Jade Oracle Hosts Lunar New Year Celebration at the Roxy

Coy Lim, lead singer of neo-soul band Jade Oracle, used to spend hours cooking alongside her parents in preparation for their annual Lunar New Year celebration. She was five when she started helping with food prep, firmly grasping a child-safe knife in her small fist, shakily chopping scallions while her dad roasted the Peking duck to a glazed, crisped perfection.

Lim was raised in a mixed household — her dad is white and her mom is Chinese Filipino — and her childhood was a blend of Chinese, Filipino and American traditions. "I always tell people I'm Filipino because it's shorter, but culturally I am a Chinese [person] who grew up speaking Tagalog," she says, noting that she also speaks the Chinese dialect Hokkien, but doesn't speak Mandarin. "They're very niche, the things that I know," she adds.

Her parents wanted the traditional Chinese holidays to feel just as important as the American ones that everyone in her small, rural Nebraska hometown celebrated with zeal. So her family created a tradition of extravagant Lunar New Year celebrations. Each year, friends joined the Lims for a decadent, homemade, eight- to twelve-course meal and left stuffed with lovingly prepared Chinese dishes.

"Famously, one of my dad's friends would get so full by around course six every year that he would get down on the ground and do bicycle crunches and try to make room," she remembers with a laugh. "He was like, 'I gotta just lay down and kick.'"

The Lunar New Year feast mirrored her family's mixed ethnicity, honoring Lim's Chinese heritage and incorporating hints of her life in Nebraska. "That's kind of the thing with the first-gen experience, is that you take your cultural traditions...and you make a new cultural event that exists between American culture and your original culture," she muses.

"What I loved about it is that even if you didn't know what Lunar New Year was and even if you didn't know what all of the traditions were, my parents always made a space where everybody felt like they could celebrate the holiday," she adds.

Now living in Denver, Lim's love of the Lunar New Year and the city's expanding AAPI population inspired her to create an event similar to the childhood celebrations she adored — one that honors the traditional Chinese New Year, brings the AAPI community together and welcomes multiple cultures with open arms. "It's traditional Lunar New Year with some fun, modern American cultural twists," she says.

The Lunar New Year party, held at the Roxy on Broadway, will also be the EP-release show for Jade Oracle's Divine Light, and will feature hour-long performances by Jade Oracle, couch co-op hip-hop band +Ultra and bassist Beom. There will also be a night market with AAPI, BIPOC and queer artists and business owners selling unique homemade goods. In the essence of a true night market, Lim has waived all vendor fees: "The spirit of a night market is that you put your junk in the street and you sell it, and you don't get a permit for that," she explains.

The event showcases marginalized artists for a reason. Lim feels there aren't many events that cater to the communities that make up so much of Denver's rich cultural history, such as the city's queer Indigenous artists and the Black musicians that made Five Points' jazz scene flourish.

"I don't think I've ever been to a show in Colorado where all of the headliners were AAPI," she says. "I don't think that I've been to a show or an experience in Colorado that specifically highlighted the AAPI community.

"I want that to change," she continues. "Towns like L.A. and New York are big hot spots for being a Chinese person in America. ... In towns like that, it's a little bit easier to find these things celebrating AAPI culture specifically, but out here, I think it's really, really hard. How are you supposed to meet people in your community if there's nowhere for your community to gather?"

Traditional Lunar New Year dishes plucked from the twelve-course meals of her childhood might appear at the extravaganza; Lim is working with the Roxy to create a special menu for the event, including drinks with a Year of the Dragon theme and food that symbolizes wealth and positive energy for the coming year.

And to start the new year with another auspicious burst, Lim, who is a trained feng shui and Bazi practitioner, will also incorporate such rituals as incense burning (and a few other surprises) in Jade Oracle's set.

"For me, the most special part about this night is that it's going to be celebrating a holiday that I have had an extremely deep connection to since childhood," Lim says. "And I can share that with everyone, people who might not have had the opportunity to celebrate Lunar New Year before, people who have...but maybe they're missing their family, they're looking for something different, they're looking for the chance to be able to connect to the community.

"I love creating spaces for people to feel like they can showcase their creativity and their art. I love that there's a space to do that and celebrate so many of our cultures at the same time," she concludes. "What better way is there to celebrate culture and holidays than with food, art and beautiful things that inspire you to have a beautiful year ahead?"

Jade Oracle: Lunar New Year and Divine Light EP Release, 9 p.m. Saturday, February 10, Roxy on Broadway, 554 South Broadway. Tickets are $20.