ABOUT RUFUS LIN

Composer, pianist, and Immersive Jazz pioneer

Artist biography: Rufus Lin is a Canadian jazz pianist, contemporary classical music composer, recording artist, and Immersive Jazz pioneer, based in Vancouver and Tokyo.

Performance: Since the year 2010, he has given well over 100 solo piano recitals on various stages in Japan, with a focus on Tokyo. In recent years, these have been on a Fazioli concert grand piano at Shibuya Hall. He currently gives frequent recitals in Vancouver as well, on Fazioli grand pianos, including his own concert grand at Lulu Island Winery in Richmond, and the Butterfly Fazioli at Shaw Tower in downtown Vancouver. Rufus also delivers an English-Japanese bilingual performance frequently on YouTube Live, improvising on the piano and singing jazz standards from the Great American Songbook, as well as show tunes, Japanese music and original songs. Above all, Rufus is well known for his rich improvisations on the piano, incorporating both classical and jazz styles. In 2023, Rufus Lin issued an artistic manifesto, defining a new subgenre of jazz he calls “immersive jazz”, and he now performs almost exclusively in that style.

Recording: As a pianist and jazz vocalist, Rufus Lin has released several albums and singles, both as CDs and on streaming platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music and Spotify. These albums vary in genre, including healing piano, contemporary classical and jazz standards. Rufus is always at work in the recording studio, and is currently working on an electronica album of selected preludes and fugues from J S Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, in arrangements for 17 synthesizers.

Classical music composition: As a composer of classical music, Rufus has published a wide variety of pieces for orchestras, choirs, ensembles and solo instruments, with several pieces for the piano, such as Moonlight Prelude (to be played immediately before Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata), Variations on a theme from Finlandia (Sibelius), Au Canada (a contrapuntal rhapsody on harmonic progressions in O Canada), and many original works. Many of these pieces have been performed by various orchestras and artists in Japan and South Korea, including the Art Aim String Ensemble under Ryuichi Horikoshi, the Kammar Abend Philharmoniker under Hideyuki Koyanagi, and several concert pianists, including South Korean pianist YoonYoung Choi and Japanese pianist Gen Segawa.

In 2021, he organized the “Thousand Cranes Project,” a series of concerts in Japan to show respect to those working on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic; from 2022 to 2023, he organized and hosted classical concerts in Tokyo, Seoul, and Vancouver. He has also given interview to various publications, media outlets and radio stations.

•••

ルーファス リン