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PARTISAN REVIEW
months. His band, which was called "Tex's Tune Technicians,"
had
been organized during the war and had done brisk business in occupa–
tion Hong Kong because, with the many cabarets that were still oper–
ating unable to import their musicians any longer from Manila, Paco's
band, composed mostly of stranded Filipinos, was the freshest wartime
Hong Kong could have of American jazz handled the Filipino way.
The Tune Technicians were really expert technically and kept turning
up, throughout those three years of the gnawed root and the rationed
gruel, with witty variations of very tired prewar tunes-but their value
was chiefly nostalgic; when the war was over and Manila orchestras
resumed their monopoly of the orient's nightspots all the way
from
Calcutta to Canton and from Shanghai down to Sura:baya, Paco found it
harder to get prestigious engagements for his band, even in the res–
taurant and cabaret boom of postwar Hong Kong. He had been given
the Manila contract because the two night clubs they were to play at )
were being opened by a Chinese millionaire (with Filipino fronts) who
wanted to cash in on the swelling tourist trade in Manila by giving its
night club set two places-the "Manila-Hong Kong" and the "Boule–
vard Shanghai"-which would be reminiscent of night life in those
cities; and who therefore wanted dance bands fresh from Hong Kong
and Shanghai to accentuate an atmosphere to be created by Chinese
prints, lanterns and mirrors on the walls, Chinese cigarette girls on
the aisles, White Russian hostesses on the dance floor, and anned
Bombay bouncers under the tables.
Paco, since late adolescence, had spent most of his nights listening
to Manila stations on the short wave (to the great discomfort first of
his mother and later of his wife, since Paco used an amplifier; although
they had learned never to complain, because he was a fretful listener)
and he could name all the major Manila orchestras of the last ten
years; describe their present and past styles, and the intervening evolu–
tion; and could even remember the different night clubs they had played
for and at what stage of their careers-but their music existed by itself
in his mind and had no scenery behind it and few faces in front.
The faces were of the bandleaders who had at one time or another
played in Hong Kong and whom he had tried to congratulate for
their ingenious re-creations of American jazz until he found that the
bandleaders were quite unconscious of re-creating American jazz, of
translating it for the oriental, which was what his ears told him they
were doing but which they resentfully denied, preferring to consider
themselves faithful approximations of their chosen American maestros.
The general belief indeed that Filipinos alone in all the orient had
