Hong Kong and Jazz: An Improvised History

Hong Kong and Jazz: An Improvised History

Rob Garratt

Jazz is back! Jazz is cool! These are the cringey media and marketing sentiments we’re incessantly being fed, as contradictory as they are condescending. But while, as any zealot of the genre will quickly tell you, jazz never went anywhere. But it certainly wasn’t cool – for a long time. 

That has undeniably changed over the past decade, led by US artists, including the hip-hop assimilations of Robert Glasper, funk-fusion throwbacks of Thundercat and spiritual jazz revivalism of Kamasi Washington. Even more lately, it was epitomised by Ezra Collective’s historic 2025 Brit Award win, the loudest and proudest voice of an ascendant generation of (mostly) Black British musicians infusing Afrobeat rhythms with improvised spunk.

Hong Kong has not been immune to this sea change in jazz fortune, but it is certainly nodding to a less danceable beat. The past half-decade has seen a plethora of new jazz-centric spaces open in the city – leading venue and music school Fountain de Chopin; pandemic-era speakeasy holdout Chez Trente, now overground and hosting its third annual festival in November; and the city’s new jazz kissa-inspired vinyl listening space, Coda. All three are grassroots ventures founded by passion-consumed music heads, nurturing musicians and educating young fans with more-than-weekly gigs – not the top-down, black-tie jazz clubs that alienated earlier generations. 

Recently, an exciting new regular live series has landed in Shek Kip Mei led by bassist Justin Siu and EXP. And at the other, institutional end of things, legitimacy and awareness have been built by the rise of the annual Freespace Jazz Festival, thankfully back for a sixth edition in 2025, despite the departure of founder Kung Shi-ching. 

Taking note of these evolutions and revolutions has been Clarence Chang, who has arguably done more to spread the gospel of improvised music in Hong Kong than anyone: as the founder of the city’s first jazz music shop and record label; as a blockbuster promoter responsible for bringing banner names like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea to the city; and most recently, as the founder of the Jazz in the Neighbourhood concert series.

“We’ve seen a new breed of musicians coming up in the past 10 years – and some of them are kind of becoming stars!” Chang enthuses between bites of spaghetti at Coda. “But it’s more acoustic here – the music didn’t really change.”

Clarence Chang poses with world-renowned jazz pianist Chick Corea.

Fresh perspectives, classic sounds

While the global jazz boom has been all about fresh fusions — like integrating hip-hop rhythms and club basslines — aesthetically embracing street cultures, and/or reclaiming forgotten Afrofutist ideals, Hong Kong’s jazz boom has been noticeably more humble. Compared to several years ago, there’s undoubtedly more venues, gigs and musicians, and a larger, younger audience to hear them, but the music being made is most often traditional, typically acoustic fare, leaning into the same standard-songbook repertoire familiar to jazz students all over the world.

Chang credits both the boom’s resonance, and its tamer sound, to a new younger generation of Hongkongers studying at schools in North America and Europe, who later brought their chops back home to Hong Kong. Ahead of the pack were the likes of pianists Joyce Cheung and Patrick Lui, guitarists Teriver Cheung and Alan Kwan, and world champion harmonica player Cy Leo. But recent years have seen dozens more talented players crowding into after-hours jam sessions. “In the old days, there were only a handful of Hongkongers who studied at Berklee or MI,” says Chang, referring to the legendary music college in Boston and the Musicians’ Institute in Los Angeles. “But now there are so many I cannot keep track of all of them.”

In 2021, Chang put the city’s emerging generation in the spotlight, programming the six-hour Our Jazz Pianists concert showcasing emerging Cheung, Lui and other key talents including Daniel Chu and Bowen Li. Two tracks by each artist, recorded live on the day, were later collected on a CD of the same name, one of the first releases on Chang’s Jazz World Records label. 

Jazz journeys

Such a compilation would have been unimaginable a decade earlier, when you might  have been forgiven for thinking the entire Hong Kong scene could be summed up by namechecking its pair of omnipresent elder statesmen, guitarist Eugene Pao and pianist Ted Lo.

Chang’s own jazz journey began back in 1979 when he heard fusion guitarist John McLaughlin’s One Truth Band live in Australia, where he was studying audio engineering. When he moved back to Hong Kong a few years later, the only jazz in town was a weekly Sunday show at the Dickens Bar, an English-style pub at the Excelsior hotel. It was led by the late Filipino guitarist Tony Carpio, whose sons Chris and Bernard became local stalwarts who played locally as the Carpio Brothers. 

In 1983, Pao returned to Hong Kong from the US, followed 13 years later by Lo. These two returnees dominated whatever scene there was for years, often backed by Filipino imports bassist Paul Candelaria and drummer Anthony Fernandes. And for a long time, that was it. “From 1990 to about 2007, it was just Ted and Eugene,” claims Chang. 

Why? Oddly, while Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai all host outposts of New York’s famed Blue Note, Hong Kong has never been home to an internationally renowned jazz club, despite its status as a tourist and finance hub. Homegrown live nightspots have come and gone — Peel Fresco, Gecko, Orange Peel, to name a few — but the city has only ever hosted one “half decent” jazz club, at least according to Chang: the Skylark on Wyndham Street, which closed around 2010.

Before that, there was the simply named Jazz Club in Lan Kwai Fong, founded by saxophonist Ric Halstead, which hosted visiting names like Tori Amos, Johnny Griffin, Archie Shepp and Jimmy Witherspoon in a prolific run between 1989 and 1995. These star soloists often travelled without a band for financial reasons, to be backed up by Pao, Lo and co. “That’s when Eugene really polished his chops,” says Chang. But these storied sets were only heard by a small, largely homogeneous expat audience. “Several times, I was the only Chinese fan in the venue,” he notes.

Making waves

That’s one of the reasons Chang set out to introduce jazz to a wider audience in Hong Kong. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, he worked as music producer on around 50 Cantopop and Cantorock records, and made his name crafting hits for Danny Summer. In 1998, he combined his two loves, producing Summer’s influential jazz-themed AM 諳1 album, that helped establish the idea of a homegrown Hong Kong jazz standard.

Chang dove in feet first in 2001 by founding the Jazz World Records shop, which introduced specialist titles otherwise unavailable in the region, while dodging rising rents and moving through a succession of five different addresses in the course of a decade.

In 2005, Chang brought Richard Galliano to Hong Kong, inaugurating the Jazz World Live Series which would go on to host more than 80 concerts, including blockbuster names Hancock, Corea, Pat Metheny, Marcus Miller and Kamasi Washington. Three years later he also co-founded the Hong Kong International Jazz Festival, but left the team after two annual events; the festival was last staged in 2021. 

In 2018, Chang partnered with the government to host the first annual Jazz Marathon concert, a two-day affair spotlighting a mix of international and local players, which he considers his proudest achievement. “That whole weekend was successful because we were surprised to see so many young people in the audience,” he recalls. “We thought the age group that would come would be much older.”

That laid the path for Chang’s latest move, partnering once more with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department in 2021 to found Jazz in the Neighbourhood. Despite launching mid-pandemic, the series has already hosted more than 60 local and international events — including vocal stars Diana Krall and Cécile McLorin Salvant, piano legend Fred Hersch and smooth guitarist Lee Ritenour — and is gearing up for one of its most gripping gigs yet, with a September 22 visit from American pianist bandleader Aaron Parks. Before the year is out, fans can also look forward to a performance from Japanese crossover star Hiromi’s Sonicwonder, on November 24. 

Frequently, Chang calls on Hong Kong acts to collaborate with the international headliners, and now the promoter is putting together an all-star Hong Kong backing group; he hopes playing together in the Legacy Band will simultaneously celebrate and elevate homegrown talent. It’s just the latest step in a decades-long quest to raise jazz’s profile in Hong Kong. 

“Yeah. I think we’re doing okay,” he muses modestly. “Now we know what we can and what we cannot do.” 

Like what, exactly? “Like, don’t expect too much, too soon.”

Chang (far left) and the band, AM 諳1.

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All photos courtesy of Clarence Chang.