EAST meets West every morning in American jazz musician Chris Brubeck's daily cup of coffee.

The 55-year-old adds a bag of green tea into his cuppa 'for the anti-oxidants'.

Ask him what it tastes like and he says with a hearty chuckle: "Like coffee with a strange but pleasant aftertaste."

The cultural blending also extends to his music-making. Brubeck, the son of legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, will perform with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) tonight and tomorrow night at the Singapore Conference Hall.

Joining him on this cross-genre musical adventure are his bandmates Peter Madcat Ruth and Joel Brown from Triple Play, a jazz trio which spans funk, soul, blues and jazz.

Brubeck plays the trombone and piano, while Ruth plays the harmonica and Brown the guitar.

Top on the evening's music bill are compositions by the older Brubeck and the famous jazz standard Take Five, written by his long-time musical partner Paul Desmond. These have been specially arranged to feature Chinese orchestral instruments.

The younger Brubeck says that it was SCO's music director Yeh Tsung who came up with the idea to infuse the snappy rhythms of jazz with classical Chinese musical instruments like the erhu and pipa. They had met when Triple Play performed with Indiana's South Bend Symphony Orchestra last March.

Brubeck says: "He was perceptive enough to be able to hear that the kind of music we play would make an interesting blend with Chinese classical music."

Eager for a new challenge and to push the boundaries of music, the trio immediately accepted the offer.

Since their arrival early this week, they have had four rehearsals with the orchestra. In keeping with the free-wheeling nature of their music, Brubeck asked several of its members to play as soloists and jam with the trio onstage.

Although they were initially reluctant, they soon warmed up to the idea and 'went from not knowing if they could do it to doing great'.

He attributes much of his musicality to his jazz pianist father, who was his first music teacher.

The older Brubeck led the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which rose to prominence in the late 1950s, creating jazz classics like Take Five and Blue Rondo A La Turk.

The 87-year-old's legacy still reverberates in the music world today. Four of his six children are musicians.

The younger Brubeck says: "His music is in my blood. When I was five years old, my father could tell I was a musician. I didn't want to play the piano as I knew I'd have big shoes to fill but he said I had to."

He learnt the piano until he was eight and then switched to the trombone.

Ask why and he talks about an encounter with another jazz legend: "I met Louis Armstrong backstage at my father's gig when I was nine and he told me I had the lips for a trombone player.

"If Louis Armstrong tells you you've got it, you stick with it."