(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-18 09:05

Performing with Fernando Saunders. File photo

"Jazz is not pop music as many people think. Instead, it is a music form that has heavy connotations of intellectual ideology," she says. "Originally the rebellious voice of black people, through its masters, jazz gradually has brought about profound impact on intellectuals as a whole."

Through her better understanding of jazz, Liu discovered similarities to story-telling traditions between Chinese folk music and blues. To explore these similarities, Liu cut her first album Blues From the East in the US in 1994. The album is based on two Chinese classical stories: Zhao Jun Chu Sai (Married to Exile) and Shuai Qin (The Broken Zither).

The first tells a story about a Chinese Emperor's mistress of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), who willingly married with a chieftain of Xiongnu (Hun) as a peace offering.

The latter tells of a zither player, Bo Ya, who had a friend named Zi Qi, who was the only one who understood Bo Ya's music. After Zi Qi died, Bo Ya broke his zither, and never touched it again.

"The Broken Zither is made for my mom," Liu says about her author mother, who stopped writing after Liu's father died.

"After his death, my mom refused to leave their bedroom. She wouldn't even allow others to clean the room. She was afraid the details and the smells she was familiar with would get lost in a house cleaning," Liu recalls. "For the past 14 years of her life, my mother slept on the same side of the bed. She didn't want to move a bit to the other side, as it's the side my dad slept on."

In 1996, Liu produced her second album, China Collage, in the US. Again, the album is a fusion of Chinese folk music and jazz, blues, rock'n'roll. Some music critics say Liu's work is just Chinese music gone "swing."

"That's exactly what I want in Chinese music," she says, her body swaying lightly.

When swinging, she says, "I feel air flow in a different parts of my body. I call that Nengliang - energy of life. That's what black people refer to as soul."

For the past 10 years, Liu has been striving to revitalize the roots of Chinese music by mixing them with traditional sound of other countries.

In 1997, Liu organized her band Liu Sola and Friends in New York and mated jazz, rock'n'roll with Chinese roots music. The band consisted of traditional Chinese and American jazz-rock musicians and became a cultural meeting point. In 1998, her third album, Haunts, Liu laces Chinese folk melodies with contemporary jazz and blues.

Liu has been fixated on traditional Chinese folk music since 2005 yet her exploration continues to fashion contemporary sounds from traditional Chinese instruments, and explores new vocal expressionism.

In 2006, she wrote a chamber opera, The Fantasy of the Red Queen, which is a myth about a woman winning power with the help of powerful men. The leading vocalist in the opera, Liu uses modern psychology in this opera, and mixes traditional and modern music concepts with pop music, to create a brand new piece of traditional Chinese music.

Her band performed the opera in Berlin, in collaboration with Ensemble Modern of Germany.

Compared to literature, which can control you for a while, she says, the blues gets into your blood, controlling you for the rest of your life. It helps you discover something instinctive and essential about yourself.

"Making music is like sexual activity - it's pursuing and conquering," she says. To her, the pursuit is seeking for answers. For instance, when she plays Mozart's Magic Flute, she would suddenly find herself pondering what Mozart was thinking when he composing this piece.

"What's the story behind the music?" I'd ask so then I'd go to find the answer," she says.

Liu deems that a creative artist should always have questions in his/her mind, "Through this questioning process, you capture the history behind the piece. Only when you know the things behind, can you properly interpret the piece, or at least deal with it well technically."

Currently residing in Beijing, Liu still has many unsolved questions.

To answer them, she says, "I have to constantly be on the road. Some answers you can find by reading. Some you can only get from music."

"I'm fated to throw myself into jazz and blues, which are to me a black magic. The gravity of blues is so powerful I cannot pull myself away from it."

(China Daily 03/18/2008 page18)

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