Jen Shyu & Jade Tongue Celebrate New Album With A Live-Streamed Performance From Roulette

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses, the new album by vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu, will be released by Pi Recordings on Friday, April 23.

To celebrate the release, Ms. Shyu and ensemble Jade Tongue will perform a concert to be live-streamed from the Roulette stage in downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday, April 6 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

Jade Tongue is comprised of Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Mat Maneri (viola), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Dan Weiss (drums).

The Roulette performance will include the music from the new album as well as free-form improvisations between Ms. Shyu and Jade Tongue, characteristic of their collaborative relationship.

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses is a collection of songs devoted to the marginalized voices of women around the world, and also an elegy on personal loss. The music spans a wide range of styles, from ancient to modern, referencing traditional Javanese music, the Japanese "katari" style of sung narration accompanied by the biwa, and East Timorese chant from Ataúro Island, among other styles in which Ms. Shyu has immersed herself during her more than 15 years of fieldwork studying the languages and traditional musics of her own culture and others around the world. Through a rich tapestry of languages, a dream-like narrative, and the interplay of ancient traditions with contemporary composition, jazz, and improvisation, Ms. Shyu creates an innovative architecture of sound that defies traditional genre categories.

The core of the music on the album originated as part of Ms. Shyu's theatrical solo performance, also called Zero Grasses, which was commissioned by John Zorn and premiered in October 2019 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. The performance was significantly shaped by the sudden death of Ms. Shyu's father, Tsu Pin Shyu, in April 2019 and the album is dedicated to him. At the time of her father's death, Ms. Shyu was in Japan, deeply involved in the study of Japanese traditional music, its language, and biwa performance practices. When informed of his death, she immediately flew to her parents' home in Texas where, while helping her mother go through her father's possessions, she came across her childhood diaries. Reading her diary entries resulted in Zero Grasses developing into a coming-of-age story about her ambitions, legacy, and personal reflections on the racism and sexism that she has faced throughout her life. The subsequent events of 2020 led to further reflection on the systemic racism in our society and the realities and challenges of life during a global pandemic.

Ms. Shyu says: "I was suddenly confronted with questions of legacy, one's future children, what possessions really mean, what you're doing with your life-all these questions burning while feeling unfathomable grief. With Zero Grasses, I'm challenging myself again, starting from scratch. The work is still being built because it is so deeply personal and current to what's happening in my life; now sitting beside death, in a way, from my dad's passing, experiencing endings and beginnings of relationships with pressing issues very close to home that are also undeniably global. Creating this piece in particular has been like excavating objects, memories, and experiences from my childhood impulses, and seeing how they shaped this living, breathing moment. Almost like solving a mystery; tapping into dreams and visions and the powerful choices we make.

"As I was grappling with my own grief, hundreds of thousands of people were also abruptly losing their loved ones as the pandemic took hold. It's my hope that the personal reflections conveyed in the music on this album may provide solace and solidarity to others."

The performance piece and the album are both a palpable homage to her father, who encouraged her to follow her heart and inspired her to "live life as I envision it"-an ethos that she has manifested into song.

In addition to the music from the Zero Grasses production, the album includes two pieces, "Display Under the Moon" and "A Cure for the Heart's Longing," taken from her acclaimed 2017 solo show Nine Doors. It also features two new songs, "Living's a Gift" and "Lament for Breonna Taylor," that were written in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and during the public outcry over the injustices towards, and killings of, Black Americans.

"Living's a Gift" was commissioned by the American Composers Forum for its ChoralQuest series of new music and accompanying curricula for middle-level choir. Ms. Shyu was appointed as the Forum's 2019-20 ChoralQuest composer-in-residence, working with the choir at William Alexander Middle School in Brooklyn and its choir director, Mimi Broderick. Ms. Shyu's residency was to conclude with performances at the school in May 2020, but the performances were canceled owing to the pandemic. For the album, Ms. Shyu sang all the vocal parts herself. However the schoolchildren retain a presence in the work as the music is set to words they wrote.

Ms. Shyu says: "It has been a profound experience setting the students' words to music. When I first met with the students, I had them write for two minutes about quarantine as homework. I made a video taking them through this exercise, and they knew their words would be part of the lyrics to the work I was composing for them. Mimi and I were stunned at the poetry and honesty of the students. What they wrote was so unbelievably beautiful and heart wrenching."

"Lament for Breonna Taylor" is dedicated to Ms. Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman shot and killed by police who had forcibly entered her Louisville, Kentucky home in March 2020. The song quotes from interviews with Ms. Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, and represents Ms. Shyu's desire to honor and give voice to Black lives that have been destroyed. The album also includes a new version of "The Human Color," a piece first recorded for her 2009 album Jade Tongue (Chiuyen Music) about the history of Chinese indentured servants who were kidnapped and labored alongside enslaved African people in Cuba in the 19th century under Portuguese and Spanish colonialism. Ms. Shyu decided to record the song again and include it on Zero Grasses as she felt it speaks to this moment in history, serving as a call for solidarity in the ongoing war against racism. Her own experiences with racism are detailed in the song "When I Have Power."

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses is Ms. Shyu's eighth album. It follows Ms. Shyu's 2017 album, Song of Silver Geese (Pi Recordings), which The New York Times named one of the best albums of the year, and Downbeat called "spellbinding" and "rapturous." Jade Tongue last appeared with Ms. Shyu on her 2015 Pi Recordings release Sounds and Cries of the World, which NPR described as "... no drive-by encounter between musical cultures, no cherry picking of exotic licks. This is research and experience, absorbed and reimagined."

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses is available for pre-order at Bandcamp and available from Amazon and Apple Music on April 23. The live-stream will be available at Roulette.org and then archived and available to view on Vimeo.

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