Stone Jazz Releases 9th Album
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
Traditional fusion band Stone Jazz has returned to fans with its 9th album, ``The Beyonders.''
The band has been applauded as a professional traditional and jazz crossover group among critics and fans in recent years with albums containing Korea folk tunes transformed into a modern jazz format.
The new album ``The Beyonders'' is a collection in which music is expanded beyond the cultural aspects of the world pop tunes, being reborn through pure artistic brilliance.
This album harmonizes the popularity and cultural nature of pop music with aestheticism, artistry and sensitivity. Widely known numbers such as ``Take Me Home Country Road,'' ``El Condor Pasa,'' ``Hotel California,'' ``Yesterday,'' and ``California Dreaming'' have been transformed and recreated into various music styles and have been played with Western instruments delicately combined with traditional Korean instruments.
The group, however, said in the press release that the album is not intended for the popular tastes of the public. ``In this album, not a measure, no, not even a single beat, has been intended in favor of public ear in terms of music styles, melodies, harmonic progressions, rhythmic figures or tempo changes. Every part fundamentally has been made for the interchange of musicians' sensitivity and consensus with each other. May be for that reason, this album is to be extremely anti-public and therefore non- commercial. Even though it will have no meaning to bring up the most anti-public and subjective music using the most public and objective music, the vague hope that it could reversely have the biggest meaning was the motive of producing this album,'' the group said.
Led by composer, guitarist and pianist Lee One-soo, the band has been playing together since 2004. The group consists of Lee Gun-seung (contra bass), Lee Chang-hoon (drums), Yang Hoon-jung (gayageum, or 12-stringed lute), Kim Yoon-a (haegeum or two-stringed fiddle) and Yoon Hyoung-wook (piri or Korean double reed instrument), Oh Sae-lan (cello).
The band creates folk tunes, standard jazz, carols and world pop songs with delicacy and sophistication in instrumentation and arrangement, and the natural resonance of the refined acoustics, creative rhythmic structure, melodic figures and combinations, and idiosyncratic harmonic flows.