{"id":3913,"date":"2014-05-18T20:21:45","date_gmt":"2014-05-18T20:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=3913"},"modified":"2014-05-18T20:21:45","modified_gmt":"2014-05-18T20:21:45","slug":"jen-shyu-returns-home-unpacks-her-ancestry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2014\/05\/18\/jen-shyu-returns-home-unpacks-her-ancestry\/","title":{"rendered":"Jen Shyu Returns Home & Unpacks Her Ancestry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Time flies. When I got a call from Jen Shyu<\/strong> the other day, we realized it had been more than two years since last we spoke at her Bronx apartment for a Wall Street Journal<\/a> story.
\nHere\u2019s how I began that piece:<\/p>\n

Lettered tiles crisscrossed the coffee table in singer Jen Shyu’s Bronx apartment, remnants of an unfinished game of Bananagrams\u2014a sped-up, free-form variant of Scrabble. How fitting. A playful yet rigorous approach to language animates her stirring music. Sounding fierce at times, ruminative at others, displaying tonal precision and an intuitive rhythmic sense, Ms. Shyu is among New York’s most invigorating vocal presences. And perhaps the most enigmatic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet it\u2019s inadequate to call Shyu a singer. In a video<\/a> for her new multi-media work, “Solo Rites: Seven Breaths<\/a><\/strong>,”\u2014a collaboration with the celebrated Indonesian director, Garin Nugroho<\/strong>\u2014she calls herself \u00a0\u201can experimental jazz vocalist and composer, a multi-instrumentalist, dancer and researcher\u201d\u2014which sounds like a mouthful yet also seems accurate.
\nWhen last we spoke, Shyu was about to leave for year in Indonesia, her great-great-grandmother’s birthplace, on a Fulbright scholarship to study dance and improvisational singing traditions. But her planned year in Indonesia turned into almost three, she explained, traveling also to South Korea, East Timor, and Vietnam, among other places, where she studied, composed, performed in villages, taught and, and collaborated with local artists.
\nBefore she left, a friend urged her to watch Nugroho\u2019s film, “Opera Jawa<\/a>,” in which Shyu sensed the \u00a0\u201cfresh marriage of tradition and modernity I was seeking in my work.\u201dThe new piece is \u201cthe culmination of a decade of field research in other countries, mainly following the sound of my ancestors,” Shyu said, “about the collision between tradition and modernity as manifested through a woman alone, traveling and seeking threads throughout the chaos she encounters.\u201d
\n“Solo Rites: Seven Breaths<\/strong>“ will have its premiere at Brooklyn\u2019s Roulette on May 28<\/a><\/strong>. There\u2019s also a unique opportunity on Tuesday, May 20, at the Indonesian Consulate NY<\/strong> <\/a>(5 East 68th Street, between 5th and Madison Aves): As Shyu explains, \u201cwe are giving people the chance to enjoy an Indonesian buffet dinner, a live preview of Seven Breaths, and intimate Q&A session with Garin and me.\u201d (It\u2019s also a chance to support the project through the Hatchfund website.)
\nShyu\u2019s new work, for which she will sing, dance, and accompany herself on instruments including the Taiwanese moon lute, East Timorese lakado<\/em>, Korean gayageum<\/em>, and piano, will also include footage drawn from her research trips and residencies in several countries, as woven together under Nugroho\u2019s innovative direction. And it will no doubt reflect what bassist Mark Dresser, one of the many musicians who have been drawn to work with Shyu, once told me:
\n\u201cShe’s fearless. She studies traditions and then does what she wants.”
\nPhoto\/ Miranda Lichtenstein<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time flies. When I got a call from Jen Shyu the other day, we realized it had been more than two years since last we spoke at her Bronx apartment for a Wall Street Journal story. Here\u2019s how I began that piece: Lettered tiles crisscrossed the coffee table in singer Jen Shyu’s Bronx apartment, remnants … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Jen Shyu Returns Home & Unpacks Her Ancestry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[25,11,146,12,147,14,148],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3913"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}