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Jazz Vocalist WoongSan
Amidst the Boundless World of Music
WoongSan, widely considered one of Asia’s top jazz vocalists, has never been limited solely to jazz but has in fact worked in a wide variety of musical genres. In college, she played heavy metal. Even after her debut as a jazz musician, she played various genres, exceeding people’s expectations every time. She has also performed with world-class musicians, such as Lee Ritenour, Nathan East, and John Beasley. Her 10th studio album, Who Stole the Skies, released last year and 20 years after the release of her first album, highlights her originality and experimental spirit. On this album, for which she wrote the lyrics as well as composed and produced most of the songs, WoongSan attempted to fuse traditional Korean music with jazz. By approaching traditional Korean music in a very serious way, she not only studied pansori but also incorporated Korean emotions into her jazz sounds without using any Korean traditional instruments. Jazz critic Nam Moo Sung described the album as “a masterpiece that shines with originality and artistry throughout all the tracks.” WoongSan has shaken things up on her own—and all without being trapped in the mold of how others define her as a musician. Today, she is showing everyone her sense of freedom—a defining message of jazz music—through her most recent activities.
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About the Interviewee
WoongSan made her debut in the jazz club scene in 1996, releasing her first album in 2003. She is the first Korean to be invited to Japanese Billboard Live and Blue Note Tokyo, two of Japan’s most noteworthy jazz venues. She won the Best Jazz & Crossover Song Award/Album Award at the Korean Music Awards in 2008, and was the first Korean award winner of the Golden Disc from Japanese notable jazz magazine Swing Journal in 2010. She was also selected as the Best Vocalist by Reader’s Poll magazine in 2008 and 2015. Later, she received a Prime Minister’s commendation at the Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards in 2021. Currently, she is the third chairperson of the Korea Jazz Association.
Q1.
In the fall of 2022, you released your 10th studio album—and first in four years. With the prolonged pandemic and the severely curtailed time seeing audiences in person, how have you been spending your time?
This has been a time when anyone could experience a slump due to the prolonged pandemic, but I spent my time studying. Along the way, I became interested in traditional Korean music and world music, so I started a Ph.D. at Sangmyung University. As chairperson of the Korea Jazz Association, I also spent time carrying out a whole bunch of other projects. It took a while for me to release a studio album because of some slow creative activities on my own part.
Q2.
It is easy to feel how many changes you have put into this album, especially when it comes to how much thought you have clearly invested in it. In particular, it features jazz combined with traditional Korean music. What kind of appeal does traditional Korean music hold for you?
Actually, more than 20 years ago, I had quite a few opportunities to showcase traditional Korean music and jazz together, like when I collaborated with a couple of truly great musicians, Kim Duk-soo and Ahn Sook-sun. Back then, I took part as a jazz musician and did what I could, but from five to six years ago, I became immersed in traditional music, especially pansori. Not many people know this, but I actually go into artistic slumps quite often. When I feel like I’m faced with limits musically, when I feel frustrated with being stagnant, when it’s hard to have a new experience—that’s when the slump comes. Whenever that happens, I overcome it by looking for new music or studying something new. This time around, I tried to find something new in gugak (traditional Korean music) that’s different from jazz but can support my identity as a Korean at the same time. One day while listening to the Gueum sinawi 1) by Ahn Sook-sun, I thought to myself, I can do this. I hummed along and emulated her every day while out for a walk. I felt relieved in the process of studying gugak and singing pansori using tongseong 2). For about a year, I sang Sarangga every morning, and then I eventually learned other pieces, including Jeokbyeokga and Simcheongga, one after the other.
Q3.
Without any traditional Korean musical instruments on this album, you presented this unique music through nothing more than your voice, like when you used one-of-a-kind grace notes as part of your singing style. This must have been a huge challenge as a jazz vocalist.
I also studied the history of gugak. I learned how pansori, minyo (folk songs), and jeongga 3) (classical vocal music of Korea) make different sounds, and I did this by meeting a few masters in person. I learned jeongga from Master Kang Kwon-Soon and studied pansori under Kim Jun-su of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. Basically, I’m a professional vocalist, so I was confident that I could use traditional music as a musical element for myself if I learned how to properly vocalize those sounds. What’s more is that because I was interested in the sound itself, in addition to gugak I also tried ragas (Indian classical music) and khoomei (a type of throat singing in Mongolia). Of course, my voice may not sound strong enough to be a professional singer of traditional music, but I can humbly accept that fact. I’m not a pansori master, but I’ve found a good way to deal with traditional music and blend it into my own music. However, as it was impossible to create natural sounds by imitating traditional music over the course of only a few days, I went through the process of practicing it step by step while being careful not to hurt my vocal chords.
Q4.
Before becoming a jazz singer, you played heavy metal. Even while you were playing jazz in earnest, you released a blues album and an album that reinterpreted Korean pop songs. What is the driving force for your singing across different musical genres?
It’s a gift from jazz, as jazz is a genre of music that can always make you cheerfully ask yourself Why not? When I perform in front of a master or together with other musicians, I’ll ask myself, Can I do this? But then I immediately say to myself, Why not? Just like saying there’s no right answer in life, jazz tells you to do as much as you want and go as far as you like. That’s why they say the biggest framework to jazz is freedom. That said, freedom is something you can enjoy when you gain the necessary tools through musical training. The process can be difficult and the changes can be uncomfortable, but you need to be willing to accept this process and its changes.
Q5.
From what I remember, fusion jazz, which is a combination of rock and jazz, led to a new revival of jazz. It seems to me that fusion with other genres will help popularize jazz. Do you also feel that way?
I think that’s going to happen. Just as Miles Davis started a musical revolution with fusion jazz alongside rock musicians—and faced some bad reviews for it at first—music that combines traditional Korean music and jazz is now receiving a favorable response as well. I once played a concert at a Buddhist temple in the mountains, and elderly people in their 70s and 80s really enjoyed it. Even if they don’t know what jazz is or who WoongSan is, I think there will be more and more people who like this kind of music every time I perform it. I think that’s especially true with foreign audiences, who seem to really like my music. Even if I don’t say that I’m from Korea, I hear that it’s a very special kind of Korean jazz. For me, jazz that includes traditional Korean musical instrument(s) is great, but gugak-style jazz or jazz-style gugak played by jazz musicians who understand Korean music has a different nuance to it. If you naturally meld a song from pansori into jazz by mixing it with your song, you’ll feel that this is K-wave and K-jazz without having to label it as something clearly Korean.
WoongSan performing with Lee Ritenour.
Q6.
You participate in composing music and in playing whatever it is you want to play, sing standard songs as a jazz musician, and sometimes do covers of beautiful songs. Is there a secret to consistently striking a balance so that you don’t lean on one side more than another?
Music is such a boundless world. And yet I wonder if it’s possible to say that I’m a true musician if I confine myself only to the category of jazz. If you simply play music, then you’re merely a person who plays music. If you go past that point, however, you can become a musician who can read the whole of music, and even work as a creator of music. It’s very important for me to strike a balance between the three practices so that I can continue to carry out memorable activities as a player, musician, and creator. I think this sense of balance will continue to be an important part of my life.
Q7.
I heard that you include various music genres, musical acting, and even poetry recitation in your curriculum for one semester when you teach at university. What do you usually emphasize to your students?
I think it’s necessary to try and discover what kind of sound you can make while having any number of experiences. I teach jazz music, but I don’t tell students to perform jazz. Whether you’re acting in a musical or reciting a poem, such an experience will definitely help a student with the music they want to perform, so I try to play the role of the person who opens the door for them. By the end of a semester, I often hear from my students that it was good to find another self through new experiences. While doing musicals in 2004 and 2005, I realized how much freer I could become on stage and how important it is to express dramas with music. I also recognized the importance of communication when I worked as a radio DJ and host. Emphasizing countless things to students is also based on my own experiences.
WoongSan working in the recording studio.
Q8.
You recently joined the Green Jazz Movement, which I find quite impressive. And it turns out that the title of this album, Who Stole the Skies, also has an environmental message to it.
The environmental problem is really serious. I started the Green Jazz Movement with the intention to do what I can as a musician. I brought a total of 20 people together, 11 vocalists and nine accompanying musicians. The vocalists are releasing two to three songs every month while conveying what they want to say through the songs, and I think all 11 songs will be released by April. So far, great songs such as Park Raon’s “I Need to Send a Refrigerator to a Polar Bear” and Kim Minhee’s “The Day Everything Disappeared” have been released. The goal is to expand people’s awareness by having singers talk about the environment in their own voices, and I think this project should continue. We performed on Nodeulseom Island in the Hangang River last year, and it was really touching and rewarding. There were some days I couldn’t sleep because of environmental concerns, but now I try to persuade people around me by practicing what I can do. This year’s Seoul Jazz Festa will also provide time to promote environmental issues to more people and expand awareness through the Green Jazz Movement performance.
Q9.
You are currently the Korea Jazz Association chairperson and are engaged in various activities. Last year, jazz musicians staged a lot of performances for International Jazz Day on April 30. What are your plans for this year?
This year, the Seoul Jazz Festa will be held on Nodeulseom Island for three days, from April 28 to 30. On the eve of the festival, the wonderful stage of the Seoul Jazz Quartet, which led Korean jazz in the 1990s, will be held, and a lot of different programs are being organized with musicians who took part last year as well as some new musicians joining for the first time. As the Korea Jazz Association prepares for this, I’d like to emphasize that performances are composed only of Korean jazz musicians. Plus, they’re all free of charge! It’s somewhere the profiles of Korean jazz musicians are raised, and potentially serves as a gateway to success for younger musicians. I hope outstanding young musicians such as Jaehun Kang and Song Yi Jeon will become more widely known through this event. There are any number of messages derived from jazz music. I learned not only how to rise to a challenge but also about freedom, consideration, love, and respect. You’re able to feel the allure of jazz music to the fullest when you see how, right in front of your eyes, musicians from their 20s to 80s transcend their age and create music while caring for and respecting each other on a single stage.
Q10.
Some people will already know that your stage name, WoongSan, comes from Buddhism and that you were once a Buddhist nun. You once said, “Music is my self-cultivation.” What exactly does that mean?
I tried to be a practitioner of Buddhist dharma, and today I now believe I’m cultivating myself in another way to make the world a little more beautiful. That’s why I try to be very wary of laziness. I’m always a practitioner because I try not to neglect cultivating myself as a musician; I look for and think deeply about what I can do for others as a human being in this world. I want to spend life like a gift the best I can and share even the very little I have with other people.
1) The unique music of Jindo, Jeollanam-do, it is a song that mimics a musical instrument with a person’s mouth.
2) One of the different singing methods of pansori, this is a singing method where the voice is drawn directly from one’s stomach.
3) Classical vocal music of Korea, it is separated into gagok, gasa, and sijo.
Words
Miyoung Ahn
Ahn is a journalist, interviewer, and writer. She has worked for a variety of media outlets, including the magazine Noblesse, and is the author of four books. She is presently working as a freelance editor and copywriter.
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