Tijuana Taxi, Classical Gas, Soul Bossa Nova — they topped the charts over 50 years ago, but you could probably still hum these instrumental classics. With their ambitious self-titled full-length debut, Ginger Beef aims to singlehandedly breathe life back into this all-but-extinct instrumental pop genre.
“If evoking emotion is the goal of music, then lyrics are cheating,”
It’s a hot take from MSG (aka Warren Tse), producer and one half of Ginger Beef. His thesis for the album: “Classical and film music prove that you don’t need words to resonate with listeners and stir up feelings. Why can’t we do the same thing with pop?”
In 2021, flutist Jiajia Li was asked to present a music video for the Camp Sled Island event in Calgary. She ended up collaborating with the veteran multi-instrumentalist/producer/Calgary Flames organist conveniently living under her roof (she’s married to MSG) to cook up “Flashback”, an energetic track seasoned with anachronistic synths, slap bass, and traditional Chinese elements — and no singing. Unintentionally, this one-off track whetted the crowd’s appetite, which gave Ginger Beef’s snowball a push downhill.
Spurred by the warm response to their first and only song, the couple wrote new material, joined forces with heavy hitters from the local R&B and Gospel scene, and thrilled Calgary audiences with their explosive live performances. When their new fans all but demanded a recording, Li and MSG locked themselves in their basement studio and painstakingly crafted Ginger Beef’s first album. They ordered up a small run of CDs and self-released the album. To their surprise and delight, their home-cooked debut was immediately met with critical acclaim and was nominated for a JUNO award. It was now clear that the album deserved greater distribution and reach than they could ever manage with their own limited DIY resources.
In 2025, Ginger Beef signed with Providence-based Ba Da Bing Records, and is now poised to drop an extra-large portion of their celebrated album on unsuspecting music fans everywhere.
The Ginger Beef Sound
How do you resurrect a long-extinct genre like instrumental pop in 2025? Ginger Beef’s answer is to splice together DNA from other genres, but shies away from the f-word, “fusion”. “We’re unabashedly pop, but being a little jazz-adjacent gives us access to a much broader palette.” MSG cites acts like The Police and Steely Dan as examples of jazzers who slummed their way to mainstream success — and you don’t have to squint too hard to see some of their influence.
While MSG brings his unique rock and “jazz-adjacent” sensibilities to the table, Li virtuosically fronts the project with breathtaking musical athleticism and beauty, courtesy of her extensive classical training (she has a master’s degree in flute performance). You could feel the emotional resonance as she digs deep into memories of growing up with musical parents in Beijing. To wit, the track that started it all, “Flashback” was inspired by a traditional Chinese tune her mother played on the pipa (Chinese lute) when Li was a child.
Instrumental music is often doomed to fade into the background, but Ginger Beef seizes your attention in its gleaming, genetically-engineered jaws with catchy earworms like “Dew”, which sparkles with a neon glow, and “Takeout” which levitates — before unexpectedly soaring into polyphonic splendour. It all sounds very ambitious, but a joyous, slightly subversive sense of humour pervades the music, with a searing, unhinged homage to classic Dutch prog-rockers Focus, and a glossy synth-pop tribute to the couple’s pet greyhound, “Kam”.
Dragging a dead genre back into the mainstream is a lofty goal, but Ginger Beef holds nothing back. When asked about the audacity of recording a live string section in their basement for their debut album, MSG laughs like a mad scientist, “We spared no expense.”