SHU
Shu is, first and foremost, a songwriter. The kind who agonizes over the right melody, fusses over lyrics and tinkers with a chord until the song finally feels ready for birth. But he is also a devoted composer and musician, the kind who is grounded in blues, funk and hip-hop, but keeps reaching beyond traditional instruments and soundscapes, looking for some Radiohead. Finally, Shu is a passionate and experienced performer, committed not just to entertaining, but also to communicating and discovering ambivalence, weakness and half-truths in himself and his audience. Through the songs, the sound, and the stage, Shu always hopes to set off on a ‘naked journey’ leading somewhere bold, brash and exciting, but at the same time very vulnerable.
Shu’s musical journey is not unlike his personal one. He grew up in Nairobi Kenya, born to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, a background that made him acutely aware as a child that the world was full of in-betweens, of almost-truths and dualities. Throughout his school life in Kenya, Shu took the world as it was, performing the duties of a good student and ‘promising-young-man’; but he would also escape to a musical world where things were much less clear, and where he could re-imagine the world as he heard it. From a very early age, Shu would spend countless hours at the piano, at first working hard to master Chopin, but then excited to discover that you didn’t have to re-produce the notes on the page – that you could actually play whatever you wanted….
This desire to go ‘beyond the page’ and create something new led Shu to constantly navigate multiple worlds and the tension created between them in pursuit of something he suspected was hidden somewhere in between. From Kenya to Harvard and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Shu’s musical and creative self grew alongside his academic self, and his American self grew alongside his African self, all jostling with each other to be heard. In homage to the immigrant’s dream, Shu moved to New York after school and worked in the corporate world for a couple of years, but then withdrew from that world entirely to write songs, and tour on shoestring budgets, performing over 50 shows in the US, Europe and Africa (including opening for Les Nubians on their US tour). During this time, he recorded and independently released his debut, Shusic, which was acclaimed by notable critics and DJs around the world and went on to sell almost 4,000 copies. Several songs from the album also won top songwriting accolades from Billboard, the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and the International Songwriting Contest. In addition to this critical and sales-success, Shu also worked hard to cement his live-show reputation in his adopted home of New York, playing to packed houses at notable venues like The Blue Note, Joe’s Pub, S.O.B.’s, B.B. King and The Cutting Room (where he hosted his own “Punk Soul” series over a number of months, exploring alternative approaches to soul music).
Shu has grown significantly as an artist and a person since his first release, coming to accept and even embrace the uncertainty and in-between-ness of his background, experiences, relationships, and the world around him. This ambivalence has become the common theme of Shu’s songwriting and sound, as he keeps pushing to take himself and his listeners someplace familiar but slightly unsettling, and inevitably finding something broken, yet beautiful, along the way.