Results tagged “cd”

Life Journey, a Modern Sky band hailing from Liuzhou, Guangxi, will play at the Yuyintang bar on Friday night. The band released their first self-titled CD last year, followed by a new four-song EP, “Waiting For You For Dinner.”

This weekend there is no shortage of gigs to check out and we suggest you take a little nap this afternoon so you will be ready to tackle as many as possible. Shanghaiist recommends checking out Queen Sea Big Shark tonight at the Living Design Center, last time we saw this band (way back when 4Live was still around) they had the crowd rocking hard to their surf garage sound. At Live Bar, experimental Korean/Japanese duo, 10, will leave the avant-garde fans in the crowd salivating for more. If you miss them at Live Bar then you have a 2nd chance on Sunday when they play at Yuyintang.

Cold Fairyland are one of those rare Shanghai bands that consistently put out original music and have steadily been growing an overseas following. Check them out Friday at Yuyintang to see why everyone is raving about their melancholic folk sound. Jazz singer Pete Moore who will be performing at Labella's Cafe is also worth a look. For fiddle fans head to Two Cities gallery where fiddle master Hanneke Cassel is in town with guitarist Christopher Lewis.

From the World’s Biggest Fishing Village to Bruce Lee’s Most Famous Kick ...

Have you got an opinion? Starting this week, we will publish an opinion piece from readers on selected weekends, so if you feel like you've got something to get off your chest, email it to us at info AT shanghaiist DOT com and if we like it, we will publish it under this column. This week, a reader takes on That's Shanghai's Erik Peterson's review of Beijing punk band Snapline's new CD. All views expressed by writers under this column are their own and do not indicate any official position taken by Shanghaiist.

The weekend is finally here, and despite the buzz surrounding Linkin Park on Sunday, there are plenty of other shows that are also worth checking out. Friday, Yuyintang warms things up for Linkin Park fans with four local nu-metal bands strutting their stuff and letting out their best screams. While over at 4Live, Pixel Toy, from Hong Kong, provide an eccentric mix of Cantonese pop electronica. Opening for them is Banana Monkey. Phreaktion in celebration...

After much hype and 2 years without a CD or performance in Shanghai, Third Party (formerly known as Muma & Third Party) celebrates the release of their debut album 'Velvet Highway' with a special show at 4Live on November 15th (Thursday). What has really got us excited about this show is that their record label, Oriental Sky, has informed Shanghaiist that props are being flown down from Beijing to recreate scenes from their music video....

One of Shanghai's greatest vocalists will be moving away for good, we are sorry to say. Arlene has been here about as long as your correspondent, over 4 years, and we've worked together a lot. She's a great singer and she'll do well wherever she ends up (first she's going to Dubai to play with jazz pianist Billy Marcus, who used to play in Shanghai at the Portman jazz bar, and then she's moving to Vietnam!). Next Monday, she will be celebrating her time here with a final performance at the JZ Club, and she hopes you all can join her for this festive occasion! It promises to be a lot of fun, as she will also be releasing her first CD that night, which she recorded in Shanghai earlier this year.

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The JazzArt concert series got off to a fantastic start with a packed house enjoying two sets of Lawrence Ku's original music on this past Sunday. His group of seven musicians featured the cream of the crop on the Shanghai jazz scene, nearly all of whom are also faculty at the JZ school — including EJ Parker, Alec Haavik, Andy Hunter, Chris Trzcinski, the author of this post, Lawrence himself, as well as the amazing Beijing-based pianist XiaJia. The concert was held at the TwoCities art gallery on Moganshan Lu, and was a perfect room for the band to play in. It's just the right size for that kind of ensemble, because there was no need to use microphones at all. In fact the only amplification used was for the bass and guitar, and it was minimal.

This first week of the JazzArt concert series will feature the Lawrence Ku Septet playing at the TwoCities Gallery at M50 on Moganshan lu. The septet, which performs quite rarely, is in fact playing quite a few times this month. This is partly because trombonist Andy Hunter is in town through the end of the month, and there aren’t really any other good jazz trombonists in Shanghai. Besides the Jazzy Shanghai festival performance last week and this weekend’s JazzArt concert, the group will also play a CD release party on the 24th (and the Beijing jazz festival at the end of the month). Of course, the imminent release of the album is the other main reason for the increased performance frequency.

We are sitting in City Diner, aka the office, making our usual rounds on Chinese blogs and news sites. On our table are two cards advertising a startling development in the diner's drinks list: Brooklyn East India Pale and Rogue Dead Guy Ale are now available for consumption at Rmb40 a bottle.

Many thanks to studiozero for bringing Ramona Cordova to Shanghai and introducing his music to us. Last night's performance was one of the best musical experiences we've had in half a decade in Shanghai — the guy plays a mean acoustic guitar and his songs are painfully beautiful. We weren't sure what we would think about the falsetto he sometimes uses, but it worked. We actually think we like him better live than on his CD (which we bought after the show).

The announcement below is from composer and arranger John Huie, who produced the Shanghai Jazz CD. The music from this disc was featured in the Hollywood production The White Countess, which was filmed in Shanghai, and features many of Shanghai's best local musicians playing John's arrangements of music from dancehall-era Shanghai.

Since Shanghaiist has indie cred to burn, we don't feel that we need to justify our decision to attend the Kenny G concert last night. The show was two hours of jazz-lite — he actually only played one song and then just held the final note (an E-flat, we believe) for another hour and 55 minutes. Ok, unfortunately he played a lot of songs, including: that one pop song where he holds a note for a long time, that sort of latin song where he holds a note for a long time, that one that's almost bebop where he holds a note for a long time, and funk classic "Pick Up The Pieces". "Wait, can Kenny G bring the funk?" we hear you asking. No. But his band can.

As part of the ongoing "Twocities in Tune" concert series, tonight there will be a duo concert by Steve Sweeting and Coco Zhao at 7:30 pm. These two have done a few of these concerts together already, some of which we reported on previously, also at the last minute. All of the concerts in this series are held at the Twocities Gallery at M50 on Moganshan Lu, and each one features Steve's masterful piano skills together with a talented vocalist. This particular duo has recently recorded an album, which is still in the production process. We'll be sure to let you know when the CD release (party) is when we catch word of it.

We hinted at this several days ago, but we didn't say more because the story we found didn't include some crucial information (like a location). But yesterday a friend who works for ESPN.com forwarded us the event's press release, which you can read here. There we learn that "[m]ore than 200 of the world’s top action sports athletes from more than 20 countries and five continents will compete in the three-day event and feature multiple disciplines, including Aggressive In-Line Skate, Skateboard, BMX Freestyle, Sport Climbing as well as a Moto X demonstration." But more importantly, we find out where all of this will happen — Yangpu District's Jiangwan Stadium.

The last time Shanghaiist saw Sonic Youth live was 10 or so years ago on a blistering hot day on Australia’s Gold Coast, as they played the most self-indulgent set of music since Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Twenty-five minutes into one noisy (noisome, even) free-form jam of whiny guitars, we wandered over to the festival’s other stage only to find a heinously drunk Beck (pre Odelay fame) sitting on a stool, almost slumped over the microphone, making incomprehensible attempts to produce music. Ah, those were the days.

Virtual China calls MyTshirt.cn "China's Threadless," and yes the design-your-own-T-shirt concept in nothing new (in fact, on its main page MyTshirt.cn links to all the other similar sites it was "inspired" by). But MyTshirt.cn is the only one of those sites in Chinese and, we assume, it is by far the cheapest. You could have a basic T-shirt arrive at your doorstep for as little as 41 kuai.

From the Associated Press:

We just saw a commercial for Wang Wang coffee-flavored jelly drops (咖啡果冻) that made us pause and think. It featured a Caucasian man speaking Chinese. If you've seen these types of commercials, you probably know that the voices are dubbed over, and that the accented Chinese you're hearing most likely a Chinese person faking a non-Chinese person's accent.

Have you ever considered the question: Are our children learning from that great resource of information that is the internet? If in some of the poorer countries the answer is a resounding no, that's mostly because computers are expensive and the last thing on the minds of people who are struggling under circumstances of poverty and deprivation. Nonetheless, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nicholas Negroponte had the idea of decreasing the digital divide by making cheap laptops that cost about $100 to make and selling these to poor countries. This became a UN backed non-profit called One Laptop Per Child.

We'd heard a lot of hype about Hong Kong director Johnnie To's (杜棋峰) new film Exiled (放逐), not least of all because it was one of three Chinese language films that competed at the Venice Film Festival (against new works by Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang).

Sensing that our caffeine levels were low, we recently made trip to the convenience store at the end of the block. There we saw Christina Aguilera on the cover of a magazine on the bottom of the rack, which upon closer inspection was the new Chinese Rolling Stone. You might recall that we wrote about this back in late March, after the inaugural issue came out with Cui Jian on the cover. They ran into problems with the publications authorites back then, and it looked like that even coming out with a second issue was going to be a problem.

GigShanghai: Robots, poems and bagpipes

GigShanghai: I-GO, Jewish rock and the F-word

Tim Kao, musician

The Top 10 favorite sounds of Shanghai contest is over and the results have been announced. The reports (in Chinese) that we've seen thus far, which are more or less identical, do not have the list in its entirety. However, the reports all mention that the Reeb beer song is one of the top ten, especially since it's composer, Kong Jia died at age 26. The contest rules stipulate three ways of entering the contest -- you can either record sounds, write something, or call in and tell them what you're favorite sound is. So what else was there? The sound of seagulls at the Waibaidu Bridge, and this unique take on life in the city -- the sound of a 70 year-old "empty nest" life. With the kids working and busy with lives of their own, these old people spend their time feeding birds, listening to the radio, talking with each other. This is part of the author's statement: “城市的生活压力让年轻人忙于在外面打拼，难得回家看看老人，空巢老人越来越多，他们的心声有谁倾听？城市发展固然令人兴奋，但深层次的问题也应该引起关注。” ("The pressure of city life is such that young people are constantly busy and working and thus have little time to go home visit their parents. There are increasing numbers of empty nest old people, but who is there to listen to what's in their hearts? The development of the city is definitely exciting, but we ought to be concerned with the deep social problems as well.")

Howdy folks, and welcome back to this week's indie music preview, brought to you by Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский (that's Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky) and the letter Ф (English equivalent: f).

In the scheme of enjoyable outings, Shanghaiist rates a night at the opera fairly high. Not as high as the time we saw Fugazi at Metropolis in Brisbane, but certainly higher than a night on the couch watching Average Joe.