Halym Kim’s Bijul

My Illusions of Korea is a short (about 30 minutes) but sweet up-to-the-minute tranche of Copenhagen-based improvised music. Featuring a quintet of younger players, the compositions they play are political only by inference. However the sardonic titles given them by Korean-Danish drummer Halym Kim make more pointed statements than the slightly Asian folkloric and percussive elements he adds to his tunes. This craftily arranged and coordinated session gives full range to the burgeoning skills of Danish and non-Danish players. The others are Polish pianist Grzegorz Tarwid and Swiss bass clarinetist Eloi Calame plus Danes, tenor saxophonist Nana Pi and trumpeter Erik Kimestad.

From first to last the thumping bottom usually consists of drum kit pummeling and keyboard chord splashing often linked to a lowing continuum from the bass clarinetist. Squirming saxophone snarls and the trumpeter’s sometimes banshee-like peeps move in-and-out of these pitches. Yet the tracks also evolve at a breakneck pace without schism. Alternately the horns are used for subtle harmonies or as designated counterpoint, where the linear flow is disrupted with singular barbed or blunted confrontations.

The program of affiliations among metal-jarring percussion, basement-pitched horn air circulation and angled but anchored piano comping is resolved with the final “Our Illusion of Korea”. Built with pressurized power into an almost impenetrable wall of sound, the timbral thickness is eventually breached by distended reed split tones and the trumpeter’s boiling capillary runs.

Whether the finale is a symbolic suggestion of how monolithic Korean society should be more porous is something the composer would have to answer. All we can intuit is from the meaningful music created on this disc.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Personnel: 1. Shamanistic Ritual 2. Where do you really come from? 3. Humbling Old Man 4. Our Illusion of Korea

Personnel: Erik Kimestad (trumpet); Nana Pi (tenor saxophone); Eloi Calame (bass clarinet); Grzegorz Tarwid (piano) and Halym Kim (drums)