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Age is no bar for this immensely gifted band
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If music be the food of love, play on!
Huang Daoyun comes closest to justify that. The 89-year-old Shanghai drummer gets all pumped up as he recalls how he was influenced by his jazz-loving parents when he was young and loved to do “air drum” himself while listening to those old songs.
It was not long before his parents discovered his passion for music and sent him to study drums.
“In the early 1950s, we still listened to Western music,” recalls Huang, now the oldest member of the Shanghai Old Jazz Band. “But then, the songs became ‘corrupted’ and we had to play them in secret. I also had to practice drums and teach my students secretly.”
Because of his drumming skills, Huang was assigned to a circus, where “I played ‘bong bong,’ and the monkey jumped, then ‘bing bing’ and the dog appeared,” says Huang, as he imitated the sound of the drum and the movement of the animals.
During the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), Huang was sent to work in the factories and did not dare to take his drum along. When he retired in 1985, Huang went back to his drums immediately.
“It has been almost 30 years since I retired. I’ve played everywhere, including the Paramount. In the 1990s, after it reopened, the place was always packed,” Huang says.
He was clearly living the moment, straightening his back in shinning white band uniform and talking in style.
Huang is one of the lao ke le (ÀÏ¿ËÀÕ) of the Shanghai Old Jazz Band that plays daily at Fairmont Peace Hotel. The Chinglish term, derived from Shanghainese, implies the English word “class.”
It referred to the “high-class” Shanghai gentlemen who lived a Western lifestyle.
“It is really important to have this lao ke le kept alive and carried on,” says Xiao Xueqiang, 59, the band manager. “The founding members of the band are getting older and many can’t play anymore, but that must not cease the fantastic lao ke le spirit.”
Two of the six founding members, 78-year-old bassist Li Mingkang and 80-year-old saxophone player Sun Jibin, still perform daily at 7:30pm with four other old musicians.
From 9:45pm, the stage is turned to a younger team — this one all over 60.
Although none of the band members played in the same venue in old Shanghai, the band is intimately connected to the period, when ballroom culture was at its peak in the city and good jazz bands were in big demand.
It was around this time when bands from the Philippines dominated until the famous all-Chinese Jimmy King Band charmed thousands of people at the Paramount ballroom in 1946.
It was the first time a Chinese band played at a top venue.
Later, Jimmy King led a poor life until a fan, who used to go to Paramount in her teens, found him in 1985 and invited him to play again — at the age of nearly 70. He gathered some of his old pals, including trumpet player Zhou Wanrong, who founded the Shanghai Old Jazz Band a few years later and started playing at the current otel.
And as long as they have an audience for their kind of music, age is unlikely to be a hindrance.
Till then, let the good times roll.
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