An upcoming music festival will make the scorching summer even hotter: the Yeowoorak Festival.

The Yeowoorak Festival experiments with different musical genres through collaborations among various musicians. This year's festival will fuse two commonly improvised genres: traditional Korean gugak music and modern jazz.

The festival will take place at the National Theater of Korea in Jangchung-dong in central Seoul from July 1 to July 26. It will feature 152 Korean and non-Korean artists, including renowned jazz vocalist Na Yun-seon and Heo Yoon-jeong on the six-stringed geomungo zither.



Yeowoorak is an abbreviation for, "Here is our music." The festival has tried to cling to traditional Korean musical standards and bridge to the world at the same time. This sixth festival will feature 14 concerts. For the opening act, the Yeowoorak Collective, scheduled for July 1 and 2, artistic director Na Yun-seon and the artist of the year at this year's festival, Heo Yoon-jeong, will be joined on stage by eight other performers. They will do improvised collaborations between gugak and jazz.

For the Modern Sound Excursion, scheduled for July 3 and 4, Prelude, a four-person jazz band, and vocalist Jeon Young-rang, a gugak singer, will present their new songs created through rearrangements of traditional Korean music. Singer-songwriter Lee Sang-eun, known for hits such as "Damdadi" and "Someday," will perform her hit songs rearranged in a gugak style at the Aram Garak concert on July 9 and 10.

For the Timeless Time concert on July 14 and 15, Heo Yun-jeong, who has broaden her musical spectrum by working with international artists, now aims to collaborate with cellist Erik Friedlander and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, who regularly performed with her in New York in 2007. Vocalist Kim Bo-ra and singer-songwriter Sunwoo Jeong-a will join them on stage.






Drummer Namgung Yeon will present a combination of traditional beats, electronic dance music and a ballet performance during the Play's Dignity concert on July 15 and 16. Ballerina Kim Ju-won will dance while media art performances are staged in the background, along with percussion acts.

Flutist Jocelyn Mienniel and Lee Aram on the large daegum bamboo flute will perform together at the Wood and Steel concert on July 21 and 22. The two musicians have perfect harmony between their Western and Eastern wind instruments and each instrument's distinctive charms. Iiro Rantala, a renowned pianist from Finland, and vocalist Jeong Eun-hye, specialized in the traditional pansori form of narrative singing, will create a great ensemble together at the Fantastic Two concert on June 24 and 25.



Jazz singer Na Yun-seon, well-established on the European jazz scene, will perform in the finale, the Journey Has Begun concert on June 25 and July 26. She intends to reinterpret jazz and world music pieces using traditional gugak instruments and, in reverse, to perform traditional Korean songs with Western instruments like guitars, a bass and a saxophone.

For more information about the festival, please visit the National Theater of Korea's homepage (www.ntok.go.kr) or call 02-2280-4114, 4115, 4116.

By Limb Jae-un
Korea.net Staff Writer
Photos courtesy of the National Theater of Korea
jun2@korea.kr