Shanghai Daily news

The Pudong Shangri-La offers guests and visitors 12 bars and restaurants to choose from when planning lunch or a night out and, as Douglas Williams reports, the luxury brand will have three more hotels up and running in the city within five years.

From left: John Cole, David Davis and Cherry J Hayes keep the music smooth to go with The Bar's slick and sultry ambience.

Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren’t things to think about any more. All that matters is value—the ultimate value of what one does.”
So said Englishman James Hilton, author of the 1933 novel“Lost Horizon,”the first novel ever published in paperback and the origin of the mythical, Oriental paradise, Shangri-La.
Shangri-La is now the name of Asia’s leading chain of luxury hotels with 47 across the continent and 19 of them in China. There are now four Shangri-La hotels in Beijing and a further three will be built in Shanghai by 2010. There are also plans to put the Shangri-La brand into the European hotel market with hotels set to open in London, Paris and Rome.
Now these hotels, as most people would be aware, are not your average hotel—far from it. Shangri-La hotels are luxurious five-star and above locations and most are very large concerns offering the best in top-end accommodation, dining and entertainment.
It strikes this humble hack who hasn’t the accounting skills to negotiate a shopping list that if an organization such as Shangri-La is planning to build—not renovate, extend or refurbish—from scratch three more huge hotels in Shanghai then any fears of economic“bubbles”can be confidently vanquished.
The Pudong Shangri-La is vast and becoming even bigger before our very eyes. With the opening of Jade on 36, the new restaurant opening soon, the hotel will have no fewer than 12 bars and restaurants.
Jade on 36 promises or threatens—I’m not sure which—“to change the way you think about food.”That’s quite a claim I think you’ll agree. With acclaimed French chef Paul Pairet creating his“cuisine de voyage—a culinary journey”(global food), interior designer Adam D Tihany’s futuristic interpretation of Chinese traditions" and encompassing a stunning Pudong’s eye view of the Bund, it promises to be“quite nice.”I jest, if the hotel’s Yi Cafe is anything to go by, the new Jade on 36 restaurant be extraordinary.
One recent addition to the Pudong Shangri-La stable is the creatively titled The Bar. This bar squeezes every fluid centiliter of opulence from its perfect proportions—the full feng shui treatment one imagines.
The lighting, dim though not too dim, the deep leather seats, the sofas, the“snugs”and the central bar make The Bar somewhere it would be very difficult to feel uptight in. The furnishings and the textures tread a fine line between traditional and contemporary whilst never straying from quality and comfort.
The ceiling is slightly curved and almost flirts with the sort of railway arch clubs that the designers might have astutely thought patrons of The Bar attended in distant halcyon days. A mammoth aquarium at one end features a real life Nemo of“Finding Nemo”fame along with a bewildering though relaxing variety of other colorful fish. The Bar boasts one of the most comprehensive selections of whiskies in Shanghai with no fewer than 70 to choose from.
So to the main attraction: The Bar’s resident musicians, playing Monday till Saturday—Cherry J Hayes on vocals, John Cole on keyboards and David Davis on saxophone, all three from the US.
Ostensibly jazz musicians, the talented trio are actually through-and-through musical entertainers and clearly enjoy every moment they’re on stage or walking about among the customers.
Hayes’vocals wash over The Bar with an effort-less warmth. She is a true jazz singer.“There are those who sing jazz and there are those of us who are jazz singers,”says Hayes,“I love jazz. I’ve sung it all my life.”
Doffing their collective caps to minimalist modernity the pared-down three-piece employs the services of an iPod which enables them to create a lot of complex sound without the clutter of a bigger band.
“Jazz makes sense to folks,”says Hayes.“People know what being in love is about, what being broken-hearted is like, what leaving someone or being left is like, it strikes a chord—people can always associate with jazz.”
Not that jazz is the beginning middle and end of their musical repertoire, not that this band sticks to a playing order and not, most emphatically, that Hayes and Co merely reel out the standards. No siree—requests are encouraged and with Hayes confident in her 380-song repertoire and the fact that the online Mac is capable of tracking down almost any lyric to any song this band is the nearest thing to a live juke box.
“We play off each other,”says Cole.“Even if it’s a song we’ve played hundreds of times before, I’m still watching what the other two are doing, listening to their improvisations and the twists they do differently each time and trying to add my own moves. We sure don’t get bored and from what the staff who hear us every night say, neither do they.”
“You can hear in the music that we get along,”says Davis.“We talk to the customers, we let them know that we know they’re here and we read the customers. We feel we have a good understanding of music and of the music they want to hear.”
Hayes told of some touching moments such as when they struck up“Have I Told You Lately That I Love You”and an elderly couple gazed into each others eyes and held one another’s hands.
Or when a young girl secretly told the band about her parents’wedding anniversary and the band played the mother’s favorite song,“Wind Beneath My Wings”and it’s clear that entertaining The Bar’s clientele also entertains this threesome.
douglaswilliams@shanghaidaily.com