US scholar and lifelong music enthusiast Andrew Field brings to life the legendary jazz era of 1930s Shanghai, writes Mike Peters.

He has a gift for using nightlife as a lens for seeing the city, the urban life. That's Andrew Field's quick assessment of modernist writer Mu Shiying, the subject of Field's new book. But the words might well be a snapshot of Field himself.

Long fascinated by the legendary jazz era of 1930s Shanghai, the US scholar born in Acton, Massachusetts, has made his adopted city's music scene, past and present, a milieu of his own - culminating in Shanghai's Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. After years of research and writing, he now leads one or two city walks each month, sharing the stories of celebrity hostesses and the gangsters who made them the heart of a bygone social era.

"It was thanks to its cabarets that old Shanghai was called the 'Paris of the Orient'," says Lynn Pan, author of Sons of the Yellow Emperor. "No one has studied the rise and fall of those cabarets more extensively than Andrew Field."

A lifelong music enthusiast, Field began studying Chinese language and culture in 1987 and went to Taiwan in 1988 to study Mandarin at the Stanford Center. That fall he toured the mainland for several months on his own before returning Stateside to complete a bachelor's degree in Asian studies at Dartmouth College, where he also studied piano and joined the Chamber Singers.

Accepting a fellowship to pursue advanced degrees in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in New York, Field added Japanese to his language studies. Two years later, in the summer of 1993, Field was living in the city of Sapporo and tending bar at a Japanese nightclub.

"That gave me a new perspective on the inner workings of an Asian nightlife environment," he says, and that sparked his interest in that topic as an academic subject. Field learned about the age-old traditions at the club, where the owner was a retired geisha and employed hostesses.

He also learned many Japanese pop and folk songs, and practiced singing them at karaoke - where he also learned many songs from Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

Excited by Chinese pop music and the revival of "golden age" music from 1930s Shanghai, he shaped those interests into a PhD dissertation focused on the song-and-dance industry of the early 20th century in China.

In 2007, he began work on a film documentary, Down, about the capital's indie rock scene.

Several years later, Field launched Shanghai's Dancing World at the Shanghai Literary Festival.

"In the '30s, people really went out to dance - they dressed up and they knew how," he says, laughing. Today, most of the clubs - even the best ones - are about selling drinks, and the once-de rigueur dance floors have given way to bar seating. His favorite hangouts for music include the House of Blues & Jazz, the Cotton Club, the JZ club and 288 Melting Pot - but only the oldest, the House of Blues & Jazz, still has a dance floor that sees any fancy steppin'.

A lot of the appeal is nostalgic, he says, noting that the Old Jazz Band at the Fairmont Peace Hotel has played there for decades.

"Today, the happening dance scene is the salsa clubs," he says.

Field's interest in the city's 1930s urban culture, meanwhile, led him to look closely at Mu Shiying one of the first significant Chinese writers who didn't focus on the proletariat countryside.

"He was once described as Shanghai's 'literary comet', starkly revealing the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism," Field says.

But the avant-garde writer was so apolitical that he eventually took a job with the Japanese occupiers of the city. He was assassinated on the street in 1940, though the who and why behind the killing isn't clear even today.

"Now there's a Mu craze after he was rediscovered in the '80s and '90s," Field says. "His highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short-story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read." Field's new book Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist, debuts at literary festivals this spring and includes six translations of his short stories.

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

Andrew Field's fascination with Chinese pop music and the revival of "golden age" music from 1930s Shanghai has fueled his doctoral dissertation and two books. Photos Provided to China Daily

(China Daily 03/02/2014 page5)