The Genius of Hong Kong Jazz Pianist Daniel Chu

To play jazz is, naturally, to improvise. But this freedom normally exists within a form. While first-time listeners may not always easily detect it, nearly all jazz performances are based on an existing composition. The score serves as a sketched outline, and musicians colour in the canvas — whether with delicate brushwork or Pollock-esque splatters. Staying within the lines is strictly optional.

That’s not the way Daniel Chu likes to play. The Hong Kong musical prodigy’s preferred mode is to sit alone at the piano and play completely spontaneously, without a single prompt, guide or goal. What pours forth may be luminous and lyrical, or aggressive and atonal — most often, both, as his inspired torrents gush through different landscapes with the freedom of flowing water.

Such an avant-garde ethos is decidedly niche in Hong Kong, but Chu’s freewheeling, freeform music has found an audience. In 2021 he performed a headline solo recital at Hong Kong City Hall. After a first half spent deconstructing popular tunes by artists including Aerosmith and Billy Joel, Chu played an uninterrupted 40-minute improvisation. In the audience was Hong Kong Sinfonietta Orchestra (HKS) CEO Margaret Yang. “She was like, who’s this kid?” he recalls. Afterwards, an introduction was made, kickstarting the talks that would see Chu invited to serve as the orchestra’s first artist associate from a jazz background.

Chu took over the honorary role for the 2026-27 season, a responsibility shared with Hong Kong harmonica virtuoso CY Leo. Their joint appointment will be celebrated with the 27 June world premiere of the specially commissioned Time (in-)Linear, subtitled A Concerto for Chromatic Harmonica, Jazz Piano & Orchestra. A few hours before we met in late May, Chu had just received composer Alice Yeung’s score by email, although he hadn’t opened the attachment yet.

In truth, he probably doesn’t need to — because he’d already made clear that the entirety of his contribution should be spontaneously improvised. “[The orchestra] should be daunted, because I don’t think they’ve worked with anybody like me before,” quips Chu. True, Hong Kong’s second professional orchestra has only fleetingly dabbled in improvisational crossovers — notably performing new “symphonic jazz” works by European musicians Ben Schmid and Georg Breinschmid in 2014 and 2018.

Strings attached

Chu’s spontaneous approach isn’t completely without precedent. Listening to him at the keys, one might easily imagine he’s been soaking up the epic solo outpourings of Keith Jarrett since he was in the womb. The American pianist almost singlehandedly legitimised the improvised solo concert — epitomised in The Koln Concert, his bestselling 1975 live album, a small slice of the 36 hours of completely spontaneous performances Jarrett released before his 2016 retirement. 

Remarkably, Chu claims his singular approach was well-honed long before he encountered Jarrett, or jazz, in the first place. After he won a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music at the age of 18, sympathetic tutors turned him on to the masters. “So how long have you been playing free improv? Have you ever seen this Cecil Taylor guy? Have you seen Keith?’” he was asked. In disbelief, the tutor rushed to play Chu video clips. The young prodigy was not surprised by what he saw — but he was relieved. “My feeling was that I wasn’t alone all this time,” says Chu. “I wasn’t impressed, I was just like, wow, there are actually people out there like me. I was so happy to find out that actually I wasn’t an alien.”

Chu graduated two years later, completing the four-year course in double time. He has heard stories about the first time his supernatural musical abilities were made visible to another human. Shortly after he could stand upright, his mother was left dumbfounded when her infant son spontaneously began playing a TV jingle. “She rushed from the kitchen, like, what is going on? Why does this thing on the TV keep looping?” tells Chu with the pride of a tale deeply embedded in family folklore. “Then she looked at me. ‘Okay, I don’t know anything about music, but this kid’s definitely got something.’”

Today, Chu wonders where he would be today if his mum had taken him to study with local jazz luminary Ted Lo. Instead, at age three he was enrolled in a typical, rigorous private schooling in classical music, at which he excelled. “Everybody was expecting me to be another Lang Lang in the making,” he remembers. Instead, winning a performance competition in his early teens prompted an identity crisis that pushed him to go his own way. 

“I was like, huh — is there anything more to this? This whole life, I’m just gonna read off people’s scores and become a robot?” he remembers. “So when the teacher left the practice room and it’s just me and piano, I just started playing games. I started to bang stuff — let’s just see what happens.”

Home Kong

After graduating from Berklee in record time, Chu was informally approached by a senior faculty member with a job offer. “I just remember that person telling me, ‘What’s there in Hong Kong? There’s no point in you going back,” says Chu. “I was like first of all, nobody talks to me like that. And secondly, Hong Kong is my home. I’m a hopeless romantic, I just love Hong Kong so much — and if somebody doesn’t believe that I can make it in Hong Kong … What if I actually go back and make it out there?”

Chu arrived back in town at the beginning of 2018 and soon found multiple outlets for his improvisational impulses. With sound designer Hirsk and drummer Blue Kwok, he formed electronic trio Manvsmachine. For the 2021 Freespace Jazz Festival, Chu conceived and conducted the John Zorn-inspired Game Play, an ambitious group improvisation described at the time by this writer as a “triumphant experiment.” Benefitting from the pandemic lockdown, Chu was invited back to the festival the following year, this time staging a bombastic pop show on the newly opened Wonderland venue. 

These days Chu is less often spotted playing jazz, instead working behind the scenes on adverts, theatre productions, movie soundtracks and on Cantopop tunes for Sammi Cheng, Janice Vidal, Jill Vidal and, most recently, Vicky Fung. “I think the hard part is really to make it sustainable,” he explains. “I knew that I needed to branch out. I can’t just do this jazz playing thing.”

He also found time to complete a master’s degree in ethnomusicology, writing a thesis on the Hong Kong jazz scene. Being pulled in so many directions, one wonders if that impertinent Berklee professor was right or wrong? Did he make it in Hong Kong?

“It’s a great question. I thought about this a lot recently,” muses Chu. “If my inner child asked the adult Daniel, are you doing what you want to do now? I can honestly say yes, because when I was a kid, all I wanted was a sustainable career in music, making a living, doing what I love. I don’t need to make a million a year. If you can actually do what you love and make it a sustainable career, you’ve got it.”

On the record

The position with HKS offers a new opportunity to focus solely on the music. Following the Hong Kong premiere, Chu will travel to Portugal to perform the concerto during the orchestra’s residency at Marvão International Music Festival. In association with HKS, he will also present a concert and conversation at Tang Contemporary Art on 15 October, before closing the season performing a self-composed orchestral piece at next year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, alongside HKS and classical pianist Colleen Lee. 

Sadly, there is currently little chance for listeners to encounter Chu’s ecstatic improvisations outside these fleeting concert experiences. At present, his only releases currently streaming are co-credited to 原始和聲 Raw Harmony, the Christian devotional group he serves as music director of. Elsewhere, two live solo pieces — a frenetic three-minute improv and a charged cover of local anthem “Below the Lion Rock” — can only be found on the physically released Our Jazz Pianists Live! CD, documenting a four-artist showcase concert in 2021, released and hosted by Jazz World Records.

Thankfully, the HKS association may also right this wrong, with Chu letting slip unconfirmed plans for the orchestra to fund recording of a debut solo album, which he promises to be a strictly spontaneous, solo affair. “There are so many people putting out stuff without a message, and I don’t want to be that kind of an artist,” he adds. “Artistically, I’m finally right at that moment where I feel like I’m ready for that side of Daniel to come out.”

Daniel Chu performs with Hong Kong Sinfonietta on 27 June 2026 at 20:00. More info here.