Mary Ann Hurst Talks With Virtual China


Q: Did you ever sing for any high party officials, or have any other surreal singing moments in China?
A: I sang in a "jazz duo" with a Chinese singer (Gu Feng) on one of those Chinese New Year television shows where foreigners are asked to perform. We took the song "Route 66" (which we both "traded" verses singing), and made a medley of it using the folksong "Embroidered Pouch" (which I scatted). I figured the Chinese would miss the melody because of the form of scatting, but not at all. The largely older men in the live audience sitting in front of us burst into applause when the scatting was going on, so I guess at least they recognized the melody.

Q: How did you pick the songs on your CD?
A: I listened to a variety of tapes and CDs and tried to mentally edit out the Canto-pop-synthesizer effect, that so many have, to get to the actual melody. I also ask Chinese friends what they like, what their parents and grandparents like -- in other words, ferret out the songs that are time-tested gems of the listening public. Everyone mentions Nanniwan, Kangding Qingge and Moli Hua, but Kenny G did Moli Hua and I didn't want to do that.

Q: How do you sing the Chinese tones? How does it work with the Western musical scale?
A: Actually, you just sing - the tones meld into the melody and the pentatonic scale is not so strange to our ears. Much of folk music is based on the pentatonic scale all over the world. Someone recently told me that 95% of Oscar Peterson's work was in pentatonic scale, for what that's worth. Pitch is pitch, regardless of person, country, song, or context. Either you're "on" or not. Tone is pretty much an individual thing - which comes from the particularities of the individual's vocal chords, personality development, way of viewing the world, and way of hearing music.

Q: How does the Jazz heritage with its African rhythms and U.S. lyrics fit with Chinese folksongs?
A: Jazz style can be fit to any music -- it is in the arrangement or "voicings" of the chords, the timing, and/or phrasing (pauses, sensibilities when to stop or start), that lyrics have to be made to work around the melody in a hopefully intelligent way. This is the test and trick for the interpreter.

Q: You seem to have wanted to show Chinese musicians something. What?
A: I wasn't really intending to "show" the Chinese anything, but was, rather, interested in the experiment of what would happen if I tried to carry out a certain vision I'd carried around for years. One of my Chinese professors at the University of Minnesota, Stephen Wang, actually encouraged me to try combining jazz and Chinese folksongs. His encouragement stayed with me over the years, I guess, along with that of other people -- a couple of whom I sat next to on trans-Pacific airplane flights.

Young musicians I met in Beijing who were playing U.S. standard jazz were doing very well, considering they had no background in the idiom, and learned from recordings, videos and fakebooks [the jazz chart books musicians use in the states]. A couple of the musicians really had a great feel for the music -- it is an international language, after all. But it occurred to me that if they used their own music and turned it into jazz it might make more sense to them more quickly. And it would be a part of them, their own tradition.

On one trip back to the U.S., I had asked the then-New York-based jazz pianist/arranger Rob Bargad of Nat Adderley's group to make jazz charts from a cassette tape of folkmusic I'd brought back from China. His charts were great. [Later] several Beijing musicians and I went into the Chinese Broadcasting Recording Studio to record two of his arrangements of Chinese folksongs in jazz form. After the recording session and hearing the not-so-shabby results, one musician said, "Gee, if we'd practiced, we'd really have been good!" Another said, "Wow, I've been hearing that melody all my life (Xiao Baicai, or "Little Cabbage") and I never would have expected or dreamed it could sound that way. His comment reminded me of hearing John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" after being accustomed to the Julie Andrews version in the Sound of Music score. A minor life-altering event.

Q: What kind of response have you been getting from your CD?
A: A Mongolian artist friend was incensed that I included minority songs under the rubric of "Chinese" folksongs, but then I'm a "big-nosed American" who has lived in China for many years and tend to accept the fact that minorities are a way of life in China.

Most people say the Chinese singing doesn't bother them -- they say it actually sounds a little like scat, and the jazz mood overshadows the Chinese for them.

Some Chinese friends have been disturbed by the fact I turned "Kangding Lovesong" into a ballad, which, to their ears, probably sounds like a funeral dirge, in comparison to the very bright and up-tempo manner in which it is usually played. But that was one of the points, to present the lovely melodies in a new light. Sometimes showing them off in new clothes shows the loveliness of their form even better.

Q: Do you have any favorite chantueses?
A: Many. Some for just specific songs or periods in their lives. I was raised on Ella and Nat and Satchmo and the Count, so those were the beginnings but I discovered many later on. Ella is probably still first, then Sarah Vaughan, Morgana King, Helen Merrill, Etta James, Peggy Lee, Shirley Horn, Betty Carter, Carmen McRae, Nina Simone, Sade, Aretha Franklin, Diana Krall, Annie Ross, Rosemary Clooney, some of Marilyn Monroe's work, Joni Mitchell, Astrud Gilberto, the Brazil 66 singers, Cleo Laine, Ernestine Anderson, Susannah McCorkle, Dinah Washington, Blossom Dearie, Nancy Wilson, Rickie Lee Jones...

Q: What do you plan next?
A: I work in Turkey a few weeks during the year and had the chance to sing with Bulgarian-Turkish jazz pianist Tuna Otenel in January. It might be fun to do a project of Turk folksongs. The Black Sea area (northeast Turkey) has some phenomenal music and it might be fun to explore that. I used to study French in college and lived in Aix-en-Province one summer, and saw Duke Ellington at Marseilles when I was 16. Jazz and France go hand-in-hand in my mind. So, maybe do a French-inspired and sung project.

If I did another Chinese-based CD, had all the money and time and could wave my wand and just say "do this, " I'd have Quincy Jones and Ray Charles work with Chinese musicians and U.S. jazz and blues musicians to create some kind of amazing project using Chinese instruments -- the guzheng, qin and erhu and huge drums (gu) in particular. The cover of the project would be the paintings from the interior burial coffin at Mawangdui which features what I'd call incredible astral travel creatures racing around -- very rhythmical, very whimsical, very cool. Very Chinese jazz in visual form.

Click to hear North Wind Blows, by Mary Ann Hurst.
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Click to hear Nanniwan, by Mary Ann Hurst.
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Click to hear a blues version of Embroidered Pouch, by Mary Ann Hurst.
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Visit Mary Ann Hurst's Web site.

A few other Jazz-China Links:
You might also like to check out the CD China Jungle which is another China-jazz hybrid
Music Critic Dan Ouellette's Salon.com piece about China Jazz
Tara Shingle's China Jazz Site
Excerpts on Jazz from Dennis Rea's book "Live in the Forbidden City"
A SF Jazz Band Tours China
A List of Jazz Clubs in China