Shanghai'd

Concert.

It's not often that a Grammy-award winning artist NOT named Robin Gibb plays a yin yue hui in Shanghai. So when I heard Bela Fleck was playing at the JZ Club with Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, I figured it would be worth 80 RMB and a Monday night.

I'm certainly no Bluegrass aficionado. In fact, before Monday I didn't know anything about any of these artists except the fact that Bela Fleck has a funny name and plays the banjo. Now I know he plays the banjo damn well (and still has a funny name). Fleck's banjo and lao wai Washburn's completely out-of-nowhere-near-fluent Mandarin were worth the price of admission, but for me Casey Driessen stole the show with his funky scratch-fiddle licks.

Okay, enough name dropping. Time to leave the music reviews to the real writers.