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“Jazz In China: The Documentary,” chronicles the 100-year story of how jazz—a democratic form of music through improvisation—exists and thrives in China—a country with a long tradition of adherence to central authority.

“Jazz In China” is a documentary produced, directed, and written by Eugene Marlow, Ph.D. based on his 2018 book Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression (University Press of Mississippi).

The 60-minute award-winning documentary reveals the significant influence of African-American jazz musicians with leading indigenous jazz musicians, sinologists, historians, and jazz club patrons in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and archival and contemporary performance footage.

“Jazz In China” was the winner of the 2022 American Insight “Free Speech Film Festival,” and received the “Award of Excellence” from the Depth of Field International Film Festival.

“Jazz In China” will  be an “official event” of the UNESCO-sponsored International Jazz Day, on April 30, 2023.

Many thanks to those who made this event possible:
Curator Leslie Arlette Boyce
Brooklyn Heights Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library
NYFA  “Jazz In China” is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts

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Eugene Marlow’s feature length documentary “Jazz in China” is the winner of the 2022 American Insight sponsored “Free Speech Film Festival.”

American INSIGHT’s Free Speech Film Festival celebrates the passionate innovations of independent filmmakers, and champions the ideas, perspectives and voices that prove vital to the future of Free Speech, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law around the world.

American INSIGHT’s Free Speech Film Festival is a goodwill, grassroots, sustainable program that unites judges, students, scholars, educators and the general public in conversations about the past, present and future of Free Speech.

The mission of the Free Speech Film Festival is to promote Free Speech, not war.

According to Margaret Chew Barringer, American Insight Founder & Chairman, “When we first saw the submission from Director Eugene Marlow we didn’t know this very democratic form of music could exist (and THRIVE) in such a place. This astonishment was just one of the many reasons ‘Jazz in China’ is the 2022 Free Speech Award-winning Film.”

She added: “Over several weeks of judging approximately 100 entries from 17 countries, ‘Jazz in China’ never fell out of first place.”

“Most people don’t know that jazz even exists in China,” noted Bob Craig, popular host for WRTI, Philadelphia’s jazz and classical music radio station. “The film chronicles the 100-year story of how this very democratic form of music improvisation exists and thrives in a country with a long tradition of adherence to central authority.”

Click the image to see the “Jazz in China” trailer.

The Free Speech Film Festival Award Ceremony was moderated by American INSIGHT Board member, Karen Curry, former NBC and CNN Bureau Chief. She was joined onstage by Bob Craig, longtime WRTI Jazz host,  Dr. Eugene Marlow, the director of the 2022 Free Speech Award winner and Jiefei Yuan, documentary Associate Director.

American INSIGHT’s annual Free Speech Film Festival Award Ceremony was held Saturday, November 19^th, 2022 in Philadelphia, where Dr. Marlow was awarded the symbolic Free Speech Liberty Bell and $1,000 honorarium by Ms. Curry.
 
Topics submitted to the American INSIGHT Free Speech Film Festival in 2022 included censorship, resistance, inequality, courage, change, and hope. Independent filmmakers from 58 countries around the world have entered their films as a response to the subject of Free Speech: You Define It!

The six 2022 Official Selection films are:

•  Jazz in China directed by Dr. Eugene Marlow
• My Grandmother Is an Egg directed by Wu-Ching Chang
• Common Grounds? directed by Raed Truett Gilliam
• Chinese Cancan – Lulu, a Chinese Woman directed by Coralie Van Rietschote
• Strength Among Us directed by Taha Ovaci
• Urania Leilus directed by Andrew Serban

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D., teaches courses in media and culture at Baruch College (City University of New York, since 1988). “Jazz in China” is his latest documentary project based on his 2018 acclaimed book. Previously, his documentary short “Zikkaron Kristallnacht: A Family Story” was an “official selection” at 17 domestic and international film festivals and was the recipient of the John Culkin Award from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Marlow has earned awards for video programming excellence from numerous film festival competitions.

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Marlowsphere (Blog #156)

Music serves many functions in society and can be found in almost every corner of everyday life. One such function is “protest.” Protest songs give musical voice to issues dealing with racism, war, civil rights, and women’s rights, among others.

Among the most famous protest songs in western culture is “Strange Fruit” recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. It is based on a poem inspired by the lynching of two young African-Americans in 1930 Marion, Indiana. They were accused of rape and murder. The poem was written by Abel Meeropol (1903-1986), a white Jew, teacher, poet and songwriter, who published under the name Lewis Allan.

It is not usual, however, to hear of protest songs and singers in eastern cultures, such as China, but they exist. The most prominent is Cui Jian, a Beijing-based singer-songwriter (also trumpeter and guitarist) who is recognized as the “father of rock” in China. He has been jailed by the Chinese government from time to time for composing and performing songs critical of the Communist Party.

Critical protest of the Chinese Communist Party goes beyond issues of governance. Among the issues are violence against women, a global problem in fact. Estimates published by the World Health Organization indicate that globally about 1 in 3 (30%) of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Most of this violence is intimate partner violence.

Chinese-born, New York City-based contemporary composer Anruo Cheng’s response to this issue in China is her 8:27 minute protest composition “She Says | 她说.”

“She Says” was inspired by several reports and significant incidents in China:

1. Every 7.4 seconds, a woman in China faces domestic violence, according to the All-China Women’s Federation, the country’s largest women’s organization. For example, after enduring years of attacks, Shaanxi native Yang Xi killed her husband. She was originally sentenced to death, but a higher court commuted the sentence to 12 years in jail for killing him.
2. A Xuzhou woman was chained to a wall, tortured, and gave birth to eight children for her “husband.” The incident was revealed through video interviews by social media in the winter of 2021 but immediately covered up by mainstream media in China. Some people were arrested while investigating the case. Unfortunately, the chained woman’s voice is not allowed to be heard anymore.
3. In June 2022, four women were assaulted and brutally punched by a group of men in a late-night Tangshan (China) restaurant. After the surveillance footage of the incident was leaked online, the victims, as well as their families and friends remained silent.

Cheng adds: “In this work, you will hear heavy percussive sounds every 7.4 seconds throughout the piece, representing the domestic violence happening to Chinese women. I also use the Chinese ancient folk tune Jasmine Flower (originally praising women’s purity and nobility) as a metaphor for the victims and twisted facts people are facing. Many other sound objects manipulated by electronic techniques are also inspired by these incidents, like the sounds of chains, metallic percussive sounds, and sounds of broken glass bottles.”

There are two kinds of broad musical categories: absolute music and program music. The former is music that stands alone without any requisite explanation. This category of music can be enjoyed and appreciated on its own merit. The latter category is the reverse. One of the more famous examples of “program music” is Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” where various instruments take on the characteristics, musically speaking, of the “characters” in the story. The music, though, is accompanied by a spoken narrative.

The repetition of “She Says” in a female voice hints at the subject of Cheng’s piece, and the repeat of hard sounds every 7.4 seconds also gives an indication of what the piece means and what its purpose is. But you need the external explanation to reveal the real power of the composition. Could this piece standalone without any further explication? Certainly. Its sonic elements are compelling on their own. But when you understand the inspiration of “She Says” the power of Cheng’s composition expands exponentially.

Click here to listen to “She Says| 她说” on Sound Cloud.

For more about Anruo Cheng, go to www.anruocheng.com

Eugene Marlow, MBA, Ph.D., © 2022

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Marlowsphere (Blog #155)

In Part I of this blog (posted last week), Female Student (FS) informed us of the inequities she and other females experience vs. males in the Pakistani culture.

Memorization vs. Analysis or Questioning

EM:  What about formal education in Pakistan?

FS: I completed high school in Pakpattan.  In that region of Pakistan people are very narrow-minded. Very, very narrow-minded.

The teachers have the same mindset as the people living there.  So, they are transferring that mindset to the students. The type of study is different here from there. It was more like reading through the pages and just memorizing them.  There is no creativity and no effort to allow students to acknowledge what skills they have. Students are not allowed or given the opportunity to choose their own field. They are not given choice from the start. That really messes things up when you’re not given a choice in your life ever.

EM:  How come you’re so open-minded?

FS:  That’s an interesting question. I became more open-minded when I came here.  I had the same mindset before I came here. I was talking about this yesterday to my friend. She said “You don’t judge people.” That’s why we have such a good bonding.

I told her I wasn’t always like this. If you met me four years back, I was so judgmental, so narrow-minded that I judged every person I saw. If I look back at myself four years ago, I see myself as a horrible person with the same mindset of the people I criticize now. When I came to America everything started to change. The way I started to look at the world changed.

It really changed for me when my mother was really very sick. She had ulcerated colitis. She was extremely ill. She was on her death bed. I had to take care of her. I struggled a lot in that phase. I had college and housework and I had to take care of my mother. At that time, it kind of changed me because I started to realize about the education I was getting here. I was never allowed, or you could say, that I never really had the chance to acknowledge the talents or skills I have, or what I can really do and really want to do in life in Pakistan.

My parents always told me “We want you to be a doctor.” I was like, “Yeah, I want to be a doctor.” But it all changed when I came here and I really got to know that I don’t really want to be in that field. It would be suffocating if I choose this. I was trying to find myself, where I really stand and who I really am as a young woman. Things started to change for me here.

EM:  You started your college career at Queens Community College. Was there any particular course or professor you were taking that helped you change your attitude or perspective or was it just the overall environment?

FS: It was the overall environment, especially two of my professors from my literature class. My one English professor, during her lecture, always used to add some lines out of nowhere that were inspiring and really eye-opening. I found myself catching every sentence she threw at us. I really like the spirit she had. Every time she was teaching something, out of nowhere she just said a sentence about woman empowerment. That was really different for me because I had never been told those things. I came from an area in Pakistan where if a girl is caught with a boy—looking, smiling, holding hands, embracing—she could be killed, as in an honor killing.

My Mother’s Unfulfilled Life

FS: The other thing that was really eye-opening for me was my mother. She’s been through a lot. She was the most creative, most intelligent and the most beautiful person I have known. She had talent to be a writer, a poet, a painter. She wanted to be a doctor but nobody allowed her to be. Then she got married. Nobody allowed her to write or to paint. She was just told “You are here to serve your in-laws and look after your kids.”

Whenever I saw the inner turmoil she was going through, it just clicked one day that I don’t want to have her life. I don’t want to be oppressed like she has been all her life. I don’t want to be in a relationship similar to my mother’s. I don’t want my children to see the same thing that I am seeing every day. In some ways, I always, always got inspiration from my mother. She is an ideal for me because you can say that her mindset is different from the people from our culture. When I was younger, she always told me “I don’t like how you think.”

EM:  She said that to you?

FS: Yes. Often, my mother told me when I was younger, when I wasn’t like how I am right now, she would scold me about not doing the right thing for myself. At that time, I didn’t understand because I was with people who thought it was the right thing to think like everybody else in a narrow-minded way. Even while living among those people in Pakistan for a lot of years, she didn’t change her mindset. Even after a lot of opportunities were snatched away from her, a lot of jobs that she wanted to do, she didn’t change herself to go after them. I think the biggest eye-opener for me is my mother’s plight changed me as a person while I was looking after her and taking care of her when she was sick.  I realized I am inspired by her, but I don’t want to be in the situation she is in right now.

EM:  She survived COVID?

FS:  Yes, she is so much better and she is recovering. Even from after COVID, her situation changed, she got much better. She was on steroids before COVID but she had to quit them because when you have COVID and are taking steroids the situation gets worse so she had to quit them. Steroids are the type of drug that when quit them without any tapering your body goes through a withdrawal and causes a bad reaction. Her condition really worsened after that.  When she recovered from the after-effects of quitting steroids, then she started to get better.  Her treatment is continuing so she’s much better than three years back or so.

EM:  Does your mother work or is she a housewife who takes care of the kids and your father?

FS: She’s a housewife.

Navigating the Future

EM:  What are you going to do when you graduate? Are you going to say bye-bye to your parents and go off on your own?  What do you foresee yourself doing if you want to have your own life and your own values and you want to marry someone you really love and have children with that person?  What do you want to do?

FS:  I’m not sure. The situation right now is that my father twice a week talks about my marriage. He says: “Once you graduate you will get married. You’re going back to Pakistan.  We will look for a suitable person for you and then you will marry that guy.”

One day, I asked my mother “What if I want to get married to a person I like?” She said I don’t have that choice. My father will never agree.  However good or nice the person is, my father will never agree.  He wants me to marry the person he chooses for me. I don’t want that. I know what he thinks about the world, of the life, of how he thinks a woman should lead her life. It doesn’t resonate with my beliefs and I don’t want that. So, what I have thought is after completing my bachelor’s degree, I plan to go to law school. I want to delay as much as I can.

One positive thing is that my father is not that adamant. He does listen to me when I’m trying to prove my point. Sometimes when I’m trying to say something, he reacts so negatively that sometimes shuts me up. I try to understand him. I pretend to agree with him and then I try to prove my point. Sometimes it works. I think that If I try to do that, some day he will really see my perspective and from which I want to lead my life.

It’s really suffocating when you’re told that you can’t do the thing you love. You can’t write a poem because “we don’t see it right.” It’s so suffocating. My mom has been through that.  Whenever I look at her face, I feel what she has thought years back. It’s horrible.

EM:  Are there other young women, students like you who are going through the same situation that you’re aware of?

FS:  I think yes. One of my Pakistani friends is from Karachi. She’s not facing the pressure of getting married but she does have parents who are strict and they have somewhat the same mindset as my parents. You get to know people and where they are coming from when you spend time with them. I realize that my fear resonates with hers. What she fears, I fear.

Marriage is a big responsibility. You have to take care of yourself, the person you are with and then when you have kids, it triples the responsibility.  For us, especially in East Asian countries, not only are you taking care of your husband and your kids, you also have to look after your in-laws.

In the summer, we were living in my uncle’s house. His wife was working 24/7. She had to take care of the guests, look after her kids and look after other people living in the house. She is only one person. Can you believe it?

She’s so fragile that I had no words for what she is going through.  Nobody realizes that. Men don’t realize how their wives suffer because they have never been told. When they’re never told, they don’t know how to take care of their women, how to treat their daughters, how to respect women. They are not told.

I think they are more concentrated about keeping narrow tradition of what are “good girls” or “good women.” Men need to be told what it’s really like to be a good man. When you impose your narrow view, your beliefs and your actions on another person, you destroy them. It’s like killing them. Men never realize that and no one has made them realize that.

EM:  It’s not built into the culture?

FS:  No, it’s not.

NOTE: The images in this blog are from Creative Common License stock and do not reflect any of the individuals mentioned in the blog.

Eugene Marlow, MBA, Ph.D., © 2022

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