Jamming with jazz stars

"I started doing the show as part of the Oscars publicity campaign. It came out great and people loved it. So we decided to keep going with it," says the Mexican-born drummer on a video call from his New York home.

Snchez says that Irritu wanted him to come up with a score for Birdman by responding to the visuals in real time. Hence the Birdman Live show is an attempt to improvise on a score that was itself composed improvisationally. "By now I know the movie intimately. I know every movement and every piece of dialogue. Hence I can do a more precise version," Snchez explains. And yet each show is unique. "I get inspired by the place where I'm playing, the audience reactions and the venue's acoustics. That is why every show is completely different."

He is looking forward to performing at the Freespace Jazz Fest. "Hong Kong is more interesting than New York. It is so alive," he says with a smile. "The people of Hong Kong are very soulful. I have a great time every time I come back to the city."

Local legend

Freespace Jazz Fest opens on Thursday with a performance by iconic Hong Kong-born jazz pianist Ted Lo. A festival staple, this time Lo performs alongside two of the city's finest new-generation jazz musicians: double-bassist Nelson Fung and drummer Dean Li.

Lo made his mark in the demanding '80s New York jazz scene. "I am a jazz man, so I love New York," he says. However, by the '90s, Lo had started accepting commissions to arrange the music for local pop projects. During the frequent back and forth between New York and Hong Kong, he fell in love with his hometown all over again. "I realized I didn't want to be elsewhere," Lo admits.

Music critics have called him Hong Kong's godfather of jazz piano music. Lo gives full credit to his parents who supported his initiation into jazz music at a very young age. When he went to study music composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in the '70s, there was no jazz scene in Hong Kong to speak of.

"The big leap in Hong Kong's jazz scene happened some 15 years ago, after the young jazz musicians who had been to music schools in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe began coming back to the city," says Kung, explaining his reasons behind including a number of musicians who incorporate elements from outside the scope of classical jazz in the festival lineup.

One of these returnees is Patrick Lui, also a Berklee College alumnus. He is performing as part of the eponymous Patrick Lui Jazz Orchestra, and will share the stage with the Cantopop band RubberBand from Oct 25-26.