointment even if everyone else in the audience disagrees with me.

Links
Spli-t
Bacardi Sino Sessions
Absolute House
The Go! Team’s website
Pitchfork Media

The melodies are direct, memorable, and inseparable from the interlocking harmonies that are weaved around them. My Two Toms carries the traditions of the most memorable music; the complexity found deep within the drone of the Appalachian Mountains, the spiraling melodies of Northumberland pipe tunes, a simple song that stands well the test of time and is remembered not in a crazy-making way but as an old friend. – Charlie Parr, April 2006

My Two Toms are not from the Appalachians, but from Bristol and they played a wonderful set of rough and ready banjo music at my leaving party a few years ago. I miss their music a lot and I wish they would come to play some shows in Shanghai. I’m sure it would go down really well here. I want to get hold of their first two albums that have just been rereleased on Mole in the Ground Records. The video gives you a flavour of what they do, but check out their websites and send them a nice message urging them to come to Shanghai. I will.

More on My Two Toms
My Two Toms – My Space Site
My Two Toms Website

Tomorrow night is themed around feminine punk grrrl power so it’s time to get out your favourite PJ Harvey and Siouxsie and the Banshees CDs. We had a chance to catch up with Cai Bao of 88 New Wave who told us a little about the parties they put on.

Do you have a brief bio for each of the DJs and promoters?
Sure. There are six of us involved in these parties: three DJs and three promoters. DJ Rou Bao is from Sweden, studying Chinese at Fudan for the year; I’m from San Francisco in the States, teaching English at public schools around town; and DJ Xiaolong Bao is from Boston in the States and does teaching and freelance writing. The other three guys, Anson, Chris, and Joey are from Inner Mongolia and throw parties around town as Top Party Productions in addition to their day jobs.

What events have you put on in Shanghai or elsewhere?
We’ve really just done the 88 New Wave parties together as a group; the first one was back in December, and this one will be our fifth since then. Last month we did a party with a robot theme that was probably our best one, but they’ve all been fun. The Top Party guys have been at it a little longer and have done a variety of small-scale parties all around the city.

How did you get the idea to put on 88 New Wave Grrrl?
Essentially we missed no-frills dive rock bars where we could drink and dance on the cheap to our favorite music.Rou Bao has a couple of friends here from Sweden, Frida and Karin, who are really into grrl punk, so we thought we’d invite them to play and stay with the theme all night since it gives us an opportunity to focus on some of our favorite bands.

What do you think about Shanghai’s party and music scene?
I haven’t been in Shanghai too too long so it’s hard to generalize, but there seems to be a pretty diverse range of things to get into if you don’t mind looking around some. We’re all pretty into the local band thing because it seems like a lot’s happening there; also it’s nice being to events that have a more integrated Chinese-foreigner crowd.

Do you want this to be a regular event?
It’s already a regular event. But we may also do some additional one-off thingies this summer.

Ladyfest has been very successful punk feminist movement putting on events in the US and the UK. Would you like Ladyfest to happen in Shanghai?
Hmmm… Actually dunno too much about that event. There are lots of women in good bands, like Booji and Ferris Wheel, around town though, so it might be worth doing. I would definitely go!

What are your future plans?
A few more parties, finishing up our respective semesters, polishing up our Chinese, traveling around the country, and then re-evaluating what we’re doing with our lives at the end of the summer.

88 New Wave Goes Grrrl is tomorrow night, 9pm to 2pm at Cs Bar, 685 Dingxi Lu (between Fahuazhen and Yanan Lu). Entry is free.

Crossposted on Shanghaiist