Fusion of Jazz and Korean Music at O1C

The title of yesterday’s Old First Concerts (O1C) program was Fusion Soul, designating the “fusion” of modern jazz with Korean tradition. Most of the performance was presented by Hesterian Musicism, a jazz quartet led by Karlton Hester playing both flute and saxophone. The other quartet members were David Smith on bass, Motoko Honda on piano, and Yunxiang Griswold on pipa. That last instrument is basically the Chinese version of a lute.

The inclusion of the pipa recalled a P. D. Q. Bach composition that included solo parts for both bagpipe and lute. When Peter Schickele introduced this piece, he explained that, when the bagpipe played, you could hear nothing else. Nevertheless, the audiences was invited to look at the lute, since it was such a pretty instrument.

The fact is that, even with judicious amplification, it was not particularly easy to appreciate what the pipa had brought to Hester’s quartet. His approach to jazz was decidedly advanced, reflecting the influences of many of the more adventurous jazz players during the second half of the twentieth century. One of those players was even singled out in one of Hester’s titles, “Byrd Math,” named after the profoundly adventurous and influential jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd.

The “Math” connection was somewhat obscure but seemed to reflect on intervals based on ratios of whole numbers, often referred to as just intonation. For the performance of “Byrd Math,” the quartet was joined by Hwayoung Shon playing gayageum, the traditional Korean zither with its own sophisticated approach to tuning. Ironically, Shon opening the composition with a clearly unmistakable tritone, the notorious diabolus in musica (the Devil in music), which could not be more alien to just intonation!

The three Hester compositions on the program (the other two being “Free Hesteria” and “Saturday Head”) were framed by two solo performances by Shon. These provided ample opportunity to appreciate the subtle variations in the sonorities evoked from the gayageum. Both of the selections were composed, rather than based on traditional sources. Shon began the program with her own “Ritual,” evoking the progress of a Buddhist religious service. Shon’s other selection was “The Haunted Tree” by Byungki Hwang.

The entire program was named for the final selection, which amounted to a “pandemic approach to jamming.” The Berlin-based Ensemble NMK (Neue Musik aus Korea), consisting of Yoon-Jin Kim on violin, Yongjin Yun on bassoon, and Soyeon Ahn on cello, performed on a pre-recorded video, joined by “live” performances by Hesterian Musicism and Shon. For the streamed version of this concert, the NMK performance had its own window superimposed on the video image in such a way to avoid obscuring the musicians in the Old First Presbyterian Church:

My guess is that this approach to video processing provided a better experience than that of the projection of the video for those in the church sanctuary. In either case the listening experience emerged as a surprisingly effective account of a unified ensemble.