Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

 

July 6, 2025
Shamanism - Kim Jung Jae
Label: Relative Pitch Records
Catalog #: RPR1230
Location: United States
Release Date: June 20, 2025
Media: compact disc or digital download
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Musical improvisation is an art form that has the potential to be simultaneously ancient and modern. On Shamanism, Jung-Jae Kim leads a quartet on a musical endeavor that embodies this principle and frames it within a uniquely Korean perspective. The ensemble consists of a pair of saxophonists and a pair of drummers. With respect to the reeds, Jung-Jae Kim performs on tenor saxophone and Sunjae Lee on soprano and alto saxophones. Percussion-wise, Junyoung Song and Sunki Kim work the drums. While some of these names may be new to readers of the review (as they were to the PPPH staff), curious listeners will soon discover that the musicians are active not only in the jazz scene of Korea but, like Jung-Jae Kim who is currently based out of Berlin, each is also part of the global improvisational community.

The choice of instrumentation in the quartet makes a critical contribution to the distinctive music on the album. As Clifford Allen has noted on the implicit structure of improvisation,

The instrumentation is the composition already, you've scored it just by showing up and bringing people together who know what one another's capabilities are.*
These four musicians share a mutual understanding of their collective capabilities and create a music which develops around a common vision. We found many singular moments and extended stretches of improvisation where the interplay of the two saxophones, each played in plaintive and inviting ways, actively grabbed hold of our attention and made us focus on the moment. The two drummers knew exactly how to elevate, support and sustain the music.

*Allen, Clifford, Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt, RogueArt, Paris, France, 2023, p. 40.

The title of the album, Shamanism, explicitly invites the listener to connect the music with their notions of the religious practice. Essentially, the term derives from a shaman, who is a mediator between the human world and the spirit world. In this case, the ensemble is the mediator opening a portal for the listener to access a spiritual dimension through the music.

In fulfillment of this function, the album invoked a particular memory for the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House, which we now share. The metropolitan area of Seoul has a population of over twenty-six million people and stretches over the Han River plain into the nearby hills and mountains. As such, many pockets of land, composed of an isolated peak with slopes too steep to develop, are surrounded by dense collections of high-rises. These small parcels are integrated into the lives of the residents of the local neighborhoods. Some peaks are lined with trails with daily use for exercise, like any other city park. One other kind of peak came to mind as we listened to Shamanism.

The Inwangsan Shamanist Hillside Walk is situated on an isolated peak surrounded entirely by the city of Seoul. Its trail does not include exercise equipment but rather a plethora of shrines to the local spirits of the mountain. These shrines continue to be visited by faithful supplicants. To visit this mountain is to experience a blend of ancient and modern in a way that is so adeptly captured by Jung-Jae Kim and company in the music of Shamanism. Below we show a few photographs from a visit by the PPPH staff to the Inwangsan Shamanist Hillside Walk. These images may help to capture the seamless transition from contemporary urban life to wilderness refuge.

To get to the Inwangsan Shamanist Hillside Walk in Seoul, South Korea, a visitor takes exit 2 from the Dongnimmum subway stop. They travel through a nondescript alley (top left) until they reach an unmarked stone stairway leading through a residential neighborhood (top right). Eventually that stairway sheds houses and leads into the woods (bottom left). The wandering path ascends up the mountain. It passes many shrines. Photography of the shrines is, we understood after the fact, not especially encouraged. We show only one example of the most modest kind of shrine (bottom right) of the many a visitor encounters on the walk.
photo credits: from the personal collection of the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House, May 8, 2011.

Shamanism provides its own tour, undeniably Korean and global, of a music that emerges from the inextricable combination of ancient and modern traditions of secular and sacred themes.

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