Jen Shyu & Jade Tongue: Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses Album Release

Jen Shyu (a ChoralQuest composer) and Jade Tougue celebrate their deeply personal album Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses on Pi Records with an evening of music at Roulette. The album and subsequent performance marks the long-awaited return of Jade Tongue, an ensemble made up of musical innovators—Ambrose Akinmusire, Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Dan Weiss—with whom Shyu has created music with for over a decade. They last appeared on her groundbreaking and highly acclaimed 2015 Pi release Sounds and Cries of the World, which NPR called: “no drive-by encounter between musical cultures, no cherry picking of exotic licks. This is research and experience, absorbed and reimagined.”

Date & Time: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 at 7pm CDT | 8pm EDT

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses is a mourning and reckoning for women and people of color, across time and into this pandemic. This album is dedicated to her father, 徐澤濱 Tsu Pin Shyu (January 19, 1941–April 2, 2019), who passed away unexpectedly during a nap at his home in Houston. Her mother tried to wake him, even banging a pot with a spoon, but finally called for help. At the time, Shyu was doing research in Japan for Zero Grasses when she received an email from the county sheriff informing her of her father’s death. A few weeks after his memorial, she was emptying her father’s closet when she discovered her childhood diaries. Reading them transformed Zero Grasses into a coming-of-age story about ambition, legacy, racism, sexism in the industry, fertility, and the mother she sought to become. It’s an investigation of life, as it was her father who inspired her to live life as she envision it.

Watch and read more here.