Part performance artist and part conjurer, jazz vocalist Jen Shyu contains multitudes. Steeped in folkloric music traditions from Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, East Timor and beyond, Shyu has forged a multi-disciplinary performance practice encompassing dance, vocals, various instruments, and at least seven different languages.
She brings together all her far-flung studies in her new work Solo Rites: Seven Breaths, a collaboration with renowned Indonesian filmmaker-director Garin Nugroho. In a rare Bay Area appearance, Shyu presents the West Coast premiere of Solo Rites on Friday, Jan. 23, at San Francisco’s Center for New Music, and Sunday, Jan. 24, at Oakland’s Studio Grand on a double bill with pianist Motoko Honda.
A fixture on the edgy New York scene for more than a decade, Shyu first gained international attention as a member of alto saxophonist Steve Coleman’s Five Elements, where her soaring vocal lines meshed with his dense avant-funk. After an eight-year run with Coleman, who was recently awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Shyu lit out on her own to continue immersing herself in obscure and threatened traditional musical forms in 2011. A Fulbright scholarship brought her to Indonesia, where she studied Javanese Sindhenan and dance, followed by a six-month scholarship from Korea’s National Gugak Center to study Pansori, a percussion-driven form of musical storytelling.
“I was purposely reaching for the underappreciated or forgotten traditions,” Shyu says, noting that when she set out on her journey to Java she dreamed of meeting Garin Nugroho, whose 2006 film Opera Java combined the country’s native gamelan music with an experimental sensibility.
“It was traditional-sounding but full of completely avant-garde elements, this poetic and beautiful marriage of music, dance, and visual arts,” Shyu says. “This is exactly aligned with the way I want to make work. It was kind of a fantasy that maybe I’d run into Nugroho, and through connections via Rachel Cooper at the Asia Society, I did. It was thrilling that he was interested in working together.”