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According to Warren Tse, the roles in Ginger Beef are pretty clear-cut.
Made up of Tse, under the name MSG, and wife Jiajia Li, the duo began making music together during the pandemic. Li is a classically trained flautist who has played with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and has specialized in everything from avant-garde experimental to traditional Chinese music. Tse is a musician and producer and is currently the organist for the Calgary Flames. He spent his teens “in cowboy boots” playing with the Calgary Fiddlers and has done work for commercials, car shows, theatre productions and Jann Arden.
“The way I sum it up for people is that Jiajia is the artist and I’m the entertainer,” Tse says. “Even though I grew up doing the classical thing up to my teens, I was a lot more interested in other types of music.”
The two met in 2012 in Beijing while attending a wedding. While Li was born in that city, at the time she was finishing her master’s in music in Germany. Tse was in Calgary, where he was born and raised. They stayed in touch and after Li graduated in 2014, she came to town. They were married not long after that. But, believe it or not, the two never had plans to play music together until the pandemic hit. Even then, the musical partnership was initially about convenience. In 2021, Li was asked to participate in Camp Sled Island, which was a scaled-back version of the festival due to COVID-19. She was asked to make a video.
“OK, I’m isolated and the only musician I see is in my house under the same roof,” Li says. “So Warren made a video with me and we also needed to make a song to make the video work. So Ginger Beef was born into the world from that time.”
The video was for Flashback, a song that put Li’s expressive flute at the centre of a funky, pop-rock instrumental that featured Tse on keyboards and erhu, a two-stringed Chinese vertical fiddle. The lively video was based on memories both had of Chinese banquets and featured dance and martial arts demonstrations and lots of eating. It was a hit at Camp Sled Island.
“People started asking ‘Hey, when does the album come out?’” Li says. “We were like ‘We didn’t think about that. It was supposed to be a one-off thing. But I guess we need to make an album.’”
The self-titled debut came out in October 2023 and Ginger Beef became darlings of the local scene. They played Sled Island in 2023 and 2024 and hit No. 1 on the CJSW charts. The duo will play Saturday and Sunday at the Calgary Folk Music Festival.
While there are some lyric-less vocals on certain tracks, the album is for the most part instrumental. The eclectic tracks lean on both Li’s classical background and Tse’s guitar/keyboards and production skills, but it is also a breezy and super fun endeavour. There are instrumental-pop numbers such as Dew, jazz-funk explorations such as Takeout and Hedgehog and harder, rock-fuelled numbers such as Hocus Pocus, a cover of the 1971 chestnut from Dutch prog-rockers Focus. The duo borrowed players from the city’s R&B, jazz and gospel scenes, bringing slap-funk bassist Dave Lewis, and drummers Orlando Retana, JD Johnson and Steve Jackson on board for the album and live performances.
“We had to find a way to work together and adapt to each other’s style,” Tse says. “Jiajia comes from the classical background, but is really big on improvised music so has this incredible way where she can freely create things on the fly, whereas with my production background, I’ve always tended to engineer music into literal products. So there definitely were some moments where we had to figure out how we would get along. But I think the album is stronger by having that kind of diversity.”
Both were keen on keeping the album instrumental. In the bio on the Calgary Folk Music Festival website, Tse is quoted as saying “If evoking emotion is the goal of music, then lyrics are cheating.”
He laughs when reminded of the quote, but stands by it.
It’s not a new idea, Tse says. Other types of music such as classical, jazz, and movie soundtracks manage to evoke emotions “without distracting vocals,” he says.
“The challenge we set for ourselves was to do the same with the pop genre,” Tse says. “This has existed in the past before. There were pop instrumentals that were Top 10 hits. Look at the Tijuana Brass and Quincy Jones had Big Bossa Nova and there was Classical Gas. The weird thing is that I think the last of the great instrumental pop songs is probably half a century old now. It hasn’t been a thing for such a long time that I thought we could try and drag that genre back into the mainstream. We have all the tools. If we can’t do it with what we’ve got, I don’t know who can.”
Ginger Beef play sessions on Saturday at 1:55 p.m. on the Community Natural Foods Stage and Sunday at 11:25 a.m. on the National Stage 4. They will play a concert on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. on the National stage 4. The Calgary Folk Music Festival runs until Sunday at Prince’s Island Park.