While her music rings familiar with the sounds and structures of jazz, American vocalist Jen Shyu simply prefers to use the terms “improvised” or “creative” in reference to her music.
“I hate using the word jazz, but as a point of reference I have to use it,” says the Peoria, Illinois native, who performs tonight at Sappho de Base in Taipei. Her show comes at the end of a three-month research project in Taiwan, where Shyu studied Hengchun folk music (恆春調) and Aboriginal music under a grant from the US-based Asian Cultural Council. Tonight she plans to perform traditional Hengchun songs and her own music.
Shyu’s compositions indeed go beyond conventional jazz, often drawing from her Taiwanese and Chinese heritage. In her song Chapter 1 Number 5, she sings verses from Lao Tzu’s (老子) Taoist classic the Tao Te Ching (道德經) in both Chinese and English, riffing or scatting to post-bop grooves.
The “freedom” of jazz led Shyu to explore her ethnic roots. After finishing her degree in opera-singing at Stanford University, Shyu realized “it wasn’t me” and started to sing jazz in San Francisco, where she became involved in a small but “vital” music scene led by a local arts organization, Asian Improv Arts.
The group offered Shyu an “encouraging community” of not just Asian Americans, but a multicultural mix that included Brazilian, Cuban and American Indian artists who often collaborated together in experimental projects. Shyu’s work in various collectives planted the seed for one of her current groups, Jade Tongue, based in New York City.
With Jade Tongue, Shyu experiments by mixing different languages: she sings in Hoklo, Mandarin and English while backed by a standard jazz ensemble, which includes a bassist, drummer, pianist and trumpeter. Having also trained in theater and dance, Shyu incorporates modern dance elements in live performances.
Her work is not merely for the sake of experimentation. “I would like to give [Western listeners] a kind of new perspective of what Chinese or Taiwanese music is or can be, or from a Chinese-Taiwanese artist [viewpoint], what that music can be or what that expression can be.”
Shyu combines jazz phrasing and hints of opera technique on her rendition of the Hengchun folk tune Thinking Back (思想起, also known as Melody of Nostalgia), the signature song of the late Taiwanese folk music hero Chen Ta (陳達), who Shyu cites as an inspiration. “When I heard his voice,” she says, “I really realized I needed to go to Hengchun and find out more about this man.”
In learning traditional Hengchun songs, Shyu also picked up the genre’s main instrument, the yueqin (月琴), or moon lute, which she will play tonight on several numbers. But the 30-year-old says that the main purpose of her studies is not to learn to perform traditional songs on stage; instead, she wants to see how they can inform her own. This trip, she says, has been about “internalizing the music.”
Shyu has made similar research trips in the past: she studied music and dance in Brazil and went to Cuba several times to study Afro-Cuban music and the history of Chinese Cubans. And while she has been exploring her Taiwanese heritage through her father’s side, her mother is from East Timor, which could be the site of her “next project,” she says. “It’s all very cumulative,” she says of her numerous artistic interests. “I see it as a life-long journey.”
One constant for Shyu is her focus on improvisation skills, which she continues to hone with her mentor, jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman. In addition to her own projects, she sings and records as a member of Coleman’s New York City-based ensemble, Five Elements, which she will join in Portugal next week for a performance.
She says one challenge of playing in Coleman’s group is that “we never know what’s going to happen next.” For example, a cue from the drummer could suddenly have the band playing a different song, which means the musicians must know every song well and be ready to play them at any time. Singing for the group, she says, has taught her an important lesson for improvisation: “You have to know everything in order to be free.”
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