Gamin Creates a Wild New Universe Blending Korean and Western Sounds

Gamin Kang, who performs under her first name, is a master of Korean wind instruments including the piri flute, sheng-like saenghwang and taepyoungso oboe. She’s made a career out of cross-pollinating with magical, otherworldly, centuries-old Korean folk themes. Her latest album Nong – Korean for “jam,” more or less – includes several collaborations with western ensembles and composers, a bracing and often entrancing series of mashups that hasn’t hit the web yet. Her music is unlike anything else in the world – and she hopes this will springboard more collaborations like it.

The album’s opening piece, Mudang – meaning “shaman” – by Theodore Wiprud is an alternately playful and sternly emphatic piece for quavery piri and string quartet. The ensemble Ethel aptly emulate the low rhythmic insistence of the traditional janggu drum and then flutter and flicker, echoing the soloist’s reedy blue notes throughout this strangely resolute mashup of traditional Korean themes and 21st century western string quartet idioms.

On the Courtship Displays of Birds-of-Paradise, a triptych by Anna Pidgorna begins with The Black Sicklebill, its contrasting textures, cascading chords and suspenseful ambience from the reeds of Michael Bridge‘s accordion and the saengwhang, along with ominous knock-knock effects. In part two, Parotia, it’s even less clear where the keening tones of the saengwhang and accordion diverge, at least until jaunty staccato chords and droll birdsong accents kick in. The Princess Marcia (an imaginary species invented by the composer) turns out to be both shy and ostentatious, with a coy sense of humor.

Violinist Omar Chen Guey and cellist Rafi Popper-Keizer join the bandleader for William David Cooper‘s Two Pieces for Piri and Strings. The strings mimic both the quavery intensity as well as the ghostly haze of the piri in the first part; the variations afterward alternate between anxious leaps and bounds, plucky accents, plaintive resonance and then a stark dance. It’s arguably the album’s most striking interlude.

Eun Young Lee‘s Bagooni – Korean for “basket” – features both the piri and saenghwang along with the string duo in a starkly glissandoing, insistently shamanic but playfully contrapuntal and expertly interwoven tableau. Longtime downtown New York jazz artists Ned Rothenberg and Satoshi Takeishi join the leader, who plays both piri and taepyungso in the album’s concluding, blues-based improvisation. The contrast and tension between the Korean reeds and Rothenberg’s bass clarinet and sax over Takeishi’s hypnotically undulating, folk-influenced percussion is bracing but also conversational, through Rothenberg’s keening duotones, a spine-tingling taepyungso solo and a blazing, syncopated coda. In a year where music was sadistically and abruptly put on pause (or potentially on “stop”) by the lockdowners, this wondrously intense album testifies to what can be accomplished when artists are unmuzzled and free to associate..