On a winter afternoon in New York two years ago, when the city's noise blended into a restless hum, Pan Chenxi sat in a quiet corner writing in her journal. She was trying to make sense of a feeling that she couldn't quite identify, an uncertain, nagging question about what comes next. The excitement that had once driven her across continents was now fading, replaced by a sense of pressure and the weight of the future.
In that still moment, she wrote a line. A melody followed. Eventually, a song was born; not a grand proclamation, but something fragile, a small way to hold onto the present before it slipped away.
That instinct to capture the fleeting, the unresolved, and the deeply human runs through This Very Moment, her debut album released on March 20. The song she wrote that winter, If Only for a Moment, is one of the album's key tracks.
On Tuesday, she'll take the stage in New York to celebrate this accomplishment with a concert at Shape-Shifter Lab.
The album's title marks a subtle shift in her perspective. Initially, she had envisioned the title If Only for a Moment for her album, a reflection on longing for something just out of reach. But Pan chose to anchor her work in the present instead.
"I don't want to place hope in some future moment," Pan says, at the threshold of her debut concert. "I want to live every moment as it is."
The album, in many ways, is a time capsule of her years in New York. Written over the past four years, the songs began as fragments — musical snapshots of specific emotional states. They didn't start as a cohesive project, but when Pan revisited them, she saw how they were all attempts to capture singular moments: a first New Year in a new country, the anxiety of impending graduation, and the quiet resilience of starting over.
For example, New Year's Wish, written during her first New York winter, carries a tentative optimism. It's the feeling that life can begin anew, and old anxieties might dissolve with the turn of the calendar. Years later, Parachute, written just before recording began in early 2025, brings the arc full circle, completing a journey Pan hadn't initially planned.
Pan's path to jazz was anything but linear. Born in 1998 and raised in Chongqing, she grew up in an environment where academic excellence was paramount. She excelled in school, eventually entering Peking University to study biology, but then switching to German literature.
"I was always able to do well," she says, reflecting on her academic years. "But I never really asked myself what I wanted to do."
The answer came through music. During her university years, she joined a student a cappella group and, for the first time, encountered jazz. Before that, her musical scope had largely been limited to pop music. But jazz, with its harmonic richness, rhythmic subtlety, and emphasis on individuality, felt like a revelation. "The more I learned, the more I loved it," she recalls. "The improvisation and the freedom in jazz were completely different."
After five years with the a cappella group, she evolved from a newcomer to a musical leader, arranging pieces and directing rehearsals. Much of her musical knowledge, like harmony and arrangement, was self-taught, driven by curiosity rather than formal education. That experience planted a seed: perhaps music could be more than just a passion.
But choosing to seriously pursue it meant breaking away from expectations. At Peking University, where stability and prestige were often seen as the ultimate goals, Pan's decision to study jazz abroad raised eyebrows. Even her parents, though ultimately supportive, were initially shocked. But for Pan, it was the first decision she made after truly searching for her future.
In 2021, she moved to New York to study jazz and contemporary music at The New School, drawn by the city's unparalleled jazz scene and its program flexibility. Surrounded by musicians from around the world, she immersed herself in both tradition and experimentation. Her teachers — musicians she had long admired — became mentors and collaborators.
