After a musical restart stateside, Ha Nguyen admits that full-time musicianship and motherhood have brought new clarity to her craft.
In her earliest musical memory, Ha Nguyen felt like a rock star, foreshadowing the adoring crowds to come. Standing atop her bed, holding a broom like a guitar, she closed her eyes and was instantly on stage, performing in front of thousands. From that moment, she knew she wanted to be a performer.
For nearly a decade, she toured her native Vietnam, pursuing that dream as part of two female-centric rock bands. She arrived in America unsure if she’d ever perform again but has been methodically building the next phase of her career stateside. Since 2021, she’s released a steady flow of singles under the moniker LOLAH. In mid-2024, Ha launched a new band, LOLAH and the Travelers, and admits she loves returning to a more communal creative experience.
“Before I was a mother, it was about me. ‘I want to share my story, and I want people to hear my feelings.’ Now, I want my songs to be helpful.”
“I love that we have three songwriters. I love the fact that we all want to do big shows, and we have a vision for the band,” she says. “Echos of Deception,” released digitally in early November, is evidence of a new-found cohesion, crunchy guitars, and a driving backbeat carrying into an anthem-like chorus. It may have taken years, but she’s back on stage sharing her love for rock music.
Growing up in Long Xuyên, a town of nearly 300,000 in south-western Vietnam, Ha first saw concert footage at the tail end of Hong Kong soap operas on VHS tapes her family rented. She took piano and vocal lessons as a child, but finally realized her dream of learning guitar when she moved to Saigon to go to dental school. She was the only female student under the tutelage of “Master Chau,” who opened a new world to Ha when he called Vietnamese pop music cheesy and began teaching her iconic rock songs like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and “I Hate Myself For Loving You” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Soon, Ha was all rock and roll.
In search of more rock music, she began frequenting a Saigon music store owned by the bassist of UnlimiteD, one of the biggest rock bands in the city. He wanted to start an all-girl rock band and invited Ha to join. In 2006, Lazee Dolls was formed.
“The first show [we played] was an audience of 3,000. We would play for colleges. We played for TV shows, and we joined contests,” she shares of her time in the band. A personnel shake-up a few years later led the band to change its name to White Noiz. At the height of their success, the band built a circuit of club gigs scattered throughout the country. But juggling the band with her dental practice post-graduation proved difficult.
“We went through a lot of member changes. I burned bridges. I got mad. I lost control. I got depressed,” she remembers of the final days of White Noiz in the mid-2010s. At the time, she was also dealing with her first stint of writer’s block and was scared she’d never be able to write music again. While it took years to be at peace with the band dissolving, she says writing the lyrics to her 2021 single “Back in Time” helped her process her feelings: “Time flies, several years gone by / not too long to forget, but enough to believe that it’s over.”
By this time, her entire family had immigrated to the US. They urged her to join them. “I was the last one in Vietnam. I had so much fun in Saigon, until it wasn’t fun anymore,” she recalls with a laugh. She moved to San Jose in 2017. “I forgot about everything. I missed playing music, but on the other side, I had my family.”
As fate would have it, her music career got an unexpected re-start during a job interview. “[The interviewer] found out I was a singer and said, ‘This job is not for you, but I used to do shows, so I’m going to sponsor you to play at this show,’ ” she recalls. Her first American performance was inside the Chùa Di Lặc Buddhist Temple on Story Road. Performances started to pick up, but it was hard not comparing the crowds to the larger rooms she played in Vietnam. She remembers busking at San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, earning only the tips she received from passers-by. “It taught me to let go of ego,” she notes of the experience, adding that being a full-time musician has brought a new sense of humility to every opportunity to perform.
Another shift for her music? Motherhood. “Before I was a mother, it was about me. ‘I want to share my story, and I want people to hear my feelings.’ Now, I want my songs to be helpful.”
Despite the starts and stops to her career, she has a quick answer when asked why she plays music: “I love it.” After a beat, she elaborates. “When you play music, it’s healing. When you write a song, you get to say things that would be weird to say, and you can share your feelings in a creative way. When I play for people and I see that I make them happy, I feel great too.”
Jon Dryden is a pianist, composer, professor of Jazz Studies at SJSU, and one of the 2025 Jazz Aid Fund grantees, performing at the San Jose Jazz New Works Fest on March 7 in the SJZ Break Room. We had the chance to pick his artistic brain on topics from what inspires him, how he balances the demands of teaching with composing while still earning enough to live, and his hopes and dreams for the Bay Area jazz scene.
Producer Jesse Harris describes Dryden’s playing as “somewhere between Vince Guaraldi and Paul Bley.” Others have called it “melancholy with a touch of hope,” says Jon Dryden. We think it’s dreamy, emotional, and layered–like crying while sitting under a grand piano when you’re a kid but still feeling comforted by it.
Dryden says for the Break Room show, “I’m bringing in a few amazing musicians whom I love to work with from New York and Los Angeles. The performance will open with a new piece called “Circada” and will include the SJZ grant-commissioned piece, “That Would Be Telling,”
The ensemble features Dryden on piano, Ben Flocks on tenor saxophone, Scott Colberg on bass, and Benjamin Ring on drums.
Dryden says the title, ”That Would Be Telling,” is “from a key phrase in the British Classic Spy-Fi seriesThe Prisoner, a show I watched with my students. It’s one of the most amazing and influential TV shows ever made. The music in the show is excellent too.”
When describing his inspiration and process, he shares, “I love metaphors, especially when they are used in subtle ways that cross artistic and psychological disciplines. Concepts like these give me an unwritten emotional framework I can draw from musically.”
The television show presents an argument between the individual and the collective. “It asks, how much of each mode of thinking–collectivity and individuality– should exist in a society? Does a collective society lead to homogenization and surveillance states?”
Whether collective societies lead to homogenization remains to be seen. However, Dryden acknowledges that it’s nearly impossible to have a thriving jazz scene without one strong type of collective: community.
”I love what the SJZ Break Room isdoing, which is establishing a place to play, listen and mingle, he says.”
However, he admits that it can be tough to maintain the sense of community he experienced in New York, where most venues are located in a smaller geographic area.
“The Bay Area Jazz scene has many amazing musicians, but is so spread out that there’s no center where people can congregate.”
Community means so much, says Dryden, because “we need each other, and we need to be around people who are better musicians than us. What I would like to see much more of is more friendly competition–people kindly challenging one another to grow musically and to share ideas.” Without friendly competition, he says, creativity can falter.
A robust community not only provides a center of gravity where jazz-lovers and performers can congregate, commune, and compete, but it creates a place to network and radically imagine new possibilities. New possibilities inspire not only new works of art but also new music students, new venues, and new job opportunities–something sorely needed to sustain Bay Area musicians.
“The hyphenated life is a common career for most musicians,” says Dryden, referring to the multiple streams of income that he depends on in order to afford the cost of living in Aptos, to which he returned in 2010 to care for his dad after living and working for 19 years in New York City.
The way Dryden describes the New York City Jazz scene conjures up complex feelings, much like his compositions do. His words bring up feelings and images, like the melancholy yet intensely alive takes he gives to popular songs he covers, like Nirvana’s All Apologies. He mentions venues, all close to one another, in a relatively condensed space. Images of happy, dreamy couples and groups of people weaving their way into and out of vibrant jazz clubs all close together–“that’s hard to beat, even when you have small hubs like those in San Francisco and the East Bay,” Dryden explains.
Prior to returning to his native California, Dryden was “solely making a living as a performing musician/composer/arranger/producer. Since I moved back home to Aptos, I’ve added instructor and lecturer to those skills.”
Some working musicians, says Dryden, have their hands in a lot of pots because “many of us love a lot of different kinds of music.” No exception, he cites musical influences as diverse as Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Smith–Elliot Smith, that is. He also loves Prince. Dryden himself has collaborated with an impressive group of musicians–Michael Urbaniak, Patrice Rushen, and the Brecker Brothers, to name a few. He has recorded with several stratospheric megastars–Questlove, Norah Jones, David Byrne, Dave Chappelle, and John Mayer. And if those accomplishments weren’t remarkable enough, he has also composed for both Michael Moore and David Byrne–both heroes’ heroes.
He finds inspiration both in the incredible musicians he loves playing with and in his students. “They know a lot of things I don’t, and they have new music they’re listening to that I’m not aware of. I like to hear what they are into musically. Some of my students write pieces that aren’t anything like what I would come up with. I love to see that. Semi-consciously, I pick up their concepts and sometimes I work bits–no stealing, mind you. Just bits–into my compositions.“
While he wishes he could devote more time to composing, “teaching earns me more than half my income and consumes less time.” And still, he admits that he could not afford living in Santa Cruz County without his family house, where he lives. So, the multi-hyphenate grindlife continues, and while he doesn’t know the answer to the economic woes that drives musicians out of urban areas they can no longer afford, he does hope that “scenes will start to percolate in unexpected places.”
Dryden started piano lessons at five and began composing not long after. ”The compositions weren’t very good then, of course; but I have always associated performing and composing as one thing,” he says.
While he has strong ideas about composition and excellence, his view on interpreting music is more open-ended: “I like music to be whatever the listener wants it to be. One role a composer/songwriter can take on is making the personal universal.”
Check out the Jon Dryden Quartet at SJZ Break Room for New Works Fest, Friday, March 7 at 8p (Doors open at 7:30p). Tickets. Livestream.
