The Nation's "Ten Best Albums of 2015" by David Hajdu: Sounds and Cries of the World, Jen Shyu and Jade Tongue - "A singer like no other, Shyu is both lyrical and wildly adventurous, producing sounds in languages as diverse as English and Javanese, Korean, and Tetum (spoken on the divided island of Timor), all of which combine to produce a beautiful language of her own passionate invention."

Sounds and Cries of the World, Jen Shyu and Jade Tongue (Pi) - "The singer Ms. Shyu represents a new kind of improviser-composer-ethnomusicologist hybrid; this is the result of her own fieldwork (in East Timor, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea), pushed through an extraordinary voice and a circle of high-level improvisers." - Ben Ratliff, NY Times

Jen Shyu is "...one of the most creative vocalists in contemporary improvised music..."

‘A harrowing-yet-beautiful grief journey, the album braids the shock of Shyu's father's death with memories of racism and sexism from throughout her life.

On tunes like "Lament for Breonna Taylor," "When I Have Power" and "Father Slipped Into Eternal Dream," personal and global sorrow pool into one. "I just think these themes are interlinked," she explains, in the context of a deadly pandemic and continuing police violence. "You kind of see how differently that manifests for people, depending on your privilege." But by examining both micro and macro grief through the same lens, Shyu sees both with more clarity—and by communing with Zero Grasses, listeners can too.”–Morgan Enos. Grammy.com

"Ms. Shyu turned the stage into a space of imaginative ritual; she framed storytelling and mythmaking as contemporary phenomena — even necessities…That magic remained throughout the set: A simple jazz club stage became a territory of belief, narrative and wonder." - Giovanni Russonello, New York Times

"The singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu draws on jazz, Asian music and much more. Her new album, “Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses,” reflects on loss, memory and perseverance. It opens with “Living’s a Gift,” a suite of songs using lyrics written by middle schoolers during the pandemic: “We’ve lost our minds, lost our time to shine.”

The music is ingenious and resilient; leading her jazzy quintet, Jade Tongue, Shyu multitracks her voice into a frisky, intricately contrapuntal choir, folding together angular phrases...." –Jon Pareles, The New York Times

"...we share in her powerful unpacking of unsettled feelings. This owes to Ms. Shyu’s uncommon gift for storytelling and her singular voice. The most appealing qualities of her singing—finely nuanced and ever-shifting tones, a balance of fierceness and tenderness—are present also in the playing here by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and violist Mat Maneri, who use gestures (a choked-off note, a leaning pitch) more than declarations to communicate.

Ms. Shyu’s music, which flows like good jazz without riding familiar rhythms, benefits from her communion with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Dan Weiss, her partners for more than a decade."–Larry Blumenfeld, The Wall Street Journal

"Shyu has become a master at connecting her own experiences with different people and cultures of the world she so clearly loves. To process her father’s death, she recruits...the email she received from the sheriff notifying her of [her father's] death, and the Indonesian language she studied in her travels.

To declare solidarity with the movement for Black lives, Shyu brings together her anger and grief, words of Breonna Taylor’s mother, and lyrics about the history of Chinese indentured servants who worked in Cuba alongside other kidnapped Africans. In the interweaving of all these histories, words, feelings, entire languages, and song traditions lies Jen Shyu’s art....Shyu is a responsible, rigorous, compassionate artist and she is doing the work we need."–Tamzin Elliott, SF Classical Voice