Ms. Min Xiao-Fen, a pipa player, performs at the BAM Cafe in Brooklyn, New York, March 4.
At 43, Ms. Min was raised in a musicians family. Her father, a pipa master in Nanjing, was her first teacher. Her sister is a prominent virtuoso on the erhu (a two-stringed fiddle). Her brother conducts an orchestra in southeast China. At 18, she auditioned successfully for the Nanjing Traditional Music Orchestra, with which she performed as a soloist for more than a decade. The orchestra gave about 80 concerts a year and toured widely in Europe.In 1992 she went to San Francisco. She moved to New York in 1996. (She now lives in Forest Hills.) In 2003, Ms. Min was invited by Jazz at Lincoln Center to perform a 30-minute solo set of Thelonious Monk compositions.
Ms. Min has performed, from clubs to concert halls, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and other American orchestras. Her concert on March, with the cellist Okkyung Lee and the drummer Susie Ibarra, will include solo and ensemble versions of various Monk, Davis and bluegrass numbers. (Source: Joseph Horowitz, The New York Times, Mar.3, 2005