Jet Chong
About
Jet Kye Chong is an award-winning Perth-based percussionist, composer and
researcher. He has performed concerts across Australia, Asia, Europe and North
America. As a percussionist, Chong won the Malaysia Percussion Festival Performance
Prize with his own work ‘Rev 3’, and is a two-time winner of the People’s Choice
Award for the Vose Memorial Concerto Prize. He has produced 5-star awardwinning Fringeworld shows, toured nationally with the Momentum Ensemble, and
internationally with his band “The Hár” in the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as
Principal Percussion with the Australian Youth Orchestra. He recorded works of
Myburgh for Australian and UK labels, and recorded with Australian Baroque for ABC
Classic.
Chong holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Mathematics and Statistics, and Music
Specialist Studies (Composition/Percussion), with First Class Honours. His research
thesis ‘Predicting Marimba Stickings with Neural Networks’ won the 2020 Dr Vincent
Harry Cooper Memorial Prize, the 2022 Statistical Society of Australia Louise Ryan Best
Presentation Award, and was recently published in the Australasian Joint Conference in
AI proceedings.
Jet at AYO 2019 National Music Camp
Q&A
Question: How’d you find yourself playing percussion?
Answer I gave violin a go in primary school. It was hard, I made lots of scratchy sounds, and I decided when I went to high school I didn’t want to play the violin. Percussion looked fun - I hit a xylophone as a kid and essentially just picked it on a whim. Maybe it was the instant gratification of being able to make a sound immediately, but since then it has been a fortunate case of two things coming together quite nicely.
Question: What’s your favourite things about percussion?
Answer The feeling when you’re performing with somebody else and you nail it: that’s unbeatable honestly. I was playing bass drum and my friend was playing cymbals in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony last year with the Western Australian Youth Orchestra, and we had to play a note at the same time. There was one time that we did it in rehearsal and for the rest of the performances and rehearsals we always looked at one another, breathed together and played completely in sync. That feeling, whether it’s with an orchestra or in chamber repertoire, is my favourite thing about percussion.
Question: When you’re not doing anything musical, what do you do?
Answer I’m doing a double degree. Maths is my other passion. To me maths is about thinking, about abstraction and trying to apply one idea to something else which would otherwise be unrelated. Maths is good fun. I also make things, I do some DIY. Often it involves building instruments.
Question: Any other music?
Answer Funk, jazz. Right now Jacob Collier and Snarky Puppy. All them groovers.