Duo Miyeon & Park

Friday, March 13, 2009

Korean beat meets American jazz
Award-winning group Yesanjok will perform at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center Sunday

Few things can heat up a chilly March night in Juneau quicker than a live, high-energy performance. Juneauites will have the opportunity this weekend to warm up with seven world-class performers from Korea.

Soul Beat Project will perform their blend of improvisational jazz, world music, percussion, singing and dancing at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Juneau-Douglas High School auditorium. Their presence here is due to the hard work of the Korea Foundation, the Juneau Arts & Culture Center and CrossSound.

"I think there is something in it for everyone - those who like popular music, world music, classical music, jazz music, crossover, folk, new - it's all contained in this ensemble," said Jocelyn Clark, director of CrossSound, one of the event's organizers.

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The group is made up of seven musicians who also perform as three separate entities in Korea. They combined forces to create Yesanjok in 2006, after running into each other repeatedly at events and foreseeing that they could do something interesting as a whole.

The performers are Lee Kwang-Soo, a singer and dancer widely-known in Korea; Park Je-Chun and Miyeon, a jazz piano and percussion duo; and a traditional Samulnori quartet made up of Lee Young-Kwang, Saon Gyeong-Seo, Gwean Ji-Hoon and Ham Ju-Myung.

A few days ago, Miyeon and Park won two Korean Music Awards, one for Best Crossover and Jazz Album and one for Best Performance. Yesanjok was awarded Performance of the Year in 2008.

"They are all trained in different ways in Korean traditional music. Some have come to it through jazz and rock, and others through shaman song and others through samulnori, meaning 'playing with four things' - in this case four different percussion instruments," Clark said

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- [Juneau Empire] By Amy Fletcher

Performing Arts Market in Seoul
National Theater and selected venues
Seoul, South Korea
11—15 October, 2010

The number of festivals, theaters and performance groups in South Korea has grown dramatically in the last twenty years and the tremendous developments in the fields of traditional music, jazz, dance and theater is testament to the vitality of Korean performers. Just as South Korea is increasingly on the itinerary of many international artists, so too, many international festivals are discovering the depth and richness of Korean performance art.

Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS) is an annual platform held in the capital for the international promotion of the Korean performing arts. At a time when funding for the arts is perhaps more difficult to obtain than ever, the hundreds of delegates and performers who gathered in Seoul were seeking new ways to collaborate , produce and distribute Korean artists, though in effect, PAMS is much more than a marketing event. As in every year since the first PAMS event in 2005, one region of the world is showcased, and in this edition of PAMS the Nordic region was given the spotlight, with an emphasis on dance.

For those delegates with a special interest in music, PAMS put together an enticing program which consisted in the main of Korean folk groups who have taken a modern approach to old traditions. However, the music on offer encompassed temple music, avant-garde jazz, indie rock, experimental pop, an outstanding music documentary film, and Korea's answer to world music fusion.

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It was a sound programming decision to break up the more traditionally-based music groups with Miyeon and Park's free improvisations on piano and percussion, in a performance entitled "Dreams from the Ancestor." The husband and wife duo of pianist Miyeon and percussionist Je Chun Park have been performing together since 1996 and bring the worlds of free jazz/avant-garde into contact with Korean traditional music in unique style.

The opening notes from Miyeon's piano had a distinctly classical air, though the spiraling intensity of the music soon dispelled comparisons with most modern European jazz pianists. Miyeon's piano vamps set Park off on a percussive journey which crossed Western and Asian terrain. Sat cross-legged, his kit set-up was an intriguing mixture of Korean drum, gong, temple bowl, bells. Western snare and bass drums and cymbals, and he merged their sounds suggestively and seductively.

Miyeon's piano vamps could be short and punchy, as on the opening number, or extended, as on the second piece when her metronomic vamp lasted fully eight minutes—accompanied by insistent gongs and bells—increasing in tempo and intensity only in the closing moments of the piece. This piece segued into a quiet piano section whose simple melody sounded all the more alluring in a set characterized by a sea of percussive chords and high-octane playing. Miyeon's piano style is a combination of ascending and descending runs, dissonant, jagged clusters of notes and stabbing chords—like Don Pullen without a trace of the blues.

A dramatic performance closed with "Change 1" from Queen and King (Audioguy, 2008) a distinctive number with a charging percussive momentum and urgent piano exclamations across the full length of the keys.

... - [All About Jazz] Ian Patterson, USA

The internationalization goes on / Only “Overseas Night” has been affected by turbulences in the air traffic.....

The Korean piano-percussion-duo Miyeon & Park are all Jazz, free, improvised Jazz. They are the only ones from the original Overseas Programms who have made it through the ash cloud. Unfortunately percussionist Park had to do without his drum set with traditional Korean drums, so that they lacked somewhat a far eastern touch, but this didn’t dampen the quality of their performance at all. Miyeon & Park played beautiful structured Free Jazz with a high level of intensity. While performing the two were vis-à-vis each other keeping constant eye contact and the finely chiseled, simple, sometimes seemingly childish piano melodies or hypnotic-repetitive pattern complemented perfectly with Parks poly-rhythmical drum performance which produced a bubbling and sizzling density full of inner tension.



24th of April 2010
- [Weser Kurier] Bremen, Germany