Music

Music for The Shanghai Mimi Band is inspired by shidaiqu which is a unique style of music from Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. It is a blend of Chinese folk & American jazz fusion, and which could only have come out of a city where musicians from every corner of the world lived, worked and thrived.

Shidaiqu has been celebrated in Chinese culture for decades, and much has been written over the years, but there is a story to its resurgence and the reason we have chosen to perform this style of music. In 2003 global music giant EMI was clearing out a former BBC Studio in Mumbai, India in preparation for its demolition. It had been there since the 1920s when it manufactured and distributed records under the Pathé label. In an attached warehouse, workmen unearthed trunks with Chinese writing and inside were the mother shells of about 800 songs from the thirties and forties. These were the stampers used to press old vinyl 78s. This discovery uncovered music as unique as Shanghai in this remarkable era, a mixture of Eastern and Western influences, blues, jazz, traditional Chinese opera and folk music.