Biography
Composer, author, and vocalist Liu Sola fuses the musical heritage of China with jazz, blues, and improvisational elements. Her catalog ranges from the multicultural blues project Blues in the East—recorded with guitarist James Blood Ulmer, Parliament-Funkadelic drummer Jerome Bailey, Chinese pipa player Wu Man, avant-garde saxophonist Henry Threadgill, and Last Poets vocalist Umar Bin Hassan, and produced by Bill Laswell—to the psychedelic Chinese rock album China Collage. While www.chinasprout asserted that “this is not your standard Chinese music—it is extremely contemporary with a strong multicultural influence,” the New York Press described Sola as “the only Chinese artist who would qualify to play the New Orleans Jazz Festival.” The New York Times highlighted her capacity to “wander from echoes of Chinese opera to simple folk-like melodies.”
Born to influential members of China’s Communist Party, Liu enjoyed a privileged childhood. Her uncle, Liu Zhidan, served as a high-ranking Red Army general until his death and martyrdom in 1936. Family circumstances shifted sharply after her father’s comrade Gao Gang was charged with treason by Mao Tse-Tung and executed in 1955. Following a harshly critical account of events written by her mother, both parents were banished to a rural pig farm, where they remained for twenty years. Liu and her older brother and sister were raised instead by relatives in the capital. Music remained central to her upbringing: she began classical piano studies at age five, trained in Peking Opera, yet gravitated toward Chinese folk traditions. In 1977 she entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to study composition; her thesis symphony honoring her uncle was later performed by the Chinese Opera House Orchestra.
After graduating in 1981, Liu turned to fiction. Her debut novella, Ni Bie Wu Xuanze (You Have No Choice), resonated with China’s disaffected urban youth and received a national novella award. Written during a brief stay in London, her first novel, Chaos and All, appeared in 1989 and was followed in January 2000 by Da Ji Jia De Xiao Gu Shi. The novella Blue Sky Green Sea was rendered into English and staged as a rock opera in 1998 with the Chinese Central Symphony Orchestra and a rock band. Liu has pursued an equally varied musical path, forming an all-female Pink Floyd-influenced rock band in the mid-1980s, recording a rock-opera version of Blue Sky Green Sea in 1988 with the Chinese Central Symphony Orchestra and a Hong Kong rock band, and assembling a reggae ensemble in London later that year comprising British, Japanese, and Chinese musicians. After encountering the music of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin during a 1987 visit to the United States, she returned two years later to the Mississippi Delta, where she collaborated with numerous blues performers. She settled permanently in the United States upon acceptance into the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 1992. Subsequent projects include the modern-dance composition “June Snow,” featured in Michael Apted’s 1999 documentary Moving the Mountains, and the piece “In Corporeal,” premiered by the New Juilliard Ensemble at Lincoln Center the same year. Returning to China for the first time in a decade, Sola performed in Beijing and Shanghai and released the album Sola & Friends in Beijing.
Born to influential members of China’s Communist Party, Liu enjoyed a privileged childhood. Her uncle, Liu Zhidan, served as a high-ranking Red Army general until his death and martyrdom in 1936. Family circumstances shifted sharply after her father’s comrade Gao Gang was charged with treason by Mao Tse-Tung and executed in 1955. Following a harshly critical account of events written by her mother, both parents were banished to a rural pig farm, where they remained for twenty years. Liu and her older brother and sister were raised instead by relatives in the capital. Music remained central to her upbringing: she began classical piano studies at age five, trained in Peking Opera, yet gravitated toward Chinese folk traditions. In 1977 she entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to study composition; her thesis symphony honoring her uncle was later performed by the Chinese Opera House Orchestra.
After graduating in 1981, Liu turned to fiction. Her debut novella, Ni Bie Wu Xuanze (You Have No Choice), resonated with China’s disaffected urban youth and received a national novella award. Written during a brief stay in London, her first novel, Chaos and All, appeared in 1989 and was followed in January 2000 by Da Ji Jia De Xiao Gu Shi. The novella Blue Sky Green Sea was rendered into English and staged as a rock opera in 1998 with the Chinese Central Symphony Orchestra and a rock band. Liu has pursued an equally varied musical path, forming an all-female Pink Floyd-influenced rock band in the mid-1980s, recording a rock-opera version of Blue Sky Green Sea in 1988 with the Chinese Central Symphony Orchestra and a Hong Kong rock band, and assembling a reggae ensemble in London later that year comprising British, Japanese, and Chinese musicians. After encountering the music of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin during a 1987 visit to the United States, she returned two years later to the Mississippi Delta, where she collaborated with numerous blues performers. She settled permanently in the United States upon acceptance into the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 1992. Subsequent projects include the modern-dance composition “June Snow,” featured in Michael Apted’s 1999 documentary Moving the Mountains, and the piece “In Corporeal,” premiered by the New Juilliard Ensemble at Lincoln Center the same year. Returning to China for the first time in a decade, Sola performed in Beijing and Shanghai and released the album Sola & Friends in Beijing.
Albums
