March 08, 2014 5:23 AM
Photo: Owen Carey
A lot of talented jazz musicians in the 1930's couldn't buy a drink in the places they played. They were the African-American musicians who helped create the era's signature sound — but still had to live under the sting of segregation. Unless they went elsewhere.
Author Nicole Mones' new Night in Shanghai centers on classcially trained Baltimore pianist Thomas Greene, who's recruited to play jazz — a music that's new to him — in a new place: not Harlem, or the south side of Chicago, or even Paris, but Shanghai.
Greene finds success in Shanghai's nightlife palaces, but the city — and the world — are on the brink of war. Mones tells NPR's Scott Simon that Greene and the three other major characters are fictional, but everyone else is real. "All the minor characters really lived, and all the events of the novel actually occurred. So at the end of the novel, there is a nonfiction-style epilogue."
Interview Highlights
On why Greene and musicians like him went to Shanghai
They got the respect that they had always deserved, that they always knew they deserved. On the surface, there was playing for an equal wage, and that's a kind of freedom, to be able to play on an equal stage. But more important, I think, than that, was that these were highly trained musicians, and they really deserved a great deal more respect than they got.
But you know something? These jazzmen did much more than just benefit from a well-deserved opportunity. They played a role in the city's modernization, by providing for its soundtrack the American song form, mediated through their sound, through jazz.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/286925314/night-in-shanghai-dances-on-the-eve-of-destruction?ft=1&f=
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