When Canadian guitar virtuoso and YouTube influencer Jay Leonard Juatco received an email inviting him to perform with Cantopop diva Sandy Lam, he ignored it – because he thought it was a scam. And also, who the heck was Sandy Lam? “Of course I hadn’t heard of her! I can’t even pronounce most Chinese food, right?” he laughs today. “So I had no idea. And the email was sent from something like, happykitty616@hotmail.com – super sketchy, right?”
Eventually curiosity got the better of him. “Like, I’m looking at this thing, and I don’t know if this is real. So I was playing chicken – just waiting to see when they ask me to make a deposit in the bank. Or a blood sample.”
Even when a decent fee was offered and he agreed to take the gig — even after he boarded a flight to Hong Kong — Juatco still had doubts for his safety. “Like, oh, my gosh, am I going to make it out of here? But then the moment I arrived at the hotel — like, it was a nice hotel — I’m like, okay, this is good. I’m safe.”
Overcoming his trepidation paid off. After playing in Lam’s band at Hong Kong Coliseum — a banner comeback show taped for a live DVD — Juatco was quickly established as one of the few foreign guns for hire on Hong Kong’s cliquey but lucrative Cantopop scene. Years of future work awaited. But before all that, the gig also introduced the guitarist to a lifelong musical foil who would, over a dozen years later, co-create his first solo album, Aww Man!, which will be released under Juatco’s stage name JayLeonardJ on June 20. Enter Macau-raised, Hong Kong drumming legend Jun Kung.
When Jay met Jun
The first day Juatco turned up at rehearsals with Lam’s band, in 2011, there was only one other musician in the room. “As a drummer, I tend to try to go in early, because of all the setting up and stuff like that,” says Kung, picking up the bromance origin story. “I walked into the rehearsal studio, and I see this guy who’s also early – because he’s the new guy. He’s preppy. He’s already set up, coffee in hand, hat backwards. Okay. So I went over, I introduce myself, and my first question was like, how did you even get here?”
It was puzzling to locally raised Kung that any new recruit could successfully navigate to the rehearsal space — “a random building in the middle of some industrial area” somewhere in Tow Kwa Wan — in the pre-smartphone era. “That’s when I knew, okay, he’s built a little differently,” he says. “In order to navigate the intricate alleys and streets of Hong Kong, you got to be wired differently. So, welcome to the club.”
Orientating skills aside, over the course of the rehearsals the pair quickly and quietly bonded, outsiders in a predominantly Hong Kong band. “We were friends from the get-go,” says Kung.
“We were at the same wavelength,” concurs Juatco.
And then they kept getting booked on the same gigs. Despite maintaining his home and family in Vancouver, Juatco was repeatedly drafted in for bigger shows and tours by Cantopop artists – not that Hong Kong is short of guitarists. “I mean, just the energy that he has on stage is fascinating,” raves Kung, contrasting the Canadian’s charisma with the relative reluctance of most homegrown players. “The times have changed a bit, but when I got in the industry, everybody [musicians] hated the attention. They borderline disrespected the stage, in my opinion. They would rock up and not be dressed properly, like, not even an ironed shirt. I just didn’t understand the not giving a crap about being on stage. Because it’s your job.”
For Juatco, not being particularly familiar with the sea he was swimming in offered a strategic advantage. “I never got starstruck,” he remembers. “It was hard for me to get intimidated by any artist because I just didn’t really know who they were. It’s a different style of music, different world. So coming here [to Hong Kong], I kind of just had my normal swagger and enjoyed meeting people. And that made things easier.”
Cross-continental drift
When this fast friendship formed, Kung was already an established solo artist with a string of releases to his name. So naturally he drafted in his brother-from-another to play on new material, including singles “Hit & Run” and “Sun Shines Down.” But over the years their meetings became less frequent. Kung moved to Australia, only returning to Hong Kong for top-dollar engagements, and when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and live work dried up, their bromance took a break. “We were pretty much separated,” says Kung. “We would talk and dabble here and there. Maybe share a meme once in a while. Jay was already family, but once you’re apart – you know how it is. We’re in our own worlds.”
When Juatco had the chance to return to Hong Kong, to perform at a branded event in late 2023, both seized the opportunity to reconnect. What grew from this hotbed of emotion was the pair’s first formal musical collaboration. “I was there for a week, but we only had to play like 15 minutes of music [on stage],” says Jay. “We had an entire week with nothing to do except reconnect. You chat, you go eat, you do the respectful ceremonies, and then you just gotta get down to your business. If you’re a painter, you have to exchange something. If you’re a chef, you cook for each other. As musicians, we got to connect by playing – that’s how we communicate.”
They began jamming with no ideas or direction. Two days later, they had five songs in the bag. “And the music was just so seamless, coming out really, really easily,” says Juatco. “We knew that we had something.”
They just didn’t know what. The result of this organic, completely collaborative endeavour, these songs might have ended up on a future Jun Kung album, or been sold to pop artists. But at the end of the week, a fateful meal, huddled in the front seat of Kung’s car, sealed the deal. “We went out for pizza — this beautiful Italian style, an entire pizza each — and we’re sitting in the car listening to the tracks we’d written, happy,” remembers Kung. “And that was when I presented this idea to Jay: you never thought about releasing an album?”
Walking Jay’s way
Over the years since they met, Juatco’s own global profile had ballooned in the digital era, building a notable career as a guitar influencer with a growing online following for his gear reviews. Having attracted multiple brand endorsements, he’s regularly called on to demonstrate products live at events, and is an annual fixture at the Namm Show industry summit. But up until now, he had never released a note of his own music.
So while all the music was co-composed, Kung generously conceived this project as the moment to let JayLeonardJ shine – not just as a guitarist, but as a vocalist and songwriter. “I came in from an angle where he’s doing a lot of stuff, he’s endorsed by a lot of major guitar brands, which got me thinking: if you’re doing a Namm Show every year, have you ever thought about having your own music blasting from the booth?” he says.
Still, they only had half an album of material and not a note recorded. So when Kung came off an arduous blockbuster world tour backing an unnamed A-lister (“Great money, great music, but horrible personnel,” he says, refusing to be drawn further) he used the spare cash to book a month-long trip to Canada in February 2024. Immediately, they hit the studio: as agreed, Juatco took all the lead vocals and guitar parts, while Kung, a self-described “closet bassist,” handled the bottom end. They called in old friend Jay Esplana to add keyboards, and behind the console installed Ben Kaplan, a veteran producer whose CV includes work with Shakira and Snoop Dogg. The vibe, however, remained relaxed – a family affair, with Juatco’s mum doing the session catering, and an art jam by his kids resulting in the distinctive, paint bomb album cover.
“I think, throughout this whole trip, it’s really just a document,” says Kung. “When you make a record, you want to document a place and a time and a feeling and a smell – and that’s what we did. A lot of beauty comes from all of that chaos and that panic.”
Wish fulfilment
The pair’s hectic working schedule means it’s taken more than a year for the music to finally be revealed to the world, some six months after Zolima took home a finished LP copy of the album to exclusively preview the release regionally. (The most recent delay saw Juatco don a wig and make an acting debut on stage in a monthlong, hometown run of the Dengue Fever-inspired musical Cambodian Rock Band.)
In the interim, Kung and Juatco did have one opportunity to debut the material live at Macau’s Hush! Beach Concerts x Yo~ga Wellfest 2024. That gig closed with the only pre-existing composition on the album, “Believe”, a solemn, self-reflective ballad written by the pair a decade earlier for Terrence Lam when the Cantopop star was living through a tough time.
“Basically, we imagined what his day would be, around this period, and tried to turn it into a story that the audience can digest,” says Kung, who released his own versions of the song in both English and Cantonese (“粵” jyut6) in 2015. “And then I thought, well, this album is a culmination of this wonderful 10-plus-year-long friendship – the most fitting song to put last is the first song we wrote together, so many years ago.”
The stark sentimentality clearly transcended the pair’s own shared bond: following the show in Macau, several audience members were left in tears. “It was my favourite moment in the show – grown dudes came over in tears,” adds Juatco. “And I think that’s really the power of music. What we did triggered that shared feeling for them too.”
Aww Man! is out on June 20.