By Diane Huang and Sophy Chu 朱子栩
Jimmy Teh grew up in Rangoon, Burma (currently known as Yangon, Myanmar) in a family with musical roots.
“I was the youngest of eight, and my dad had formed the family band through his business in Chinatown, so the whole family was involved,” says Jimmy. “All of my siblings played different instruments. I was so jealous of them having their own special instruments, when I had nothing.
“At that time, I was so young,” he continues. “I didn’t get to have my own, and so I played percussion, the easy one. But that wasn’t so bad, by being involved in percussion, I got to know all the rhythms.”
Jimmy played the maracas, bongos, and tambourines with the family band during festivities and weddings. Eventually, he trained more seriously in piano with a Chinese teacher. Jimmy mainly plays piano today.
“He was so meticulous with the timing, and I was still young and didn’t know how to count. He was telling me about quarter-counts and half-counts, but I had no clue at the time,” says Jimmy with a chuckle. “I was just counting whatever he said, but that was good training with him for a few years.”
Jimmy moves into different genres
Eventually under the encouragement of a western music teacher, Jimmy explored different styles of music.
“I really like jazz. It was very restricted in Burma to be exposed to Western music. We don’t have much material to read, so we would have to go through the Philippines with short wave radio to listen to Voice of America Jazz, where they start the intro with ‘Take the A Train’ by Duke Ellington.”
Jimmy’s musical tastes expanded to pop and heavy metal, which was, to him, a “natural progression as you age and get into different music”. During his university days while pursuing his bachelor of sciences studying chemistry, he tutored many American students, which exposed him to more musical genres.
Over time, he joined an amateur band. Jimmy recalls, “I was on the radio broadcasting and playing classical music or pop songs on a monthly basis. After graduating, I joined a professional band doing recordings for movie background music.”
However, there was a period of time when his relationship with music changed. “In the 1980s, I migrated to Canada and as an immigrant, I [struggled] to find a job, so I had no music exposure while I was in Canada for at least five years. [It was] just work, go to school, study, and more work.”
Ending the days with Abbey Road
Jimmy met his wife, An Teh, in Canada. They originally spoke English to each other, as she had immigrated from Vietnam. To their surprise, they shared many commonalities in food, language, and culture.
“We found out we both speak Hokkien,” Jimmy says. “And that was how we got so close. We feel like we are “家己人 (ka-kī-lâng)—our own people, all Hokkien from Southeast Asia—and we became more comfortable with each other.”
It wasn’t until later that Jimmy resumed playing music again.
“When I got married and Jacqueline was born, she grew up in a household where I played 91.1 Jazz FM every day and night. When I put her to sleep, I put on the Beatles song ‘Golden Slumber’ from the Abbey Road album. She fell asleep right away with that song.”
This time, music became the thread that connected Jimmy and his daughter, Toronto jazz singer and composer Jacqueline Teh. Jacqueline remembers fondly, “My whole life, I’ve been drawn to jazz because of my dad. He bought me one of those radios where you can only press the button to shuffle through stations and listen. I used to shuffle until I found big band jazz.”
As Jacqueline was growing up, the father-daughter duo often played music together, especially during Christmas parties every year.
Jacq draws on her heritage at Jade Music Fest
“Jacqueline performed with me when she was 10 years old,” Jimmy says. “We had a band in Toronto. I put her on a few songs, and since then, we have been playing every year for the past 15 years. I’ve been progressing her from kids songs to adult songs—the level of difficulty getting better and better—and it was amazing. I remember I performed with Jacqueline at one of the university recitals with a semi-brass band; it was really good!”
For Jimmy and Jacqueline, another musical moment came after watching John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians. The rearrangements of classical Chinese songs with big band jazz inspired new ways of playing classic songs for them. “Although it is based in Singapore, they speak in Hokkien too. So [that] very much hit me right away that, wow, it’s my kind,” Jimmy says.
This inspiration carried over into Jacqueline’s performances at Jade Music Fest as a way of “coming full circle”. These events offer artists an opportunity to perform in their heritage languages. She says that this festival enables her to take her musical upbringing and education and return to the original influences.
“Usually it feels like music is its own separate thing, like a solitary planet,” says Jacqueline. “And being able to bring my mother tongue into my music because JMF encouraged it, I am now able to bring music back into the orbit of my family, which is really special.”
For the next Jade Music Fest in Asia, Jimmy and Jacqueline plan to perform together in Taiwan.
This is one of a series of Toronto Spark articles about Canadian musicians of Asian ancestry who were supported by their parents as they pursued careers as singers and songwriters. These musicians have all performed at the Jade Music Fest, which promotes underrepresented artists by offering them a platform to perform. This event also fosters intergenerational connections by celebrating Chinese-language music created by artists born in Canada and abroad. The next Jade Music Fest will be in Vancouver from November 5 to 8.
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