Jazzing up the community

Musician creates venue where masters and students feel at home, supporting the genre through an evolution of sounds, Chen Nan reports.

On a warm summer Thursday night in 2006, down a quiet alley by Beijing's Houhai Lake, a guitar trio stepped onto a narrow wooden stage. There was no fanfare and no media blitz; just music.

That night marked the official opening of East Shore Live Jazz Cafe, the brainchild of Liu Yuan, a trailblazing Chinese saxophonist who believed jazz deserved a "real home" in China's capital. Liu Yue, one of the guitarists, remembers the moment vividly.

"I wanted to be the first," Liu Yue says. "Not just to play there, but the first to stake a claim in what Liu Yuan was trying to build — a real jazz club."