Various Artists - Waiting for Your Return: A Shidaiqu Anthology 1927-1952, Pt. II

Death Is Not The End

£12.60

Format: Cassette
Catalogue No.: DEATH068
Barcode: 5050580803206
Release Date: 31 Mar 2023
Genre: World/Reggae/China

01: Little Things - Yan Fei
02: Tuberose - Bai Lizhu
03: Send You Off - Yao Lee
04: Spring Night Song - Chen Yumei
05: Pillow Picture - Ying Yin
06: Spring Flowers Like Brocade - Zhou Xuan
07: Falling Flowers and Flowing Water - Bai Hong
08: Meet by Chance - Wu Yingyin
09: The Destination of Love - Zhou Xuan & Yan Hua
10: I Want to Follow You - Li Li-Hua
11: Prayer Under the Moon - Zhou Xuan
12: Spring Breeze Brings Troubles - Wu Yingyin
13: Window to the Soul - Chen Juanjuan
14: Rural Song - Min Yao
15: Dongshan Green - Bai Guang
16: I Want to Forget You - Wu Yingyin
17: I Ask You - Gong Qiuxia & Huang Yuanyin
18: In the Mood for Love - Lu Ming
19: Spring Flowers, When Will You Come Again - Wang Qinglong
20: Second Dream - Li Xianglan

Shidaiqu literally means "songs of the era", a term used to describe a hybrid musical genre that first began permeating through the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai in the late 1920s. Blending western pop, jazz, blues and Hollywood-inspired film soundtracks with traditional Chinese elements, the shidaiqu represented a musical and cultural merging that would go on to shape a golden age of Chinese popular song & film in the pre-communism interwar period.

Waiting for Your Return brings together a wide collection of recordings for an anthological overview of the style. Taking in it's early beginnings in the work of the pioneering composer Li Jinhui - whose 1927 song "Drizzle", featuring the vocals of his daughter Li Minghui, is often referred to as the first shidaiqu record - through to more polished 1930s & 40s examples, when China's western-influenced popular music & movie industry reached it's golden age with the prevalence of the Seven Great Singing Stars (Bai Hong, Bai Guang, Gong Qiuxia, Li Xianglan, Wu Yingyin, Yao Lee and perhaps most prolific of all, Zhou Xuan).

Included in the collection are tracks recorded right up until the music's demise in Shanghai in the early 1950s - during which time the Chinese Communist Party denounced shidaiqu as "yellow music", outlawed nightclubs and pop music production, and destroyed western-style instruments - following which, much of these singers would decamp to Hong Kong where many saw further success throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.