Over a distinguished career, Hong Kong’s best known jazz musician Eugene Pao has played alongside a host of legends and become the city’s first ever jazz player to sign with an international record label. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he was inspired to take up the guitar after hearing the Beatles records of his visiting American cousins; his introduction to jazz came later, when he was at college in the US.

After returning to Hong Kong in the mid 1980s, he started performing with jazz bands around the city, refining his craft by playing with visiting overseas musicians including, on one occasion, Herbie Hancock. In the mid-Nineties, he recorded his first solo album in New York; This Window followed in 1999, and then Pao (2001) and Naked Time (2004). He returned to the city in 2022 for his first overseas performance for over two years, beginning a US tour with a gig at the Lincoln Centre. He set out to form bridges among cultures with the Asian Super Guitar Project, formed in 2006 with fellow guitarists Kazumi Watanabe from Japan and Jack Lee from South Korea; while the Asian Jazz All-Stars Power Quartet, which has toured extensively, also combines jazz legends from around the region.

He also recorded an album, To Paris With Love (2015) alongside one of them, Singaporean Jeremy Monteiro. The Eugene Pao Project (2005), meanwhile, was an experimental performance recorded without an audience at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts.