What does “Zo” mean?
Japanese haiku are traditionally associated with one of the four seasons, and traditional haiku collections thus have four seasonal sections. As haiku poets stretched the form, however, they began to write poems that didn’t clearly belong to any single season — so the collections added a fifth section, the “zo” section (meaning “miscellaneous”), for those poems that defied categorization. Defying categories is my perpetual aspiration, so the name suited me. In addition to “miscellaneous”, the character “zo” also means “rough” or “crude” — and oddly, that suits me too. Zo is a venue where I can take risks — risks with pieces I’m still learning, risks with new compositions, and risks with interpretation. Free from the poisonous competitiveness of the classical performance world, which always insists on making music that’s correct, I can focus on what matters to me: making music that’s passionate, absorbing, magical, and honest. Plus “Zo” is easy to spell.
