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 Metropolis
Shanghai: Showboat to China (Winter and Winter
910 111-2, 2005)
Zuflucht in Shanghai:
The Port of Last Resort- A Film by Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy,
Music by John Zorn (Winter and Winter 915 004-7, 2005)
In the late 1930s and early '40s about 20,000 European Jewish refugees
arrived in Shanghai. That Chinese port city was one of the very few places where
they were unconditionally welcomed (though by most accounts, "tolerated" would
probably be a better word). Shanghai at the time was both a troubled and exotic
place, a sometimes uneasy mixture of prosperity, nascent multiculturalism and
squalor partly resulting from the ills of the Sino-Japanese war era. Ambitious
and authentic,
Metropolis Shanghai seeks to present what the city sounded like at
the time.
A combination
of traditional Chinese music, jazz, classical-and-popular-rooted Jewish
compositions, military marches and scene-setting environmental sounds,
the disc moves easily from whimsical ("Strolling on the Street") to
melancholy ("Sehnsucht," "Khsideshe") to spiritual ("Bells and Chants
at the Long Hua Temple"), all the while piecing together a fascinating
musical picture of a chapter in history that's rightly becoming
better-known. Brave Old World, a U.S.-based quartet renowned for
combining longtime Jewish musical motifs with jazz and classical
leanings, are among those responsible for the evocative sounds. I'd
advise against doing anything else while listening to this CD. Just
listen closely and let it take you to another time and place.
Forgive my putting a DVD review alongside a CD review, but similary enlightening is Zuflucht in Shanghai: The Port of Last Resort, an acclaimed 1998 documentary now on DVD. Mixing old footage and still images with survivor testimonials and a tender music score by John Zorn, the film movingly traces the journey of Jews fleeing nazi Germany to such places as "Little Vienna," a refugee community in Shanghai's Hongkew district. Simple, straightforward and dignified, it's a totally absorbing visual recounting of what the music on Metropolis Shanghai suggests.
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