Sola & Friends
Sola & Friends--live recording from the 1999 Beijing International Jazz Festival
Radical, experimental fusion of Chinese with Western rock music, with improvisational vocalizing and anomalous integration of the dissonant with the mainstream for an unforgettable signature sound.
Liu Sola
Composer, Author, Vocalist
Liu Sola, "the only Chinese artist who'd qualify to play the New Orleans Jazz Festival." (New York Press, 1995), is a composer with an elective affinity for free jazz and blues with Chinese roots and a singer with an unforgettable voice. Her voice can "wander from emotive, free-form vocalizing, with echoes of Chinese opera, to simple folk-like melodies." (New York Times, 7/1996) Like her other works, her first album produced in the United States, Blues In The East (Axiom Records /Polygram, 1995) received excellent reviews, including a "Spotlight" position on Billboard magazine. It remained for many weeks in the top 10 of the New World Music chart. Her second album China Collage was released by Avant Record in 1996. In 1997, her own record company Also Productions Inc. in New York, released the debut album Haunts, followed in the next two years June Snow and Sola & Friends. In 2000, the company released Point Zero, Apparitions, and Spring Snowfall.
Besides her CD recordings, Liu Sola has scored many Chinese and international films, TV and drama productions and has won several major national awards in China for her piano pieces and film music. She has also composed many pieces of modern theater music and modern dance music. Her major work for modern dance June Snow, was featured in Michael Apted's documentary film Moving The Mountains, the sound track of which Sola also composed. The June Snow CD was released in 1999. Her most recent symphonic work In Corporeal was performed in February 1999 by the New Juilliard Ensemble at Lincoln Center. In 1999, she went back to China with her musicians for a series of Jazz & Rock concerts in Beijing and Shanghai, her first performance there since she left China 10 years ago. A live recording of this ground-breaking concert, "Sola & Friends," was released in 2000. In Sept. 2000, she returned to China again and founded the New Folk Big Band, the first-ever Chinese folk jazz fusion big band. The debut concert was a revelation to the Chinese and international audience, as if represented the first successful attempt to create a new Chinese improvisatory music.
Sola is frequently invited to perform in international music festivals world wide. She has recorded with many international artists and some of her early collaborations are featured on the Womad album A Week In The Real World. In 1988, Sola represented China at the Seoul Song Festival for the Olympics. In 1989, she collaborated with Memphis-based blues musicians to record what is perhaps the first-ever Chinese Blues song, Reborn.
Besides being a world-class musician, Liu Sola is also a famous writer. She established her place in the history of modern Chinese literature with her first novella You Have No Choice, a work which single-handedly introduced a notion of hip into Chinese writing and gave voice to the radically different sensibilities of a whole post Cultural Revolution generation. Her work received not only high critical praise but also became cult reading for the young generation¡Xand has remained so up to today. You Have No Choice won the 1988 Chinese National Novella Award. Her latest novel Da Ji Jia de Xiao Gu Shi was published by Ming Pao Publishers in Hong Kong in Jan. 2000. In 2001, Sola's new book about music Liu Sola On The Move was published in China, and became an immediate bestseller.
As an award-winning writer, Sola's stories have been published in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and are translated into Japanese, English, Swedish, Danish, German and Italian. A collection of stories, Blue Sky Green Sea, was translated into English and was published by Renditions in Hong Kong in 1993. The novel Chaos and All That was written in 1989 when she was living in London. It has been acclaimed as the first great work of Chinese fiction written in exile. This "quick-witted novel" (Kirkus Reviews, 9/1994) "has created a brilliant kaleidoscope drawn from colorful fragments of widely divergent worlds." (Publishers Weekly, 12/1994). The English translation, by Richard King, was awarded First Prize for translation by the British Comparative Literature Association. Hawaii University Press published the English translation in October 1994 and the Italian publisher Ediziono Theoria published the Italian translation in 1995. A collection of her stories has been translated into Japanese and published by Xin Chao Publishers in Japan in 1997. In 1992, she was a visiting writer at the prestigious International Writing Program at Iowa University and lectured at Harvard, Cornell, Iowa, Berkeley, Portland, Minneapolis and Bryn Mawr.
Sola currently resides in
New York and Beijing.
Jazz: Experimental Big Band