SINGAPOREANA -
OUR SOUND, OUR STORIES
Lion City Jazz Festival 2026
Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre
Saturday (7 March 2026)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 March 2026 with the title "Home-grown talent blend multi-cultural genres in Singaporeana".
Some 102 years ago, New York City’s Aeolian Hall hosted the concert An Experiment in Modern Music, which made musical history for having delivered the premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In a more modest way, this concert wholly by Singaporean creators, part of the Lion City Jazz Festival organised by the Jazz Association (Singapore), accomplished a similar feat of revitalisation.
Directed by law graduate turned jazz pianist and composer Chok Kerong, Singaporeana felt like a symbolic handing of the baton from elder statesman of jazz Jeremy Monteiro to an equally gifted junior. Appropriately, the 90-minute concert opened with Monteiro’s Ubin, arranged by Germaine Goh, a leisurely stroll through nature and history which combined elements of Chinese, Malay and Indian musical influences.
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Side by Side:
Jeremy Monteiro & Chok Kerong |
Variety was the spice of this showcase, which incorporated the widest possible of musical styles and genres, involving a twelve-strong band of CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) instruments and eight star vocalists of diverse cultures. Call it a rojak but it was a heady mix which all who attended could be fiercely proud of.
Chok and Indian singer Sushma Soma’s Shifting Ground was a dizzying display of haunting melismata which shuffled between tonal centres without sounding like Arnold Schoenberg. Malay singer Namie Rasman put a modern twist to Nada Merindu from one of National Anthem composer Zubir Said’s movie scores, while adding the gloss in English for her own song Petrichor.
Three women united in voice to sing Weish’s (Chew Wei Shan) updated treatment of traditional Hakka song Sam Kho Sung Su (Three Pine Trees), which included a rap where she was joined by Sushma and Joanna Dong. Dong’s own jazzified ode in The First Chapter from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching sung in Mandarin to Chok’s original music was just as refreshing.
Of the purely instrumental pieces, experiments in adventurous harmonies were tried and tested. In Young Artist Award recipient flautist Rit Xu’s Desert Echoes, chromaticism fuelled exoticism, an excursion from its origin as a tango. Chok’s Renewal combined Brazilian bossa nova with a percussion duel between Sai Akileshwar’s mridangam and Riduan Zalani’s rebana, supported by Yap Ting Wei’s drumset.
In Chok’s If, Only If, erhu soloist Moses Gay took the spotlight as a brief prelude to the grand entrance of jazz veteran Alemay Fernandez, whose power vocals in the ballad Meant To Be rocked the house. Two singers dominated the higher registers of the male voice, firstly Singapore Idol Sezairi in his upbeat new song Kan Ku Nantikan, where the spirit of P.Ramlee was fondly relived.
The second was Dru Chen, whose nifty moves in Replay, co-written with Jesse Bear and Joel Tan, showed he was also light on his feet. The final singer was Tim De Cotta in Eurasian favourites Jinkli Nona and Rio, his avuncular charm also exuding in Lying Eyes.
For the grand finale, all eight singers were united for Sezairi and Petra Sihombing’s Deja Vu, which drew the loudest of cheers from the attentive and clearly absorbed audience. Another edition of Singaporeana cannot come soon enough.
All photography by Norhendra Ruslan
courtesy of Lion City Jazz Festival.
