Who knew musicians could cause such disharmony?
We went to the Harry Connick, Jr. show on Tuesday night and had a good time but the performance wasn’t as stellar as I had expected. Harry’s voice was a bit off for some reason. Maybe it was a cold; maybe it was a bit of those Beijing ‘blue sky days’ getting stuck in the old pipes. He came packing a big band, but few numbers really allowed the horns to cut loose, other songs made no use of the horns at all. It seemed an oddly expensive exercise to bring such a large group of back-up musicians all the way to China only to have them lay out for half the set. Other folks in the audience complained the show was too short and that calls for an encore went unheeded. Either way, it was clear that something was up.
From AP:
Connick said Thursday he was forced to make last-minute changes to his show last weekend in Shanghai because an old song list was mistakenly submitted to Chinese authorities to secure the performance permit for the concert.
Authorities insisted he play the songs on that list, even though his band did not have the music for them.
“Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was not able to give my fans in China the show I intended,” Connick said in a statement.
Musician J.Q. Whitcomb, also quoted in the AP story, reported on The Shanghaiist yesterday:
We fell asleep at the beginning of the show, with all the solo piano and mellow vocals happening. Then it was the same 2 or 3 players taking horn solos all night, and there was only one trumpet solo in the entire show! It makes you wonder what the heck was going on for this to happen, after all the hype about this great big band.
But then it dawned on us what the Ministry of Culture said in response to Bjork’s political outburst at her concert the week before, right at the end of the press release: “From now on, stricter controls will be placed on performances by foreign artists in China to prevent similar incidents from happening.” Bingo! Sure enough, players in Connick’s band told us that the government people showed up an hour before they were to play and went to town on their set list, crossing off a number of tunes they disapproved of (what was Harry thinking, trying to play all that counter-revolutionary garbage anyway?) and replacing them with “safer” tunes. Tunes, of course, which the band did not happen to have charts on hand for. Thus explains the extraordinary number of solo piano-with-vocals tunes heard throughout the show.
The political angle seemed strange to me because Harry Connick is probably one of the least-threatening artists you could imagine. I mean, we’re talking about Harry freaking Connick here, not Rage Against the Machine.
Perhaps the set list snafu was the real culprit and not some sinister conspiracy against the music of Cole Porter, I mean what songs could the MOC possible object to? Were they afraid Harry would change the lyrics of “Hello Dolly” (one of the tunes he actually did perform) to “Hello Dalai”? Perhaps to make the culture vultures happy, he could have reworked one of his early hits into an homage to the CCP… “It Had to be Hu” anybody?
Anyway, YJ and I enjoyed the show, even though it was a little short. I noodle a bit on the piano myself, so watching somebody take a turn at the ivories isn’t something I’d readily turn down.
It also helped that our tickets came courtesy of a That’s Beijing contest won by your correspondent last Thursday. (Q: Name one of the legendary musicians who performed with Harry Connick, Jr. at the NBA All-Star Game. A: Ellis Marsalis and Dr. John among others.)
7 responses so far ↓
1 Ching Ping // Mar 13, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Music must serve the Party too !
2 Froog // Mar 13, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Actually, that was Tuesday.
I feel slightly less aggrieved at missing it now that I learn it was a censored and abbreviated show.
I wonder what the ‘unharmonious’ songs on the original playlist were.
3 Jeremiah // Mar 14, 2008 at 7:42 am
I suspect that the changes were due more to the overly retentive PSB handlers fretting that the setlist didn’t match their paperwork rather than objections to specific songs.
4 FanSpace Heather // Mar 14, 2008 at 9:42 am
My heart goes out to any who were in the audience and weren’t treated to the full Harry Connick, Jr. & his Big Band experience, because, speaking from 18 years of experience, it is an AMAZING one.
It’s such a shame that the outbursts of one can cause such problems for so many others–Bjork should have remained professional and behaved herself. However, with that being said, I’m so glad I live in the USA, where we are free and no concert will ever be ‘censored’ with set-lists needing ‘pre-approval’ from our government.
Oh, and one more thing…your comments about “Hello Dalai” and “It Had To Be Hu” are hilarious! Very funny stuff!! Harry would appreciate the humor. =)
Visit the FanSpace. I think you’ll like it. (*wink*)
5 Leah // Mar 14, 2008 at 10:05 am
It’s funny that, even after so much practice, the censorship folks still manage to cock things up with such regularity.
I went to an orchestra performance at the Poly Theater a couple of summers ago in which the main feature on the playbill– by some crazy Russian composer whose name I can’t for the life of me remember– was replaced at the last minute and without so much as an addendum to the program by, of all things, Haydn [sticks finger down throat]. The Russian piece was what we what all come to see and, needless to say, the whole thing was a big disappointment. When we managed to catch the conductor at the stage door after the show, he said something about that piece having been axed because it was “too revolutionary.”
6 Froog // Mar 14, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Ha! Leah, do you suppose that the Chinese can’t differentiate between ‘revolutionary’ in the senses of ‘ground-breakingly innovative’ and ‘incendiary, inciting civil unrest’? Is it another problem of the language? I have my suspicions.
And I love that “this is what we all came to see” but you can’t actually remember what it was!
J, if the problem was really just a mismatch with the pre-submitted playlist, why wasn’t anyone in Harry’s entourage smart enough to just LIE about it? These MOC morons are easily duped by the stratagem of, ahem, “changing the name” of the song.
Remember when Carsick Cars were “banned” for a while last year? They kept playing gigs under the pretext that they were ‘a tribute band’, who just happened to comprise the same personnel as the original group and sang ‘almost identical’ songs.
7 Jeremiah // Mar 14, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I’m hearing some things that the the snafu was at least partially sorted out before the Beijing show. But I’m not sure what or how. There was still something a little off about the show so I’m interested in learning more about what happened between Sunday and Tuesday.
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