Eugene Pao

My dad is from Shanghai, and he used to play classical violin when he was a young man. My earliest memory of listening to music was waking up to him playing violin along with classical records. I must have been a little baby.

But I was never quite interested in classical music. When I grew a bit older, my mom started buying The Beatles records. I was instantly drawn to the sound of the band, which inspired me to take up the guitar.

I listened to and played a lot of rock as a teenager—The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, all of them. In June I’m doing this gig at Dada Lounge, [where] I’ll be playing with a classic rock band. Having gone into jazz as a musician, I appreciate this opportunity to revisit my roots.

I wasn’t a very good student at school. Before the end of Form Two, my mom saw my grades were kind of bad so decided to ship me to the States because she thought the high school system there was a little easier and I could learn English better.

After high school, I wanted to study music in college, but my conservative Chinese parents were against the idea. Dad had a trading company at the time, so naturally he wanted me to study business. Therefore I ended up getting a degree in business and administration.

Despite majoring in something I wasn’t enthusiastic about, I had a great college experience. It opened up the world of jazz to me. I took a lot of selective music courses like jazz history and theory, and made a lot of friends who were equally passionate about music.

For rock, you know three chords and you can make a record, but jazz is so much more. It involves so many different kinds of scales, modes and disciplines, and you’ve gotta know the theories and techniques. But after you learn all that, you have to put the knowledge in the back of your mind and create your own music. When you improvise, you can be totally free to draw from what you’re feeling at the moment. No other forms of music gives you that kind of freedom, and that fascinates me.