Hitting the right note with children

"All of these were hardly imaginable before our very first show," said Rebecca Kanthor, Liu's wife.

Prepared but still keyed up, the couple staged their first concert in 2017 in Nantong in East China's Jiangsu province.

"We started it from a small city so no one would know if the concert turned out as a failure," recalled Kanthor. "We were worried that Chinese audiences wouldn't respond to or interact with bands singing in English."

But soon after The Lucky Band started playing their second song, many kids and parents got up to jump and dance, Liu recalled. "Seeing that, we both burst into tears, and all our previous misgivings vanished into thin air."

For folksinger and writer Liu, 41 and American journalist Kanthor, 40, putting on a music festival for children in China never came to mind until they had a hard time finding quality children's music online for their daughter, Liu Na, now seven, back in 2013.