Karen Lyu is a jazz singer born in Seoul who grew up in the United States, built her career in Minneapolis and Nashville, and now lives and performs in Seoul. She has three albums to her name: Karen Lyu & Global Jazz: Live (2003), Karen Lyu & Fresh Jazz (2009) and Karen Lyu Jazz Experience (2019), the last made with the bassist Lonnie Plaxico, the pianist Misha Tsiganov and the drummer Mike Melito. Discogs also lists her under the name Karen HeaChung Lyu. No Hangul rendering of her name appears on her releases or in her biographies. Nearly everything known about her career comes from her own biographies and release notes, and the account below follows them.

She was born in Seoul and grew up with an immigrant family in California, Texas and Minnesota. In a statement written for the Jazz Experience release she says she sang to strangers as a toddler, became shy after the family moved to the United States and being bullied there, and found her voice again after discovering jazz at 16, when she first heard The Manhattan Transfer. She earned a BSS degree in jazz studies and vocal performance at Cornell College in Iowa and graduated in 1993.

Her first decade as a professional was in Minneapolis. She says she began her jazz career there in 1995 and, after a trip to New York that year, went back, took a day job and started the band Karen Lyu & Global Jazz. Her biography counts 16 years of singing in Minnesota and 12 groups since 1993, among them Global Jazz, Fresh Jazz, Pacha Mamas, Via Brasil, Bomba, Jazz Transit, the Eddie Piccard Trio and the Morris Wilson Band, and lists performances with the pianist Soli Hughes of Sounds of Blackness, the percussionist Devon Evans of Bob Marley and the Wailers and the vocalist Bruce A. Henry. She also reports two years as executive director of the West Bank School of Music, a Minneapolis community music school, and a 2007 Minnesota State Arts Board grant shared with the vocalist Maryam Yusefzadeh. Her acting résumé adds work as a host on the community station KFAI-FM.

Karen Lyu & Global Jazz: Live was recorded at Walker Community United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, with Jeff Sylvestre recording, mixing and mastering. The band on the disc is James Allen on guitar, Michael O'Brien on bass, Rubin Nizri on drums, Shai Hayo on congas and Tim O'Keefe on bongos, oud and other percussion, with Devon Evans singing and Soli Hughes on piano, bass and guitar as featured guests. Discogs dates it 2002 from the copyright line, and her Bandcamp page gives December 2003. Her biography says it was a Top 5 most played CD of the week on KFAI-FM in 2003.

By 2009 she was in Nashville. Karen Lyu & Fresh Jazz came out in December of that year, with Jerry Navarro on bass, Ron Krasinski on drums, Anthony Belfiglio on keys, Geary Moore on guitar, Billy Ramirez on congas and Leon Alejandro Berrios Areas on pandero, recorded by Justin Francis at Sound Stage Studios. Her biography lists a 2010 MusiCares and Grammy Foundation emergency grant and a 2010 NashvilleMuse.com Songwriter of the Week award from the same period.

She now lives in Seoul, where her biographies say she leads three groups: the Karen Lyu Jazz Experience (jazz, Latin, funk and crossover), the Karen Lyu Quartet (swing) and the Yoo and Karen Jazz Duo (jazz, pop, funk and ballads). An expatriate directory in Seoul lists her as a holistic voice coach, and her acting résumé lists improv training and cabaret work with Seoul City Improv and Korea Improv Theater and dubbing roles for Arirang TV. From 2016 she also lists a ReverbNation ranking as the top jazz artist in South Korea, a platform statistic rather than an award.

The Jazz Experience album grew out of a trip from Seoul. A producer and recording engineer, Dave Anderson, who was building a studio in Rochester, New York, invited her to record there after hearing Fresh Jazz, and Plaxico, whom she had known since a 1995 meeting at Birdland, agreed to play. She combined the session with a three-city birthday tour of Minneapolis, Nashville and New York City, ending with a night at Rockwood Music Hall. The nine tracks, eight songs and one original piano solo, "Changes with Time," were recorded live at Saxon Recording in Rochester within ten hours and with no overdubs, on a Baldwin grand piano that she says The Fray used for their single "How to Save a Life." The album was released on December 7, 2019, when she described herself as a 48-year-old Korean-American singer and songwriter. All About Jazz lists it on JazzMine Records.

The Korean thread

The Korean basis of her career is real but modest, and it is mostly recent. She was born in Seoul and left as a child; her schooling, training and first twenty-five years as a working musician were American. Korea shows up in her music in small ways: she sings "Naduri" in Korean on the 2003 live album, and her biographies list Korean songs among the influences on her repertoire. Her present link is residence and work in Seoul. Her biographies mention no Korean award or major festival billing, and the quotes in them come from American and Korean-American publications such as Strum Magazine, the Asian American Press, the Star Tribune and Korean Quarterly.

Lyu describes herself as a singer who swings, scats and savors songs, and her biographies add jazz, folk, pop, funk, Motown, 1980s pop, Broadway, classical, Latin and world music, and Korean songs to the mix. The singers she names as inspirations are Sarah Vaughan, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Bobby McFerrin, Youn Sun Nah, Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Siegel of The Manhattan Transfer, Nina Simone, Eva Cassidy and Robert Robinson.

Each album has its own flavor. Global Jazz: Live is the most international, with standards such as "Nature Boy," "My Funny Valentine" and "Summertime" set beside songs sung in Spanish, Portuguese and Korean, played by a band with congas, oud and bongos. Fresh Jazz is a Nashville session of standards and Latin color, including "La Vie en Rose," "Agua de Beber," "Lazy Afternoon" and "All Blues." Jazz Experience is a quartet record of blues, soul and swing: she calls "Ain't Misbehavin'" playful and sassy, "God Bless the Child" a bluesy 12/8 shuffle and "Stand By Me" an original R&B take, and "Feeling Good" a Nina Simone favorite with a twist.