Liu Sola sings during a recent Beijing concert.

On a gloomy Beijing afternoon, a Chinese woman wearing a long black silk overcoat walks into a teahouse outside Purple Bamboo Park. Sitting on a cushioned cane chair, and sipping of a chrysanthemum tea, she says to me: "I often wonder if I'm Chinese or African."

Her tone is musical, her voice full of mystique, and her eyes glint behind chic, old-style round glasses.

"Don't you believe me?" She chuckles, and her laughter resonates through the empty teahouse. We are the only customers.

Liu Sola is one of China's most mysterious musicians, authors and singers. Her physical appearance is Han Chinese but if you close your eyes, Liu becomes the embodiment of an African American blues singer.

At her recent concert in Beijing, her deep satin voice moved from breathy glissandos to animalistic yells, between her series of operatic and African-American chants.

Her singing techniques aptly adapt the vocal traditions of gospel and jazz with Asian music from northern China's folk opera Bang Zi to Japanese Noh.

The third child and the youngest of parents of high-ranking Communist Party of China officials, Liu was born in 1955 in Beijing, and raised in the capital. However this Beijing lady claims, "I feel music, jazz to be exact, just like a black person."

Knowing how to swing is the key to jazz, Liu says. "You've got to know how to swing not just your body, but also in your music."

Swing cannot be learnt in the classroom, she says, because it is a spontaneous resonation reflecting the musician's deep feeling.

Liu's friend's Ornette Coleman, one of the major innovators of free jazz, told her that understanding swinging is the pivotal difference between one who understands jazz and one doesn't. It may sound easy, but Liu, a classically trained composer from China's prestigious Central Conservatory of Music, took a decade to get it.