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Jazz Articles about Song Yi Jeon
Gaia Wilmer, Ra Kalam Bob Moses: Dancing with Elephants
by Angelo Leonardi
Questa collaborazione tra la sassofonista e compositrice Gaia Wilmer e il batterista/bandleader Bob Moses, è stata progettata dieci anni fa, quando i due si sono incontrati al New England Conservatory, nei ruoli di allieva e docente. Il giudizio che Moses esprime in copertina sulle doti di scrittura di Gaia può apparire eccessivo (la paragona a Charles Mingus, Hermeto Pascoal, Gil Evans, Maria Schneider, Michael Gibbs) ma basta ascoltare il suo ultimo album orchestrale (Folia, Sunnyside 2023) per capire ...
Continue ReadingEugenia Choe: So We Speak
by Dan McClenaghan
New York-based pianist Eugenia Choe's first two trio albums on SteepleChase Records, 2016's Magic Light (review here) and 2018's Verdfant Green (review here), featured her trio with bassist Danny Weller and drummer Alex Wyatt. For her third album release, So We Speak, Choe goes with a trio once again, this time teaming with vibraphonist Yuhan Su and vocalist Song Yi Jeon. The result is less the traditional jazz trio mood of her debut and its follow up, and more of ...
Continue ReadingDominik Schürmann: The Seagull's Serenade
by Richard J Salvucci
Insularity is a funny thing. With globalization on everyone's mind--one way or another--it is ironic that parochialism affects the fine arts in any important way. It is not as if Pablo Picasso or Gustav Mahler were merely local celebrities. In classical music, composers have long been peripatetic figures--think of G.F. Handel, as likely regarded as British as he was German. And celebrated figures are nothing today, if not international. And yet--it is only an impression--jazz seems a bit different. Of ...
Continue ReadingSeulah Noh Jazz Orchestra: NOhMAD
by Jack Bowers
On her debut album, NohMAD, South Korea-born, New England-educated Seulah Noh is listed as composer, arranger and conductor. She could be described as “painter" too, as she uses her seventeen-piece orchestra (enlarged to twenty-one by strings on three numbers) as a palette on which to render sophisticated--and sometimes daring--portraits in sound that are generally progessive but seldom boring. Several impart an East Asian flavor, especially the three-movement Traveler's Suite, which presumably depicts Noh's long journey from Korea ...
Continue ReadingChase Kuesel: Space Between
by Bruce Lindsay
Drummer and composer Chase Kuesel is based in Brooklyn, but his debut release as leader, Space Between, arose from a year spent studying in Basel as part of a select group of young musicians funded through the Focusyear Artist Grant. It's an album that's notable for Kuesel's ambitious compositions--drawing on influences including Olivier Messiaen, Norma Winstone and Guillermo Klein, to whom Kuesel dedicates “Axis (For GK)"--and for the stylish interpretations crafted by the drummer and his bandmates. Four ...
Continue ReadingSong Yi Jeon: Movement Of Lives
by Jerome Wilson
Song Yi Jeon is a vocalist from South Korea whose voice and music can be as ethereal as ectoplasm or as penetrating as a laser. She recalls the mystical flexibility of Sheila Jordan and the raucous improvisations of Patty Waters in her sound but comes up with her own brand of hypnotic beauty. On this CD, only two songs have lyrics--the opening track, the standard “Invitation," and the closing track, a Korean folk song. On the rest, Jeon ...
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