The Making of American Anxiety
Zishi Liu’s EP American Anxiety is a bold and deeply personal statement. Set for release on June 1, 2025, the project explores Liu’s evolving identity as a Chinese artist living in the United States. But at the heart of the story is the recording itself—a series of sessions that pushed boundaries, challenged expectations, and brought together an ensemble of striking musical voices.
The sessions became a crucible for Liu’s vision: a space where deeply personal material met collective improvisation. With each musician bringing their own approach and energy, the studio transformed into a collaborative workshop. Liu emphasized emotional transparency and improvisational risk-taking, encouraging the players to treat the material not as fixed compositions but as living, breathing frameworks. The result was a collection of recordings that feel at once precise and unpredictable, intimate and expansive.
To capture the distinct palette Liu envisioned, he assembled a diverse and adventurous ensemble: Francisco Mela (drums), Eric Hofbauer (guitar), Harold Charon (piano), Ben Koh (bass), Hui Weng (guzheng), The Gaia String Quartet, Chris Klaxton (trumpet)
The inclusion of the guzheng—a 3,000-year-old Chinese zither—was a deliberate and pivotal choice. It bridges ancient Chinese musical traditions with the open-ended structures of modern jazz, offering an expressive contrast to the Western instrumentation. Combined with the sensitivity of the string quartet and the bold textures from the rhythm section and horns, the recording achieved a truly borderless sound.
The project’s conceptual centerpiece is the title track, “American Anxiety,” which encapsulates the EP’s emotional terrain: uncertainty, cultural tension, reinvention, and introspection. Inspired in part by the later work of John Coltrane, Liu sought to integrate Eastern ideas of meditation and emptiness into the flow of the music—embracing dissonance, silence, and space as expressive tools.
These recording sessions were not about perfection, but about capturing the truth of a moment. Liu gave his collaborators room to interpret and expand the material, and the takes chosen for the EP reflect rawness and immediacy over polish. This approach makes American Anxiety not just a document of compositions, but a record of conversation—between musicians, cultures, and ideas.
The project was first introduced in early form during Liu’s graduate recital at the Longy School of Music on May 19, 2023. That performance, shaped under the mentorship of Eric Hofbauer and Noah Preminger, laid the groundwork for what would become the full recording.
American Anxiety will be performed live on May 23, 2025, at The Lilypad in Cambridge, MA. The release concert will feature the full band and present the music as it was born: spontaneous, searching, and shared in real time.
Ultimately, American Anxiety is not just an EP. It is a soundscape of contemporary disquiet—a work of jazz that resists borders and embraces the uneasy beauty of becoming.
