Tales of two cities imagined in music: ‘Metropolis Shanghai’ and ‘Chavez Ravine’
1950s Los Angeles and 1930s Shanghai, conjured in sound
(Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on January 22nd 2006.) I’ll make a long overdue mention of Chavez Ravine in a moment, but one of my favourite music items of last year is an ‘audio film’ on the Winter & Winter label called Metropolis Shanghai — Showboat to China (2005).
In the style of an earlier favourite — Uri Caine’s Sidewalks of New York, which re-imagined the sound of popular song in the bars and pubs of 1900 New York — it’s an ersatz aural recreation of 1930s Shanghai, comprising historical recordings, re-recorded songs and sounds originating from that time, and original music inspired by the particularly fascinating cultural collisions in the city leading up to World War II. Here’s the context of this new re-imagination:
“Shanghai means “on the sea”. The name comes from the Sung dynasty in the 11th century. At that time the story of Shanghai began as a small fishing village. It became a city in the 16th century, but was still unimportant until the Opium War during the 1840s when European powers took control of the city and opened it up to foreign trade. Because of its ideal location near the mouth of the Yangtze River and the foreign…
