The Last Night at Cotton Club, and the Shanghai It Shaped Over 20 Years | The Shanghai That's Disappearing ①

"Cotton Club's live music drew a crowd of long-haired musicians and dope-smoking hippies, and they etched Cotton Club onto Shanghai's cultural map."

"Cotton is packed to bursting."

At half past ten on the night of March 25, Wang Wen put a few photos on his WeChat Moments, marveling at the flood of people pouring into Cotton Club. An hour earlier he had still been stuck outside the door, drinking a large beer a server had handed out to him. If a friend with a reservation hadn't happened to walk past and spot him, Wang Wen might have stood out there all night.

Cotton Club is a bar at the corner of West Fuxing Road and Middle Huaihai Road in central Shanghai. The name comes from the New York club of the same name, which made its reputation in the 1920s and 1930s as a gathering place for jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

In Shanghai, too, Cotton Club has meant something out of the ordinary to the city. To Wang Wen it is "where blues and jazz in Shanghai were born." He used to play at Cotton Club; now he is one of the owners of another well-known Shanghai jazz bar, JZ Club.

"Cotton Club's live music drew a crowd of long-haired musicians and dope-smoking hippies, and they etched Cotton Club onto Shanghai's cultural map." In Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City, University of Chicago sociology professor James Farrer and his co-author Andrew Field give Cotton Club a section of its own.

A pity, then, that the legend is over. The lease had run out, and March 25 was the blues and jazz bar's last day of business. Cotton Club's owner, Gregory Smith, is hunting for a new address, but that will not happen before this summer at the earliest. Until then, a cultural landmark that opened at the end of 1997 and has run for nearly 20 years has to say goodbye to the city, at least for now.

Everyone wanted to come and say it back. Cotton Club had seen plenty of busy nights over the years, but the scene on this last day was still a shock.

It was just past seven in the evening, not long after dark. When Gregory Smith walked into the lobby as usual, he found a long line that normally wasn't there — people waiting for Cotton Club to open, the queue winding up the stairs that lead to a hotpot restaurant on the second floor.

His appearance set off a stir. People rushed up to have their pictures taken with the tall American. He looked startled for a moment, then smiled and granted one request after another. After more than a dozen photos, Gregory Smith finally pushed through the crowd and disappeared into Cotton Club.

Old Ma got several photos with him. In fact he was the first to recognize him. When he saw Gregory Smith come into the lobby he waved wildly and shouted, "Greg! Greg!" Once the pictures were taken he stepped aside and kept scrolling back through them. The man is nearly 60 and already going gray, but his face wore a child's grin.

Old Ma still remembers what Cotton Club looked like the first time he came, in 1998, not long after it reopened from a renovation. The wooden floor and bar counter counted as refined for the era, and behind the stage stood a beautiful panel of stained glass with the words "Cotton Club" inlaid in orange. "It's no different from how it looks now," Old Ma said. "It hasn't changed in all these years."

"A Heineken cost 50 yuan a glass back then." In those days he and his friends came to Cotton Club every week or two. On a monthly salary of around 1,000 yuan, that was not a small expense. They paid it gladly: "It was fashionable. Jazz was hard to come by then. Especially for those of us who came out of the Cultural Revolution — back then the most we listened to was the Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop."

"When I was small, jazz was banned. When the grown-ups took me somewhere to hear it, I had to swear I wouldn't tell anyone." So Lin Dongfu said in an interview. He is a well-known Shanghai voice actor and host, born in 1957, the same generation as Old Ma. This was their shared memory.

Shanghai was once called China's jazz capital. In the 1920s the city caught the trend early, and jazz travelled from the United States to Shanghai. The 1930s were the music's best years here: top dance halls like the Paramount and Ciro's each kept a jazz band of about 18 players, who earned more than five times what an ordinary worker did. For many people, a fascination with old Shanghai and an obsession with jazz became the same thing.

The tradition broke off, until the 1990s, when a few people set out to bring the city's old jazz culture back. In 1995, out of a love for blues and jazz he had grown up with, Lin Dongfu opened a bar on Sinan Road called House of Blues and Jazz. It was one of the first privately run bars in Shanghai with live music.

Finding musicians to play was one of his biggest headaches. Just as most of the players in Shanghai's jazz heyday in the 1930s had come from the Philippines, the good musicians then were basically all foreigners. So Lin Dongfu went looking among the foreigners living in Shanghai. By day, Graham Earnshaw was Reuters' Shanghai correspondent; by night he performed at Lin Dongfu's bar.

Matt Harding came from a Mormon family in Utah. After three years of Chinese in college, he came to China to push the language further. A friend's introduction brought him to House of Blues and Jazz too, and for a while afterwards he and Graham Earnshaw were the house act there.

In the winter of 1995, Matt Harding met a Chinese man named Huang Angang (Tony Huang). Huang was president of Shanghai Shenshen Food & Entertainment Services Co., Ltd., which ran a string of venues along Huaihai Road — bakeries, restaurants, dance halls, nightclubs. He invited Matt Harding to invest with him in a bar and to be its music director.

Matt Harding agreed. Under his direction, a bar soaked in blues and jazz — Cotton Club — opened in 1997. To keep the music good, Matt Harding brought in a fellow American, Gregory Smith, and not long after sold him his own stake so he could concentrate on playing.

That is how Cotton Club put down roots at the corner of West Fuxing Road and Middle Huaihai Road. The block was Huang Angang's turf: next door was Shenshen Bakery, and upstairs a restaurant called Shenshen Jiujia. At the time it was a reasonably well-known Shanghainese place, and it was over a meal there that Old Ma discovered Cotton Club downstairs.

"It was full of foreigners inside." That was Old Ma's first impression. "This whole area was consulates." He pointed to a street to the east, where the U.S. consulate used to be — 1469 Huaihai Road, less than 200 meters on foot from Cotton Club. "The foreigners worked at the consulate in the daytime and came over to Cotton Club at night to play."

Even now, foreigners are still Cotton Club's main customers. Laura, an American who has lived in Shanghai for four years and teaches music at a school in the suburbs, was making her second visit on March 25. "I don't come downtown often, but some of my friends who teach music have always recommended Cotton Club to me." That is how word of the place travelled through the foreign community, mouth to mouth.

In time, Chinese customers came too. No surprise there: the Shanghai Conservatory of Music is less than a kilometer away on Fenyang Road, and a fast walker can be at Cotton Club in under ten minutes.

On the night of March 25, Wang Wen raised a hand to flag down a man in a light down jacket and got him to talk to QDaily. The man, once a keyboard player at Cotton Club, still looked young. "There used to be a long bench here at Cotton Club," he said. "Back in '98 a few of us came every day and hung around 'guarding the door,' and when we got the chance we'd go in and play a couple of numbers."

"Our lives ran between two places — either we were in class at school, or in our spare time we ran over here," the keyboardist said. "In 1997 a mug of draft beer here cost 35 yuan. But we had a friend inside, a trumpet player named Feng Yucheng. He could get a beer at a discount, just 6 yuan a glass. So we came over all the time."

The Feng Yucheng he means is from Sichuan and is now one of China's finest jazz trumpeters. In 1991 he tested into the middle school attached to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and later moved up to the conservatory itself. Once, back from a long trip, he stopped at Cotton Club to rest and listen. He asked the owner to let him take the stage for a trumpet solo and won the whole room over. From then on Feng Yucheng was Cotton Club's trumpeter, until 2005, when he helped found the JR Aurora Jazz Band.

Zhao Ke also sang here as a resident singer. He appeared on the first season of The Voice of China in 2012, was picked for Harlem Yu's team, and was praised for an unusually deep command of jazz. But Zhao Ke never needed a talent show's blessing. His years singing at Cotton Club had settled the question long before.

"It [Cotton Club] gave young Chinese a bohemian social setting through which to enter the world of art, and some of them went on to considerable renown." As Shanghai Nightscapes puts it, plenty of the big names in today's jazz scene once played at Cotton Club.

All of this added to the legend. For the city of Shanghai, Cotton Club stood for the return of jazz. For Old Ma and Lin Dongfu, it was clear air after a suffocating time. For Feng Yucheng and Zhao Ke, it was an important stop on the road.

And for a great many ordinary people, Cotton Club was more like proof that they had been young.

Around half past eight, Mr. Shen arrived with his wife and two children. They parked the stroller in an out-of-the-way corner of the lobby; Mr. Shen took the older boy, seven or eight years old, his wife carried the little one, and they got ready to go in. Cotton Club's last night meant a great deal to this family: "This is where I met my wife."

Because he loved jazz, Mr. Shen became a regular in 2002, coming almost every week to sit and listen to the band. Two years later a friend brought his future wife here. That is how the two met, fell for each other and eventually started a family. "After we had our older son, we brought him here too," Mr. Shen said. "He was very small then. He certainly doesn't remember."

But this night they were bound to be disappointed. By the time they arrived, every seat was taken and many people could only stand in the aisles. A large area by the stage sat empty, but Gregory Smith explained to a few regulars, sounding faintly apologetic, that all of it was reserved.

The server at the door apologized to Mr. Shen too: Cotton Club does not admit children. The family had no choice but to back out and take a few pictures under Cotton Club's neon sign. "That's a shame. If it opens again, we'll come back," Mr. Shen said, and then told his older son, "You need to grow up fast, so next time we can get in."

When Mr. Song walked in, the crush inside startled him. He asked a server and only then learned this was the last night. His plan to show a friend from Chengdu what Cotton Club was like fell through.

"I first came in 2004 — a foreign colleague brought us here one evening," Mr. Song said. After that he got into the habit of coming about once a month. "The music here is quite good."

Work got busier later and the visits grew rarer, but whenever friends came to Shanghai from elsewhere, Mr. Song still made a point of bringing them here. To him it was one of the few places left in Shanghai that was still genuinely "Shanghai."

Set aside the people who turned up only because they had heard it was the last night, and everyone at Cotton Club that evening had memories of their own here. More old customers than usual — that was what the server Lily had noticed over the past two days. Many of them probably hadn't been in for a long while, but the closer the closing date came, the more of them appeared.

With so many people crammed in at once, the place was a little chaotic. A man who looked like a floor manager struggled out of the crowd holding the air-conditioner remote. "It's too hot in there, I've already put the cold air on," he said, and swore.

The liquor was running low too. With the bar closing, they had over-ordered, and what to do with the surplus was going to be a problem. A woman worked down the drinks list, ordering one thing after another, and each time got the same faintly apologetic answer from the server: "We're out of that one."

At least the music hadn't changed. Three sets were scheduled, meant to start at half past ten and run to half past one in the morning, about 45 minutes each.

After greeting all the customers he knew, Gregory Smith slung his guitar over his shoulder and walked onstage. He wore a denim shirt with the top three buttons open, his long white hair tied in a braid behind his head. He is not young any more. A dozen-odd years ago he had not run to weight like this, and his slightly curly brown hair was combed into a stylish center part.

Over 19 years, band members came and went. Only guitarist Gregory Smith and bassist Jorland Paulino stayed the whole way. Drummer Francesco Pierre counts as an elder too: he came in 2001 as the house drummer, taking over from Fred Hanel.

Standing onstage, Gregory Smith spoke into the microphone: "Thank you all for coming to Cotton Club on a Saturday night. I hope everybody has a great evening." Then the show began. The room ignited at once, the crowd cheering and then falling quiet again to listen to what came out of the speakers.

Old Ma, who had waited outside the whole time, finally got in. He could only stand at the very back, holding his phone up high to take photos, then switching to video. Then he opened WeChat Moments, typed a caption and posted. Unlike the others, Old Ma wasn't drinking or waving his arms about. He simply stood there alone, listening to the music onstage.

"I don't actually understand jazz," Old Ma said with a laugh. "I'm just here for the fun of it."

The set ran until 11:05, when Gregory Smith and his band went off for a break. Some of the people who had come for the spectacle began gathering their things to leave; for them the evening had already been more than worth it. Most stayed, and the crowd outside showed no sign of thinning. Those who couldn't squeeze in gathered in the lobby and on the sidewalk, talking and smoking in twos and threes, and soon left cigarette ends all over the ground.

Others used the break to push toward the stage, hoping for a better spot. But the area was packed solid, without a sliver of room left. At the bar nearby, a few foreign girls sat up on the counter itself, which let them see the stage better and left more space for the crowd below.

The second set started around 11:40. After an opening number, Denise Mininfield came on. She wore a green top and pink glasses, an extravagant ornament in her hair, and earrings that hung down to her shoulders. She has been Cotton Club's lead singer for several years.

The first song she sang was "Soulshine," from the 1994 album Where It All Begins by the American rock band The Allman Brothers Band, and one of this band's signature numbers. The audience clearly knew it well, and as Denise Mininfield sang they sang along, some loudly, some under their breath.

When the song ended she greeted the crowd, mentioned that Cotton Club was about to close, and raised her voice: "It's time to find us a new home!" Then she brought up Sugar Mama, Cotton Club's resident singer from 2005 to 2010.

Sugar Mama was one of the most respected singers in Shanghai's jazz world, and came from Missouri. From her thirties onward she performed around Asia, reaching Beijing in 1998 and Shanghai seven years later, and died of colon cancer in July 2010. For Cotton Club it was terrible news. Gregory Smith once said in an interview that it was the hardest day he had been through.

The room went quiet for a moment, then broke into applause. After a pause, Denise Mininfield started singing again. This song was a little more cheerful, and the crowd's mood lifted quickly, swaying along with the music.

At one in the morning the second set ended. That was already behind schedule, but nobody seemed to mind; on Cotton Club's last night they had every reason to keep going till dawn. Down in the crowd someone murmured to a companion: "I wonder whether tonight's show can even finish before sunrise."

The musicians who had once played here all came back. At ten past two, when the third set ended, the players spoke into the microphone from the stage: "Hang on a bit longer — in ten minutes more musicians are coming up to play."

Late as it was, Cotton Club showed no sign of tiring. More and more people walked in with instrument cases on their backs, most of them having just finished playing at other bars and clubs and hurried over. They hugged, talked and laughed loudly, exactly as they would on any ordinary night here.

The music kept going. In the middle of a long jazz stretch, the players slipped in The Beatles' "Hey Jude." The audience joined in on the "na na na."

Much like the mood that "Hey Jude" carries, a feeling that was wistful but not grieving began to spread through Cotton Club. At half past two in the morning, a few servers who had finally caught a breath came outside with a camera to take keepsake photos, facing the neon sign that spells out "Cotton Club."

Lily has worked at Cotton Club since 2005. A friend's introduction brought her here in the first place and she stayed. For a time she went back to her hometown, but when she returned to Shanghai she came back to Cotton Club to work part-time. Part-time or not, on March 24 and 25 she was here both nights, working from eight in the evening until the small hours.

After working here so long, Lily still felt a pang when she suddenly learned the bar was closing.

While she was serving an old customer who hadn't been in for some time, he suddenly sighed: "I thought this place would stay open forever."

"I thought so too," Lily said.

Plenty of people probably felt that way. The keyboardist told QDaily, half joking: "I used to think this was the one bar in Shanghai where you could collect a pension." Cotton Club held its spot at the corner of Fuxing Road and Huaihai Road for nearly 20 years — long enough, it seems, to create the illusion that time had stopped there.

But Cotton Club is closing anyway. Even for Gregory Smith the news came as a surprise. Just on March 1, thanks to the new smoking ban, Cotton Club went without the smell of cigarettes for the first time in more than a decade. Gregory Smith wrote on WeChat Moments that it was unusual, but better than living in a place that smelled like Keith Richards's lungs. (Keith Richards is a founding member of the Rolling Stones, famous for never being without a cigarette.)

As far as anyone can document, the first to report that Cotton Club was closing were TimeOut and That's Shanghai, two English-language outlets that cover eating, drinking and going out in the city — but they ran it on March 21, only four days ahead.

Before the show, Gregory Smith explained the closure to QDaily: "The lease is up, and we couldn't renew it." As for why the landlord wouldn't renew, Gregory Smith only shook his head and said he wasn't sure: "We haven't really made money in more than a decade. We were here just because we wanted a place to play."

Shanghai has seen a great many of these closures over the past two years, clubs and bars alike. At the end of 2015, the press reported mass closures along the bar strip on Hengshan Road. "Losing money was basically normal; a lot of places couldn't hold on and pulled out."

In April 2016 the jazz bar JZ Club closed after the municipal party committee gave notice that the building would be taken back and converted into offices.

A month later, the Xuhui District government added Yongkang Road to its "Hengfu Historic Area environmental improvement" project. From August 1, the tables and chairs that used to stand outside the bars on Yongkang Road, long taken as the street's trademark, were strictly banned. The street CNN once called "perhaps one of the most crowded drinking spots in Asia" turned into a dead one.

At the end of the year, The Shelter, a club known for cutting-edge electronic music, closed; the official statement gave the reason as "the government has taken the property back and we have decided not to keep operating this venue." On the final night, December 31, so many people came from all over the country that the police turned up and cleared the room by force, putting a dramatic full stop on the place.

The reasons for closing vary wildly, but the venues are fewer and fewer. "For old Shanghainese and for the city's new residents alike, nightspots are where this city performs its imagination of an international metropolis," University of Chicago sociology professor James Farrer wrote in Shanghai Nightscapes. "Through live performance, an ideal of a community both local and global can be realized — at least temporarily."

But now all of this seems to be slowly disappearing. Mr. Song has nowhere left to take friends for real blues and jazz; the story of Mr. Shen meeting his wife at Cotton Club probably cannot happen again; young people have lost a club stage and the road to success that ran through it; and the revival of jazz in Shanghai has lost its footing in the real world.

Gregory Smith doesn't want that to happen. At the very least he still wants a new place for his band to play. He is out looking, trying to find Cotton Club a new home: "Nothing is settled, but I hope to reopen Cotton Club this summer."

Wang Wen is confident he will. JZ Club, which he helps run, moved to Julu Road last October and still has the same flavor it always had. He told QDaily: "When Cotton Club opens again, I'll let you know."

(Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this article were taken on site.)