Open Hearts Yield Gorgeous Hybrid
John Shand - Sydney Morning Herald

It may appear that every writer starts with a blank page, every painter with a blank canvas and every musician with silence.

Before key is struck, stroke brushed or silence broken, however, the options are often already attenuated by conformity to expectations, lack of imagination or both. Sydney drummer Simon Barker and his colleagues certainly cannot be accused of those sins. He, guitarist Carl Dewhurst, pianist Matt McMahon and trumpeter Phil Slater have entered the world of Korean traditional music with open minds and hearts and the results are breathtaking.

First, there is none of the mindless poaching that characterises so many cross-cultural musical hybrids and amounts to a form of cultural colonisation. Post-modernism has provided a ready excuse for such laziness as a composer incorporates an unfamiliar scale or a rhythm to add cheap exoticism. But surface knowledge produces surface art: veneers devoid of heart or substance.

Barker has steeped himself in Korean music for more than a decade, winning the respect of two eminent practitioners in singer Bae Il-dong and percussionist-singer Kim Dong-won. Having learnt to play with them on their own terms, he then added three of his regular improvising companions to the mix and they responded with bristling, empathetic imaginations.

Calling begins with Dewhurst creating a barely audible shimmering pool of sound by rapidly rubbing his guitar strings with a slide. Into this pool McMahon drops pebble-like notes, the ripple of each allowed to die before the next is cast, and then Slater adds long, slow sighs on the trumpet. A brief barrage from Barker's drums arrives like unexpected thunder and is answered by Kim's small gong and then by his voice: insistent and resilient as it slides between pitches. Drums and gong then embark on a lock-step rhythm, increasing in tempo and intensity, with the shimmering guitar and gentle piano affording an otherworldly dimension to this quite martial music.

Sinawi includes improvised singing from both Kim and Bae, firstly over portentous piano, then riding rhythmic surges involving drums, gong and typically inventive Dewhurst guitar. The full wonder of Bae's voice is unveiled on Dishevelled Hair, a tragic section of the epic The Song Of Spring Fragrance. Bae developed his voice via the pansori tradition of singing into a waterfall 18 hours a day for many years and he sounds like two people singing simultaneously, so dense is his voice, with a thick layer of overtones.

Song Of The Filial Daughter begins with spoken word from Bae, who then sings over traditional drumming from Barker and Kim. A second and climactic sequence from The Song Of Spring Fragrance is also set against Barker replicating traditional drumming on his kit and builds to some of the most thrilling Slater playing yet captured on disc.

JS

Aussie in Love with Korean Sounds
Living arts Korea 31/10/2005

An Australian jazz drummer who fell in love with traditional Korean music had a dream come true when he performed with Korean musicians in Seoul last week.
Described as "one of our most outstanding musicians" by the Sydney Morning Herald, Simon Barker led the concert with a combination of Band of Five Names and Showa 44, as part of the "Australian Month" festivities. He played with Bae Il-dong, singer of traditional narrative songs, or pansori, and traditional drummer Kim Dong-won.
The improvised collaboration performed an intriguing, harmonious and exciting set with the Korean musicians. In the climax, the audience clapped with the beat of the drums.
After the performance, sweaty and smiling, Barker held an interview with The Korea Herald, during which he expressed how glad he was to perform with Korean musicians. "I`ve been trying to study and understand Korean music as much as I can for eight years. I`ve always wanted to try some collaboration with traditional musicians here. This is like a dream come true," he said.
He first learned about Korean traditional music when he interviewed many Korean shamans for a project film called "In Search of Intangible Cultural Asset #82," an exploration of shaman music in various provinces in Korea. "The sound and rhythms are so beautiful and so special. For me, it`s the most powerful music in the world," he said.
The combination of Kim`s traditional drumming beats, Barker`s jazzy and creative drumming and guitarist Carl Dewhurst`s electronic sounds produced powerful music which enthralled the audience. Bae`s pansori, or Korean epic song, with the sounds of the keyboard and electric guitar, trumpet, cymbals climbed to a climax where all the musicians seemed to be creating a world of their own.
"The music evolved into a sonic portrait of Korea`s hidden character interweaved with a sense of Australia`s vast spaces and jazz pathos from the United States. It created an imaginary place where the music we were listening to was its utopian anthem!" commented one audience member.

Barker said their sounds were also influenced by Aboriginal music. "The?trumpet player and the guitarist have been studying Aboriginal music and they`ve told me a lot of things about it ... especially the long sound, space, a sense of dryness ... Maybe they`re influenced not just by Aboriginal music but perhaps by the landscape of Australia," he said.
Barker was asked by Australia`s public broadcaster ABC to bring Kim Dong-won and Bae Il-dong to Australia for a concert next year.
"I hope to come back here to perform this kind of collaboration in other parts of Korea," he said.
(yoonmi@heraldm.com) By Kim Yoon-mi

OzAsia Festival - Daorum
DIANA CARROLL
30/09/2008
Daorum is an exceptional example of musical fusion at its best. Steeped in the conventions of modern jazz but celebrating the traditions of Korean pansori singing, Daorum is a rare musical treat. It is new, original, and very exciting.

This particular show was created in 2005 by drummer Simon Barker as part of the 2005 Australia Month Festival in Seoul, an opportunity that came to Barker as part of his enduring interest in Korean music. Barker had been on a musical pilgrimage into the mountains of Korea where he met percussionist Kim Dong Won and renowned pansori singer Bae Il Tong. The 2005 show emerged from this meeting of musical minds and a documentary of the journey should be shown on Australian television later this year.

To uninitiated ear, pansori singing sounds like a violent collision of opera and death metal. The pansori singer spends months or years in the mountains shouting at waterfalls to enhance their vocal power. Pansori itself is a form of opera, the musical storytelling of universal tales of love, loss, and heroism, but the sheer force of the singing gives it an epic quality often lost in more traditional opera.

This collaboration with Barker on drums, Phil Slater on trumpet, Matt McMahon on keyboard, and Carl Dewhurst on guitar, accompanying the two Korean masters, is simply superb. The first piece, an improvisation, gave a superb display of the musical intimacy between these fine musicians. The following pieces in this short program were excerpts from traditional pansori stories given a new twist with the western instruments. Each performer in this ensemble is an accomplished musician but the sheer power of Bae Il Tong’s vocals was quite remarkable. He is also an incredibly engaging performer to watch, bringing drama, pathos, and comedy to each epic song.

Daorum has been performed at the Queensland Music Festival and the Sydney Opera House – it would be wonderful to see it back here as part of our Festival of Arts. Space Theatre, September 26.

Daorum
Oz Asia Festival
Space Theatre
Friday

Daorum is a six piece cross-cultural group – four Sydney jazz musicians and two Korean performers – founded by drummer Simon Barker to explore the Korean tradition of pansori. A theatrical blend of folk music and storytelling, pansori traditionally features a singer/storyteller and a drummer. Daorum’s intention is to incorporate these traditions with contemporary jazz improvisation. Pansori vocalist Bae Il Tong has an enormous emotional range and a powerful voice, almost frightening at moments of deep, raw-throated intensity in his storytelling and song. Simon Barker outlined the narratives, age-old tales common to many cultures: wronged heroes, corrupt officials, a beautiful daughter with a blind father. The second Korean, Kim Dong Won is a percussionist using various gongs and a double-ended drum. At first the instrumental music sounded more Korean than jazz influenced with Phil Slater creating wind effects through his trumpet while pianist Matt McMahon tinkled abstractly at the top end, to blend with Carl Dewhurst’s high guitar notes. Later the two Koreans took centre stage and demonstrated the amazing varieties of sound possible from just voice and a single drum. When the whole group portrayed chaos at a banquet the music contained elements of free jazz with a Korean modality, as Barker’s frenetic drumming built the effect. Daorum is a laudable enterprise interpreting aspects of a little known Asian art form for Australian audiences.

John McBeath

Taking Pansori to a New Level of Intensity
Korea Herald 3/11/2005

When a Manhattan-trained jazz drummer on his “search for the essence of Korean music” met pansori singer Bae Il-dong, he found a voice with a timbre that had been toughened and refined by seven years of screaming into a waterfall at Jirisan National Park.

To help spread the word, Australian-born Simon Barker last week brought here from Sydney guitarist Carl Dewhurst, trumpet player Phil Slater and keyboardist Matt McMahon who play in groups Band of Five Names and Showa44. Last Wednesday they teamed up with Bae and traditional drummer, “janggu” player Kim Dong-won to present a collaboration of jazz and pansori at the National Theater of Korea in Seoul.

The event was offered in the October Australia Month Festival 2005 as the Australian embassy had it from John Shand of the Sydney Morning Herald that here was “some of the most innovative and absorbing improvised music being made in Australia.”

Barker has been coming here for almost ten years, researching the music of shamans and this year, he has been making a documentary called “In Search of Intangible Cultural Asset No. 82,” referring to the tradition of folk ritual and drama. And the highlight is Bae's voice.

“It's just extraordinary. He has this really intense emotional capability,” said Barker. “It's incredibly rich and fat, it just fills the room, it's so visceral and I don't know anything like it,” Slater elaborated.

At first Bae wondered why these Australians were so interested in Korean music. “It's just traditional.” But after a short conversation, he said he could recognize their passion and sincerity.“There are not many with a musical philosophy, so we could share so much very quickly. I really like them and everything they play, even though it's a different genre.”

Barker is adamant their collaboration is not simply about pasting music together in some kind of cornball fusion, instead its like two streams coming together and trying to interact, he said.

And their forces combined proved to be a remarkable musical interaction. From the beginning of the performance, it clearly had nothing to do with finding a couple of secret Eastern-enriched flavorings for the new age jazz scene.

Dewhurst and Barker, a duo known as Showa44, started the show off with a meticulous banter of guitar and drum. Continuing to build the momentum, Kim joined in with poise for the second set offering traditional Korean drum rhythms and dance movements.

Then came the Band of Five Names. With Barker and Dewhurst, McMahon's keyboard and Slater's soft, skillful trumpeting lifted through maze-like atmospheres turning from boisterous to mellow and back again. Barker switched intermittently through a variety of percussion devices, bells and cymbals found over the years in Korea. Dewhurst, grinning across at the drummer, caught the reverberations from the drums and displayed his own ingenious range of guitar techniques.

Finally, the long-awaited Bae marched out onto the stage. With a fan in hand he opened up like a gregarious giant to these 30-something-year-olds from Sydney. His pushing them to create their own thunderous response resulted in a rhythmic indulgence that the pansori singer lapped up and returned fivefold.

It was the climax from “Chunhyang,” the Korean “Romeo and Juliet” _ an edgy, sweaty version that stirred the crowd as they clapped along with Bae at front waving and conducting with his fan. And the band behind chased each other with their own exuberance that didn't want to know the end.

DAORUM - QUEENSLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL
GREG GOTTLIEB ABC

The Brisbane Powerhouse's Visy theatre keeps the music and the audience close together. The gestures and faces of the performers in Daorum are just as visible as the subtlest nuances of their music are audible. Six musicians - four Australian and two Korean - enter the room and position themselves within the stage space.

Daorum is drummer Simon Barker's brainchild. In 2005, an Australian Embassy commission to create a cross-cultural event inspired Barker to unite Australian musicians - trumpeter Phil Slater, pianist Matt McMahon and guitarist Carl Dewhurst - with Korean musicians - Pansori singer Bae Il Tong and traditional percussionist Kim Dong Won.

A soft opening stanza builds into a raucous cacophony of improvised music. Somewhere amidst the colliding sonic waves there's a unique concoction of Australiana, Miles Davis soundscapes, onslaughts of contemporary free jazz and a vaguely familiar Korean-ness. The scene brashly set, Daorum contracts to a dialogue between Barker and Kim Dong Won.

Barker's recent years have been spent absorbing principles of the South Korean shamanistic drumming traditions of which Kim Dong Won is a master. Barker attributes a 'powerfully relaxed' and centred percussive approach to the spiritual and physical core of those traditions. His rhythmic conversations with Kim Dong Won create enthralling grooves and textures - same mastery, different approaches.

Bae Il Tong steps into the spotlit foreground, a closed folding fan clasped in one hand as song pushes from his throat. The storytelling is drenched in the traditions of Pansori, Korea's traditional theatrical music. Three suspended visual projection screens depict running water. While the taut, Korean syllables suggest interpretable narrative meanings, the drama and intensity of the performance are profound and firmly tangible.

The kwangdae's (singer's) strained shouts and cracked wails lead then follow the gosu's (drummer's) beat. Barker's flexible improvisations create a broad pulse which solidly propels Bae Il Tong's narrative. The two enjoy focused interaction at the eye of the musical storm forming around them. The singer's body language sometimes belies the pressure in his voice; after two breathtakingly powerful scenes, the tears streaming down his hot face are better evidence than his composed posture.

Daorum's fusion of Eastern and Western sounds produces pleasing sonic relationships: Matt McMahon presses harshly distorted Nord keyboard sounds up against the raw sandpaper of drums and raspy voice; later, his acoustic piano musings are a smooth, trickling undercurrent; Carl Dewhurst's electric guitar wrestles against the rituals and traditions, dominating pensive moments but subdued by the most engaging ones.

Underlying the tumultuous multimedia mesh of improvised music, visuals and theatrical elements is a subtly felt thread of peace. From Simon Barker blossoms a cavalcade of notes as though he were affecting a single brush stroke; Phil Slater's trumpet shrieks when freed and whimpers when muted, both tones delivered with measured intention; Kim Dong Won drums meditatively, seated cross-legged on the crest of an enormous dynamic wave.

When the performance concludes, there's no stunned silence or barrage of elated whoops. Contentment permeates the vibe. Daorum's music breaks new ground and the results are certainly fruitful. Simon Barker's conceived cultural interaction has come to life and proven its worth. The theatre empties itself of people treated to a unique, interesting and satisfying show.

- Greg Gottlieb