By BRUCE VEDDER

Foreign acts are coming to play – and stay - on China’s vibrant music scene.

Western rock bands are now well accepted in Chinese bars.

THERE was a time when Western music in Beijing was provided by a hard core of Filipino cover bands and the odd part-time collective of embassy staff and foreign journalists. Today, however, foreign acts are coming to Beijing to play - and stay. Many hotels in the city continue to hire Filipino groups but acts have increasingly been coming from more diverse places. Trained at one of Bulgaria’s most prestigious universities, Irinka Podorova is one of a new wave of Bulgarian artists in China. Rounding out a nightly residency at the Lido Holiday Inn with private recitals and concerts picked up by her agent, Podorova says Bulgarian classical and jazz musicians are lured to China with chances of residential bookings at some of the many new international hotels springing up around the country. “There are lots more artists coming here because the opportunities are here – not just in Beijing or Shanghai but in lots of other cities where they need professional musicians to play Western standards,” says Podorova, who is currently adapting versions of rock anthems by Queen for her nightly shows.

Outside of upscale hotels, foreign acts are making headway in China by bringing sounds and virtuosity not yet common among local talent. Austrian songstress Jessica Meider strums her guitar and offers jazz and folk songs at several bars around the city, sometimes with local jazz collectives like Buyiding (Not Sure) backing. Funk band Sunjam alternates between local venues such as Yugong Yishan and the 2 Kolegas Bar on Liangmaqiao Road north of Chaoyang Park. Indian musician Kapla Vriksha carries his sitar to venues around the city, looking for gigs in venues large and small. “There are simply more places to play and more people interested in hearing foreign and more progressive music in Beijing now than ever before,” says Vriksha, who often plays the tiny but legendary What? Bar, a one-room jumble of counter-top, tables and amplifiers in an unlikely location near the northwest gate of the Forbidden City.

Punked All over the Place

Beijing’s nascent rock scene is inured to unconventional venues and unusual sounds – lacking the rock clubs that nourish talent in Europe and U.S., musicians are keen to get gigs wherever they can. Band names are even more bizarre: Suffocation, Spirit Trace and Break off the Tragedy are three bands currently doing the rounds of the three largest venues in the city, Yugong Yishan, Nameless Highland and Get Lucky, where punters pay RMB 30 for a night of metal and hard rock. Yugong Yishan regulars Sophie’s Garden and New Perfume meanwhile play Brit-pop songs by groups like Suede and Oasis. Fans of American pop-punk band Blink 182 got together recently at the 13 Club, a cramped rock club in Chaoyang’s northwest limits. Local punk and heavy metal groups Brain Failure, Miao, and Candy Gun haul amplifiers and drum kits off and on the stage for forty minute sets. On Liangmaqiao Road the recently opened 2 Kolegas Bar recently offered The Mutts a weekly slot. “Beijing rocks!” says Peter Hayes, rhythm guitarist in The Mutts, a rock quartet based in Beijing. “You can get good gigs here, and a following. We play to big houses here, and we haven’t been together that long. It would take a long time for a band to get gigs that size in the U.S. or Australia or England, I reckon.”

For Those about to Rock…

China’s capital is becoming a great city to catch hip, hot modern music. Even before some of France’s best known rock and electronica artists came to Chaoyang Park this summer, Massive Tone, one of Germany’s most popular hip hop bands, played to an auditorium of students on the hallowed grounds of Peking University before doing a late night show at the nearby Propaganda nightclub. South of the university district in Chaoyang a healthy mix of foreign and Chinese bands plays every night at clubs like Yugong Yishan near Sanlitun as well as Hart Salon in the 798 art districts. There are some excellent players among them that do rock, jazz and blues. But more and more groups are basing themselves in Beijing and finding paying gigs in the bars and banquet halls of the booming capital. “There are a lot of venues in Beijing now that welcome rock and roll,” says Peter Hayes, adding “A lot of businesses are also willing to hire bands to play at corporate gatherings or openings…They’re really keen on a band with some foreign and local talent because it carries a real cachet in Beijing,” says Hayes, a-23-year old English literature graduate from Utah in the American mid-west who says he’s in China to write a novel.

The Mutts play a thick slice of Western pop and rock canon -- in a typical set cramming in everything from Tom Waits and Thin Lizzy to Guns and Roses – but Hayes concedes that there’s a larger audience for easy listening. On a recent Saturday night when Hayes and his band mates played a Black Sabbath tribute gig in Beijing’s university district, a full house had shown up at the Forbidden City Concert Hall to hear the China Philharmonic Orchestra perform Maurice Ravel’s A Suite for Gypsies and Mozart’s Violin Concerto 3 in G Minor. Conducted by the admired local conductor Yu Long, the orchestra was accompanied by renowned French violinist Augustin Dumay. The China Philharmonic under Yu Long has built a solid reputation from tours in Europe and North America. In the past five years the trickle of international musicians and directors coming to China to work with the group has become a stream, says Wang Yong, manager for international exchange at the Chinese Organization for Culture Exchange, a government body that organizes and promotes tours by foreign musicians. “We’re constantly being approached by artists’ agents and culture officials from other countries, all wanting to do shows in China, whereas before they bypassed it on tours of Japan and Hong Kong.”

Picking up Local Tunes

Even as the world’s musicians make playing pay in the Chinese capital, many foreigners come to hear China’s own music. As Augustin Dumay fiddled at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, further west of town Professor Huang He was giving an audience a taste of his playing and compositional skills on the Chinese dulcimer (the yangqin) at the Central Conservatory of Music. Yang performed Walk on the Antique Road and Yellow Plum Blossom Caprice to an audience of locals and foreign visitors. The Central Conservatory has trained most of China’s best-known classical musicians, a fact not lost on the foreign fans of classical music that came to hear Huang’s concert. “It’s the perfect triple whammy,” gushed Mike Murphy, a retired arts broadcaster from Ireland who came to the concert. “You hear one of China’s most accomplished performers of one of its most beautiful folk instruments in the country’s greatest conservatory.” Chinese traditional music has blended well with Western classics. Piano master Richard Clayderman was in Beijing recently to show Beijingers that he’s still the main man, playing Western standards and Chinese favorites with traditional Chinese ensemble the Oriental Angels. Clayderman is enormously popular in China and has brought his brand of popular piano here several times since his 1985 debut in the country.