Having drawn inspiration from ancestral poetry, ancient Chinese art and even dreams about grandparents, Yijia Tu’s songs are timeless, borderless and personal. She found incredible success as a teenager in China, winning a televised talent competition and receiving multiple awards and accolades, but Yijia Tu’s ambition to explore ethnomusicology led her to London, and to SOAS where she studied music. Since coming the UK in 2016 she has appeared onstage at Richmix, the British Museum, Oxford Town Hall and on BBC Radio 3’s “Music Planet”, as well as our event at Jam In A Jar in May 2019 with her band The Sages.

The Sages are a London based syncretic ensemble who draw inspiration from different music elements throughout time and history, with a soft focus on traditional East Asian music. Emerging from a diverse cosmopolitan generation that grew up under an age of globalization and other social changes, they aim to explore and challenge the concepts between “East” and “West”, cultural identity and musical “genres” through both original composition and adaptation of traditional folk music.

This episode was written and produced by Harriet Paintin and Will Paintin, edited by Will Paintin and hosted by Josh Middleton.