Young musicians find shared language in jazz

Backstage at the SFJAZZ Center on Aug 4, Malcolm Clark and Annie Meyer were already dressed for the bandstand: black jackets, red pants and black canvas shoes.

The San Francisco concert was the ensemble's last US stop before they left for a tour running through Aug 15 with stops in Taichung, Shanghai and Beijing.

But when the two musicians talked about what they most hoped to find on the other side of the Pacific, they kept coming back to something they already knew how to do: listen.

"I know it's cliche, but when people say jazz is a language that can be understood by everyone, I think that's like a connective tissue that connects both cultures," Meyer said. "You're able to communicate with audiences in a way that you couldn't by speaking."

That idea is at the heart of this summer's tour by Carnegie Hall's National Youth Orchestra Jazz, or NYO Jazz, a band of players aged 16 to 19 chosen through a national audition process.

For the players, the trip is both a concert tour and an experiment in person-to-person communication.

"When I travel outside of the country, I am always really happy to get to know what the locals think about the world and see other people's perspectives," said Clark. "I really hope that we can kind of act as ambassadors of American music for a Chinese audience."

For Clark, that improvisational freedom is exactly what makes jazz useful across cultures. "The improvisational aspect of jazz ... is something that doesn't require any kind of mutual understanding," Clark said.

Music feels "wired into all of humanity", allowing improvisation to become "a connecting bridge between different cultures", he said.

Meyer echoed the view, adding that a solo does not require a shared spoken language, yet another musician can hear it, react to it and join the conversation. "It connects people, and it allows people to feel like they've known each other," she said.

The NYO Jazz musicians had known one another for only about two weeks, she said, yet playing together had compressed the distance between strangers.

That is the argument Carnegie Hall has been testing since it founded NYO Jazz in 2018. The ensemble traveled to China for the first and most recent time the following year.

'Cultural ambassadors'

"NYO Jazz was created not only to develop exceptional young musicians, but also to give them a platform to serve as cultural ambassadors," said Joanna Massey, director of learning and engagement programs at Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute.

On tour, the musicians take part in peer-to-peer activities with local young people, musicians and non-musicians alike. Those encounters, she said, frequently outlast the concerts in the players' memories.

Jazz has a long history in China, with Shanghai becoming an early jazz center in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent years, the genre has gained popularity among younger audiences, with jazz clubs and festivals expanding in cities including Beijing and Shanghai.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com