Jungmori Blues (short insert of middle section from 14 minutes long recording 'Jungmori Blues') composed by gamin & Ned Rothenberg

"Jungmori Blues" is a work commissioned for the New York Sanjo festival, 2018. Co-composers gamin and Ned Rothenberg premièred this work in May 2018 at the New York Asia Society. Sanjo is an improvised form of Korean music that arose from Shamanist rites, an animistic religion, and later developed into a unique instrumental music form, similar to the blues, which was developed by enslaved African-Americans based upon African traditional and religious music.  
Based upon this shared history, we conceived Jungmori Blues, Jungmori being one of Sanjo's rhythmic patterns. Based on both Sanjo's scale (gyemyunjo) and the blues' scale, we have created an improvisation based on Sanjo's rhythms. We combined traditional Korean winds, piri and taepyongso, with Western instruments often appearing in the blues, such as bass clarinet and and saxophone.

At the work's première, Jungmori Blues was performed as an accompaniment for a Korean percussion, janggo, which is a traditional style for Sanjo.  Later, for a subsequent performance, in November 2018, at the Smithsonian Freer-Sackler Gallery in D.C., we expanded the role of Korean percussion instruments in improvisation. A Sanjo typically begins with a solo instrumentalist playing the slow Jinyang Jangdan 16-beat, but Jangmori Blues as an original composition, is accelerated to Jungjungmori and Jajinmori rhythms. Each of 2 musicians plays 1 of 2 instruments successively, accompanied by percussion.

Album 'Nong' : Innova Records 2020

Jungmori Blues

Sarah Grace Graves: Both/And (2018)

Sarah Grace Graves and Virginia Guidi, voices
Live performance, October 31, 2021, Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, FR

(Photo: Janine Niépce, Title, Date Unknown)

Both/And

improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance maker

Jungmori Blues

gamin

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