MUSIC REVIEWS : Multicultural Thrills From Kim, Friends

Korean American composer-performer Jin Hi Kim’s “Living Tones” concert, Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, proved to be a rare forum for a gamut of adventurous musicians. Where else but at a Monday Evening Concert could you expect to hear free-jazz saxophone master Oliver Lake, new-minded baritone Thomas Buckner and daring double-reed player Joseph Celli, as well as revered musicians from Seoul?

Kim has long sought to marry Korean and Western traditions, as well as extend her hand as an improviser in jazz and experimental circles. As it turns out, the fruits of her efforts embody a unique brand of a multicultural thrill, in the most seamless sense of the term.

On “Nong Rock,” originally commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, the patently versatile New York-based Sirius String Quartet performed along with Kim on the komungo , a fretted zither. The string players are required to play with a thin, glassy tone, savoring the life of each richly inflected note.

Kim often explores the common ground between ancient Korean instruments and relatively modern Western counterparts. “Tchong” accents the timbral interplay between the daeum , a bamboo flute altered with a rice paper filter--played here by Hong Jong-Jin--and Robert Dick’s altered Western flute. “Yoeum” found the ever-impressive baritone Buckner intoning fragmented snippets of e.e. cummings poetry alongside the Korean poetic text sung by Whang Kyu Nam in the Korean vocal tradition of kagok .

“Piri Quartet” brings together three Korean masters of the piri (a Korean predecessor of the oboe)--led by Chung Jae-Guk and including Park Jong-Sol and Yang Myong-Sok--with Celli. Celli’s refined extended techniques on oboe and English horn enabled him to mimic and complement the mournful wail of the piri players.

Best of all, Kim, at the komungo , improvised ably with Lake and bassist William Parker on “Quagmire.” While Parker laid out a busy foundation-in-flux, Lake issued sparse, intense and often tuneful fragments, and Kim reacted sensitively to the surroundings. They made beautiful music together.

All told, this was new music/ world music at its finest: beyond political correctness, into the realm of the sublime, where words and cultural postures fall away.