Unique fusion of traditional Chinese 2-string violin (erhu) music with free jazz, African-Cuban rhythms and eastern melodies. Shanghai Blue went on to be named the Bandsearch 1990 Jazz Band of the Year.

5 MP3 Songs
JAZZ: World Fusion, WORLD: World Fusion



Details:
Dr. Bill Colangelo and Tianji Xie, whose ground-breaking musical collaboration in 1990 produced the award-winning group Shanghai Blue, reunited in the fall of 2005 for series of international performances in San Antonio, Toronto and Beijing.

Jazz saxophonist and composer Colangelo, and, erhu (Chinese two-string violin) master and composer Xie, began their collaboration combining the sounds of Chinese traditional music with 1960s-style free jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms in New York City in 1989. The six-piece group Shanghai Blue went on to be named the Bandsearch 1990 Jazz Band of the Year, performing in concert series and jazz clubs such as the Knitting Factory in New York City and the Bim Huis in Amsterdam. Their music was heard on National Public Radioâs American Jazz Radio Festival and was reported on in New York Newsday, the Tokyo Yomiuri, and the Taiwan World Journal. The groupâs CD Shanghai Blue influenced many musical groups inside the Peopleâs Republic of China to combine the erhu with American-style jazz and pop.

Dr. Colangelo began his work in experimental music as a teenager in the late 1960s using Moog synthesizers, tape loop studies of white noise, serial composition, Indian music and free jazz improvisation. He received favorable reviews in the New York Times for his performance at the Microtonal Music Festival in New York City. He also has performed solo works at the World Saxophone Congress in Valencia, Spain, and in Perugia and Gubbio, Italy. His dissertation on Giacinto Scelsi is one of the few published works in English on the trance-induced creations of the Italian mystical composer. Dr. Colangelo is an Associate Professor of Multimedia and American Popular Music at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas.

Xie came to the U.S. in 1988 as a visiting scholar from the Peopleâs Republic of China, where he was an authority on the folk music of Chinaâs ethnic minorities and a master erhu performer. He began his study of the erhu when he was six years old with a blind fortune teller on the streets of Shanghai and went on to become a soloist with the Shanghai Opera, a modern composer and a musicology authority with the Academy of Arts and Literature in Beijing. Xie immigrated to Canada in 1991 and is currently a composer and piano teacher in Vancouver, B.C. His works have been performed in San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Shanghai and Beijing.