From the 1920s to the 1940s, Shanghai was a global crossroads alive with sound. American musicians, Filipino jazz bands, and Chinese composers and performers converged in the same nightlife scene. In crowded cabarets, Western swing collided with Chinese folk; brass met pentatonic melodies. Jazz didn’t simply arrive in Shanghai — it was absorbed, reshaped, and transformed into something new, laying the foundation for modern Chinese pop.

In this video, we return to Shanghai’s jazz age to uncover a hidden chapter of music history. It’s a story that challenges the idea of jazz as a purely Western phenomenon and reveals Shanghai as an unlikely yet vital laboratory of global sound.