Saturday night in Beijing: Cool jazz, luke-warm police barricades, and hot chuan’r

Last night YJ and I went to the Forbidden City Concert Hall for the Nine Gates Jazz Festival, running in Beijing through next weekend. It was one of the only nights we had free, and–turns out–we picked a good one. I like jazz but I really haven’t explored the, uh, Beijing scene. I was prematurely dismissive. The “opening act” was Beijing jazz legends (a sentence I can now write without smirking) The Golden Buddha Trio, led by pianist Kong Hongwei (A.K.A. Jin Fo 金佛). There was no contest. Jin Fo and the boys blew the headliners, the Austrian-based modern jazz quartet The Philipp Nykrin Quartet, out of the building. I mean really. A group of foreigners haven’t been this caught out in Beijing since the Boxers were last in town.

I’ve played piano all of my life and I’ve seen a lot of good players. Kong is absolutely one of the best. In a perfect world—where taste and talent rule—Kong would be playing Carnegie Hall and nobody would have ever heard of Lang Lang. He’s that good.

Today in jazz it’s too easy to play “guess the influence” with musicians. The aforementioned Philipp Nykrin Quartet was

May 26th, 2007

A Noah’s Ark of Death found off of the Chinese Coast

I’m pissed.

From today’s Guardian: Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world’s rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.

The pangolins, Asian giant turtles and lizards were crushed inside crates on a rickety wooden vessel that had lost engine power off Qingzhou island in the southern province of Guangdong. Most were alive, though the cargo also contained 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper.

According to conservation groups, the haul was discovered on one of the world’s most lucrative and destructive smuggling routes: from the threatened jungles of south-east Asia to the restaurant tables of southern China.

The animals were found when local fishermen noticed a strange smell emanating from the vessel, which did not have any registration plates, on Tuesday, the Guangzhou Daily reported.

When coastguard officials boarded the 25-metre craft, it was reportedly deserted and stripped of identification papers. They found more than 200 crates full of animals, many so dehydrated in the tropical sun that they were close to death.

This isn’t about some farmers in China being “too poor” to worry about conservation. This isn’t about the need for economic development in struggling areas even

May 26th, 2007

日历

May 2007
M T W T F S S
« Apr   Jun »
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031