Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you threw everything else aside to achieve a goal? That has been me with academia. Indeed, the past few months have been very scholarly. Anyone who has followed my recent work will probably have noticed how academically intensive the past few months have been. I have been publishing, travelling for conferences, presented at others, attended many more online, and somehow found myself speaking across music, education, pedagogy,

As my first academic year at LASALLE comes to a close, I find myself reaching a small but meaningful milestone: five peer-reviewed journal articles published! While I am grateful for the number, what matters more is that these articles have begun to make visible a research direction that has been taking shape across teaching, supervision, performance, and writing. The topics differ, but the underlying concern persists: how musicians learn, judge, communicate, and make sense o

Recently, I had the opportunity to present at the fifth conference of the International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ), held at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel under the theme “Places and Spaces”. It was a fitting setting for the paper I brought there: “Pocket as Embodied Space: Reflections from the Bandstand.” The conference framed artistic research in jazz as a serious and expanding site of inquiry, explicitly naming embodiment as one of its core strand

This year’s Chinese New Year was meant to be a short reset. I took a few days in Phnom Penh with my wife to step away from marking, proposals, and the quiet strategising that comes with building a life in higher education. It was supposed to be a pause, a sightseeing holiday. Instead, it became perspective. We visited Tuol Sleng (S21), the former school turned prison under the Khmer Rouge. The rooms are preserved as they were found: metal bed frames, shackles, faint blood spl

Last week, I had the opportunity to facilitate an IN-depth module at the University of the Arts Singapore titled Artist as Futurist. Although UAS provided the workshop content, the experience resonated strongly enough that I felt compelled to document the learning trajectories, tensions, and shifts that emerged across the three sessions. What follows is not a summary of content delivered. It is, instead, a reflection on how thinking evolved through discussion, critique, and m

This past year marked a genuine paradigm shift for me. Not in the superficial sense of adding more credentials or outputs, but in the deeper work of clarifying my research voice, my pedagogic stance, and the relationship between my teaching, research, and supervision. I have come to understand more clearly how these three dimensions must cohere if the work is to be sustainable and meaningful. At the same time, I began to recognise what was no longer serving me, including cert

Lately, I have been reflecting quite a bit on my own research identity. Not the academic kind involving CV lines or publications, but the deeper question of what I actually care about in music and teaching. That process unexpectedly nudged me into this piece: a small attempt to articulate something I have sensed for years but rarely put into words. I have been sitting with a recurring realisation these past few years, something that shows up in teaching, performing, supervisi

I wanted to take a moment to document this while it’s still fresh in my head. Earlier this month, I played what might have been my first proper large-scale jazz gig in years: a big band show with the Julian Chan Jazz Orchestra and the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra at Dewan Filharmonik Petronas. It felt like stepping back into a life I once knew intimately. Long rehearsals, pages of charts, setups, fills, the satisfying punch of a shout chorus landing exactly right. We even

I recently spoke to a few friends going through something, as we often are in Singapore. It translates to many versions of the same: overwork, burnout, non-alignment with core values; or too much alignment with values not equating to worth, monetary or otherwise (for example, perceived worth from personal satisfaction). The “solutions” aren’t really solutions. They may be, negatively, stopgaps; positively, ongoing life experimentations. Step back from bar gigs, release music?

I was awarded the Fellowship Diploma in Composition, with Honours, by Victoria College of Music following external assessment of a substantial portfolio of original compositions and supporting documentation. The value of this award lies primarily in the work itself. My submission included a big band composition, a four-movement suite, and a jazz-orchestra work featuring strings, together with detailed programme notes explaining the structural, stylistic, and artistic decision

2024 will always be huge for me: I got married, and I became a doctor. The first is personal, and the second, my Doctor of Music...

Between 2012 and 2022, I completed four performance diplomas across four very different instruments: the LTCL in Drum Kit (Trinity College London), the DipABRSM in Piano (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music), the DipRSL in Electric Bass (Rockschool/RSL Awards), and the CIPP in Classical Chinese Percussion, awarded by The TENG Company in partnership with the Confucius Institute, Nanyang Technological University (CI-NTU). Pursued over a decade, these qualifications r

I’ve spent years performing, teaching, arranging, building curriculum, earning qualifications, and navigating multiple musical worlds...