In 1935, in Shanghai—a city sliced into concessions like a pie among guests who can barely stand one another—a twenty-three-year-old trumpeter from Parsons, Kansas, is wrapping up his final Shanghai season at the head of his own orchestra. His work with Count Basie lies a couple of years and twelve thousand kilometers away. But this story begins earlier—and in an entirely different hemisphere.
Shanghai in the mid-1930s was a mechanism with three gears turning in different directions and somehow not jamming. The International Settlement was governed by a Municipal Council of Britons, Americans, and Japanese. The French Concession lived by its own laws, with its own police and its own sense of what was permissible after midnight. The Chinese city—territory nominally under the jurisdiction of the Nanjing government—surrounded these enclaves as the ocean surrounds islands, and its population was dozens of times larger. Each zone had its own courts, its own taxes, its own rules for issuing entertainment licenses. A cabaret in the French Concession could stay open until dawn, while across the street, in the International Settlement, different restrictions applied. This legal patchwork created perfect ground for the entertainment industry: if they shut you down in one zone, you opened in the next.
By 1934, hundreds of dance halls, cabarets, and hotel restaurants with live music were operating in the city. The biggest hotels—Cathay (now the Peace Hotel), Astor House, Park Hotel—kept their own orchestras, often Filipino or Russian. Shanghai’s Russian émigré community, one of the largest in the world, supplied musicians by the dozen: violinists, pianists, accordionists from Harbin and Vladivostok filled restaurant stages. Filipino ensembles, playing American repertoire with impeccable pronunciation—a legacy of decades of American colonial rule in the Philippines—were considered the workhorses of the dance industry. And into this landscape came—or crashed—African American jazz musicians, who had begun appearing in Shanghai as early as the 1920s.
The simple answer: demand. Dance halls competed for audiences, and audiences—cosmopolitan, affluent, bored—wanted “real” jazz, foxtrots, swing. Filipino orchestras played beautifully, but club owners understood market mechanics: an African American ensemble onstage was a marketing argument, a promise of authenticity. The racial logic of colonial Shanghai worked paradoxically. On the street, a Black person could encounter discrimination from white expats—entry to pools and certain clubs was restricted. But on a cabaret stage, his presence raised a venue’s status. You were a commodity and an artist at once, and the gap between those roles could be painful.
The more complicated answer: Shanghai offered work and relative freedom in years when the American South lived under Jim Crow laws, and even in the “liberal” cities of the North and West, opportunities for Black musicians remained limited. Buck Clayton, before leaving, was based in Los Angeles, playing at the Red Mill dance hall and living in Boyle Heights—one of the few multiethnic neighborhoods where Mexicans, Japanese, and African Americans lived side by side. Central Avenue was the center of Black musical life in Los Angeles, but the scale of that scene and its financial possibilities were nothing beside what a Shanghai contract promised. Twelve musicians, paid passage across the Pacific, a permanent venue—for a twenty-two-year-old trumpeter, it was an offer you didn’t turn down.
Clayton was not a pioneer. African American musicians had already worked in Shanghai before him—the pianist Teddy Weatherford, who became his traveling companion, was already familiar with the Asian club circuit by then. Weatherford had spent years in India, China, and Southeast Asia, building a career unimaginable for a Black pianist in the Chicago or New York of that era. Shanghai was part of a wider network—Calcutta, Bombay, Manila, Tokyo—along which jazz musicians circulated, musicians who had not found—or had not sought—a place in the American mainstream.
There is one detail in Clayton’s biography I love because it sounds like a scene from a film nobody ever made. In 1934, he married Gladys “Derb” Henderson right at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, and Duke Ellington’s orchestra played at the wedding. A twenty-two-year-old kid from Kansas, getting married to the music of the era’s greatest bandleader on a Hollywood studio lot—and then, within weeks, boarding a ship for Shanghai. The distance from Hollywood to the Bund waterfront is one sea crossing.
In April 1934, Clayton arrived in Shanghai at the head of a twelve-piece orchestra called Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen. The name was pure marketing: nobody in the group seems to have been from Harlem. Clayton was from Kansas, the other musicians from the West Coast. But “Harlem” in 1934 was a brand, a geographical stamp of origin for “authentic” jazz, and to Shanghai audiences the difference between Harlem and Central Avenue meant nothing. The lineup was formidable: three trumpets—Clayton himself, J. Bratton, Teddy Buckner—trombone (George Johnson), three saxophones (A. Taylor, Hubert Myers, C. Roberts), violin (George McCutcheon), and a rhythm section of piano (Eddie Beal), banjo/guitar (Franklin Pasley), bass (Reginald Jones), and drums (Babe Lewis). Plus Teddy Weatherford as a solo pianist—an entity unto himself, not part of the rhythm section.
The show included more than instrumental music. Duke Upshaw, Thelma Porter, Areyma Columbus Taylor, and Gladys Clayton—Buck’s wife—performed as vocalists and variety artists. It was a full-scale revue, modeled on Harlem clubs like the Cotton Club: music, dancing, vocals, show numbers. Their venue was the Canidrome Ballroom in the French Concession—a dance hall attached to a dog-racing track (canidrome comes from the French “cynodrome,” a place for dog racing). The combination of gambling and jazz under one roof was standard Shanghai practice, not an exotic novelty.
The Canidrome crowd was a cross-section of Shanghai’s elite. Among those attending Clayton’s orchestra were Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling) and her sister. The wife of the leader of the Republic of China, a Wellesley College graduate who spoke fluent English, listened to an orchestra from Kansas and Los Angeles in a hall beside a dog-racing track in the French Concession of a city her husband nominally controlled but, in fact, did not. Put bluntly, that one sentence contains the full absurdity and complexity of the Shanghai situation.
Shanghai’s jazz audience broke down into several layers. Western expats—businessmen, diplomats, servicemen, adventurers—formed the core club crowd. Wealthy Chinese, especially from Westernized families—and the Soong family was perhaps the most Westernized in the country—also frequented cabarets and dance halls. Shanghai’s middle-class youth were learning the foxtrot and tango—dance halls were spaces of modernization, where bodies were taught to move the Western way. Russian émigrés, Japanese businessmen, Sephardic entrepreneurs like the Sassoon family—each group arrived with its own expectations, and each paid. Chinese dance hostesses, the so-called taxi dancers, worked the halls, selling dances one by one—and for them the orchestra was a working tool, setting the rhythm of their earnings.
But the Canidrome ended badly for Clayton. On November 13, 1934, a fight broke out in the hall between the musicians and one Jack Riley—a former American sailor and member of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. The Volunteer Corps, a paramilitary force of expats defending the International Settlement, included people of every stripe, and Riley apparently belonged to the kind who walks into a cabaret with his fists already clenched. Details of the incident are scant, but its consequences are specific: on November 19, 1934, Clayton’s orchestra left the Canidrome. They were replaced by Nathan Rabin’s “Champions”—a white American band, less “problematic,” in terms of racial tensions in the room, according to an advertisement in the China Press. Six days from the fight to the firing: the speed with which the colonial machine ground up conflicts, leaving no time for investigation.
The orchestra did not break up. From December 24, 1934, the Harlem Gentlemen began playing at the Ladow’s Casanova cabaret at 545 Edward VII Avenue—a street that served as the boundary between the International Settlement and the French Concession. The co-owners were Louis Ladow and Stella Leitao—names pointing to the Portuguese-Macanese diaspora, another layer of Shanghai cosmopolitanism. The place operated with no cover charge: admission was free, money was made on drinks and, probably, associated entertainments. Free admission meant a more democratic crowd—or, more precisely, a wider funnel, catching sailors on leave, clerks, and random passersby alike.
It was during this period—between the Canidrome and his departure from Shanghai—that Clayton did something beyond the bounds of ordinary club work. He seriously took up the local Chinese repertoire, whose source was Li Jinhui—the composer now called the father of Chinese popular music. Li wrote songs at the intersection of traditional Chinese melodies and Western dance rhythms—what would later be called shidaiqu, “songs of the era.” In retellings, this connection swells into a direct collaboration between the two men, but scholars of the genre are clear-eyed: there are no witnesses to a personal meeting. What is documented is something else: Clayton’s orchestra played Li’s music for the dancing crowd at the Canidrome, while the trumpeter himself—by his own memoirs—learned local pop hits by ear to keep the room going. An Eastern melody through the lens of Kansas swing—essentially, an arrangement in reverse—shatters the notion of jazz in Shanghai as a one-way import.
What gets me is this: the thread is barely discussed in standard Clayton biographies, where the Shanghai period is usually reduced to an exotic vignette before the “real” career with Basie. But working with someone else’s song material is proof that, at twenty-three, Clayton was already thinking like an arranger, capable of hearing an unfamiliar musical language and finding its jazz potential.
The story of the Harlem Gentlemen’s studio sessions is the slipperiest detail in this biography. The temptation to credit the orchestra with recordings for Victor is enormous: the label had branches and distribution across Asia, its Shanghai office issued records for both Western and Chinese markets, and sessions in those years were held in improvised studios—hotel halls and specially equipped rooms where portable recording machines were brought in. But no trace of those sessions can be found in the discographies: Clayton’s first recording in the main American DAHR database is dated 1937, already from the States. Shanghai jazz historian Andrew Field puts it more harshly: nothing from Clayton’s Shanghai recordings has survived—not catalog numbers, not matrices, not a single surviving disc.
The repertoire of the Canidrome and Casanova—foxtrots, swing numbers, ballads—is now known only from programs and newspaper lines: the sound itself is lost. The one thing we can state for certain comes from Clayton’s own memoirs: in local clubs he learned Chinese pop songs by ear to keep the room going—and Li’s dominant role in the genre almost certainly left its mark on that homemade catalogue.
What the record tells us with certainty about Clayton is this: by twenty-three, he was leading a full-size orchestra professional enough for studio work at a major label. Three trumpets, a trombone, three saxophones, a rhythm section—this was not a combo for a small club but a big band requiring arrangements, rehearsals, discipline. When Clayton returned to the States in 1936 and joined Count Basie’s orchestra in Kansas City, he arrived not as a green trumpeter, but as a man who had spent two years running his own ensemble on the other side of the world and working with material beyond the standard American repertoire. Basie got a musician tempered not by the clubs of 52nd Street, but by the dance halls of the French Concession.
Victor was far from the city’s only label. By the mid-1930s, Shanghai had become East Asia’s largest recording center. Pathé Orient—a branch of the French Pathé—dominated the Chinese popular music market: it was where shidaiqu stars recorded, including the celebrated Zhou Xuan. Columbia, Odeon, Beka—European labels maintained Shanghai offices and pressed records for both expats and Chinese consumers. The market was bilingual and two-tiered: Western dance music and Chinese popular music coexisted in the catalogues of the same companies, sometimes recorded in the same rooms.
Records were sold in department stores on Nanjing Road, in specialist shops, and through mail-order catalogues. By then, the gramophone was a household object in middle-class homes—Western and Chinese alike. The gramophone sold the public precisely what the Harlem Gentlemen supplied live at the Canidrome and Casanova. On neighboring shelves stood recordings by Filipino ensembles and Russian restaurant orchestras, records by Li Jinhui, and Louis Armstrong discs brought in from America—but not the orchestra ruling the stage: its sound never entered that circulation.
It would be a lie to describe this world as a space of cultural freedom. Jazz in Shanghai functioned within a system where rights were determined by passport and skin color. Extraterritoriality—the legal principle by which foreigners in the concessions were not subject to Chinese law—created a caste of people standing above the local population. Within that caste there was its own hierarchy: Britons and Americans at the top, Europeans behind them, then the “colored” subjects of empires, and at the bottom—Chinese people on their own land. African American musicians occupied a strange middle position: formally American citizens with the right to extraterritoriality, in practice people white expats might bar from their club but whose music they wanted to hear.
The incident with Jack Riley at the Canidrome was not an accident but a symptom. A former sailor, a white American, gets into a fight with Black musicians—and six days later, it is the musicians who leave, not the sailor. The French Concession, for all its reputation as a liberal enclave, protected its clients rather than its staff. Clayton’s orchestra found a new venue quickly—Casanova opened its doors a little over a month later—but the mechanism of exclusion worked flawlessly. A musician was replaceable. A dance hall was not.
Chinese musicians and dancers stood still lower in this food chain. Taxi dancers in Shanghai halls worked under conditions that today would be described as exploitative: long shifts, a percentage of dance-ticket sales, dependence on tips and customers’ favor. The orchestra set the pace of their earnings literally—a fast number meant more dances in an evening, a slow one fewer. Jazz in Shanghai was embedded in an economy of bodies: musicians’ bodies onstage, dancers’ bodies in the hall, customers’ bodies at tables.
Buck Clayton left Shanghai in 1935 and returned to the United States. After that—Kansas City, Basie’s orchestra, recordings for Columbia and Vocalion, the famous sessions with Billie Holiday, a career that would last for decades and end only with his death on December 8, 1991. In the standard narrative, the Shanghai episode looks like a prologue, a warm-up before the main act. But look at it from Shanghai rather than Kansas City, and the proportions change.
In 1934–1935, American jazz already existed as a global network of production and consumption. Records were pressed in Shanghai and sold in Manila. Musicians from Chicago played in Calcutta. An arranger from Kansas set the melodies of a Chinese composer into swing form. An African American band from Kansas and Los Angeles was the leading musical force in the French Concession—a city governed simultaneously by three jurisdictions. To call this the “periphery” is to look at the map from one point and mistake it for the center.
Shanghai in the 1930s was not a utopia of jazz brotherhood. It was a market—hard, racially stratified, commercial—where music was sold just as opium, silk, and real estate were sold: to those who paid, by rules set by the strongest. But precisely because it was a market, not a festival or a cultural mission, it worked. Demand for swing existed on both sides of the Pacific, and the Harlem Gentlemen, supplying it live beneath the spotlights of the French Concession, were an answer to that demand—no more, but no less. Where those matrices are now, and whether the original pressings have survived, is a question I have no answer to—and, I suspect, neither do most discographers.