Jazz player melds musical styles of East and West

"If you got caught playing jazz in the US in the 1950s you'd get expelled from college, so we would practice in secret after 10 pm. It was very underground," Aitken says.

He recalls learning his craft by watching black musicians improvise in smoky clubs run by local gangsters.

"Now you have YouTube, or Youku in China, so everyone has access to this world, and you have some very fine Chinese players improvising to almost anything," he says when asked if the Chinese can boast of creative genius or just technical virtuosity.

From Elvis onwards, most modern pop music owes some debt to the legacy that jazz created, so getting a good grounding in this can serve as a stepping-stone to a career in showbiz.

In Shanghai the jazz scene is smaller than it was before World War II, but dedicated clubs like JZ are packed most nights.

A big advocate of computer technology to aid jazz studies, Aitken says China is fast catching up with the West in this area of education. He also helped develop the jazz studies program at Fu-Jen University in Taipei.

In the US, multi-million-dollar government grants gave the industry a boost in the mid-80s, and now China has also begun introducing jazz studies at a collegiate level.

"Jazz can adapt to a culture. It's not like a foreign language," says Aitken.

"I think now China is recognizing the value of music in its own culture, both as a form of communication that can cross borders and as something that engages the right side of your brain and breeds creativity.

"In the US now they're even using jazz as a vehicle for teaching people how to manage large companies, because the organizational structure of a jazz ensemble can be compared to that of a mid-sized corporation."