Sousell Chai was born in an artistic family in China, her mother is a violinist. She started to learn piano at 4 age with a Chinese famous composer of the Central Conservatory of Music called Wang Bingzhen. She gave her first public performance as a pianist when she was only 8 years old. She started to learn vocal(bel canto) at 12 years old with a Chinese great singer Guo Tao.She had the particular musical gifts and intelligent instinct in her young age.
After the rigorous vocal training, Sousell began to learn jazz. She was influenced by Sarah Vaughan、Ella Fitzgerald、Billie Holiday、Carmen McRea、Nancy Wilson、Anita O’day、Dianne Reeves、Charlie Parker、Miles Davis、Herbie Hancock and so on. Sousell’s teachers and mentors, whilst in the USA, included jazz diva, composer, educator Charenee Wade, the great french singer Cyrille Amie, English jazz vocalist Tina May, amongst many other musicians and educators, including saxophonist Victor Goines, jazz pianist Amina Figarova and so on.
During her studies, Sousell had the opportunity to play at several different venues all over the country. She started to built her own band named Adventure since 2011 as a composer and a singer, and release her self-titled debut album Adventure in 2012, also she finished a tourist performances all over the country in the same year. From 2013 to 2015, Sousell had the opportunity to go abroad for exchange learning of jazz vocal, during the training, she had cooperate with loads of great jazz musicians and bands. In 2017, Sousell moved to Shanghai and Sousell Quartet was selected to perform at JZ Club at the same time she was invited to play at Shanghai Jazz Festival from 2017 to 2018. In addition to performing the Great American Songbook and bebop and Vocalese classics, Sousell is also a passionate devotee of 20s and 30s music and has sung with the Grammy winner John Chin, Walter Blanding, Jerome Jennings, Quincy Phillips, Hila Hulik, Jianyi Huang, Danny Zanker, Brian Hurley, Nicholas McBride, Steinar Nickelsen. In 2019, Sousell has recorded with great saxophonist Walter Blanding as a duet album. Sousell also recorded with Israel jazz guitarist Ofer Landsberg in United Kingdom.
She performed at top venues in China, and packed them to the hilt. Her audiences were as diverse as her vocal range. They were rich and poor, made up of all races, all religions and all nationalities. In fact, many of them had just one binding factor in common—they all loved her.
Wang Jiahao, works in the auto industry and is a jazz lover. In 2016, he joined the campus band D-Mirror as a dulcimer player and tried to create simple melodies. In 2021, he began to learn jazz vocal music from Sousell in JZ School.
Helena, a music explorer. At the age of 7, she started to learn classical piano, and at the age of 16, she started to learn vocal music. At the age of 18, she studied composition and played the role of Alto voice in the school choir. Since 2021, she has been studying from musician Coco Zhao and Sousell.
Zhou Yuhan, a singer, began to learn vocal singing at the age of 17, good at POP/R&B/Jazz music, etc., the second place in Shanghai Theatre Academy Campus Singers Competition. In 2019, she participated in the JZ Spring Festival. Since 2020, she and her friends have formed the bands "Two Sheep", "Slow Slow" and "Indifference" and she acted as the lead singer. She has performed in Blue Note Shanghai and other famous jazz clubs for a long time. In 2021, she began to learn jazz singing from Sousell.
Taylor, singer of the post-00s. She was admitted to Senzoku Gakuen College of Music to study jazz vocal in 2020. She was brought up in classical music since childhood, which has given her excellent sense of music and musical knowledge. While studying in Germany, she began to study jazz systematically. Currently, she is a full-time student at JZ School, and have been performing Jam Session in HeyDay and JZ Live. She loves art and hopes to convey the beauty beyond the medium in her creation and performance.
