Doyeon Kim - Wellspring [CD]

Wellspring presents the arrival of a powerful new voice in creative music, unrelenting in passion and invention, while always transmitting a deeply empathic grace. Masterful composer-improviser Doyeon Kim is an unparalleled practitioner of the Korean gayageum (a silk-string zither), and is also in possession of a purposeful vocal intensity. This is her debut album as a bandleader, featuring fellow master musicians Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Mat Maneri (viola), Henry Fraser (bass). Armed with an unlikely traditional instrument, flanked by three extraordinary improvisers, radiating a brash, acoustic strategy that simultaneously invokes folk universalism and a No Wave battle-stance, the Brooklyn-based virtuoso has dropped a volcanic sonic statement with grand humanist goals. Kim mingles Korean lullabies, fervent interactions between drums and strings, and pure instrumental expressions of musical self. At times, she sounds like she can halt armies. Wellspring is a call for society to come together. How the Seoul, South Korea-born 34-year-old came to be the centuries-old zither's leading (only?) practitioner of contemporary improvised music, reflects an expansive embrace of her own culture, her place in modern society, and her ascending recognition of music's liberatory power. Kim has released works alongside Morris and Brandon Lopez. Her 2017 duo album GaPi with Chase Morrin garnered a Korean Grammy nomination. And she's shared stages with Kris Davis, Cooper-Moore and John Hébert, among many others. Now, Wellspring, is the recorded culmination of her growth period. It is a rumbling record, with wall-to-wall big sounds, all Kim compositions or group improvisations, built on immediacy and gusto. Even the aforementioned lullaby, "Walking in a Dream," which Kim performs with unrestrained vocal intensity, surrounded by Fraser's resonant bowing, Maneri's accompanying melody and counter figures, and Sorey adding atmospheric percussive touches-ends like a hurricane.          Kim chose her accompanists not simply because of familiarity, but due to their emotionally unmediated relationship to the moment. "I don't want people thinking about their 'role' in the music" she says. "I want people free from their instrument, who are more about how they are making a sound and the relationship between our sounds."  That feeling and the album's humanist themes are well-displayed by Wellspring's two-part epic closer, the 20+-minute "Linear System"/"Calculus of the Soul." The instrumental "Linear Systems" is, according to Kim, constructed on the theme of the lifecycle, slowly building to a mass bowed drone, through a plucked and reactionary percussion section, before folding into the album's gentlest moment, and sliding into "Calculus of the Soul." "Please listen to this girl's story" the latter begins; then, with Maneri and Sorey flitting around her narration in noise-folk fashion, Kim speak-sings-then-screams of how between the sun's and the moon's daily arrival are countless formulas, and that the mystery of life is contained within those numbers. "That's how we live together!"