Written by Cindy Majane
Jazz pianist Alfred Yun was born and lived in the United States until he was six, when he moved to Korea with his parents. In middle school, he returned to the United States to live with his uncle. At that time, he was really into drawing and animation, but he fell in love with music.
“When you’re a teenager, music speaks to your emotions differently. Not only was music powerful emotionally, I realized I was able to write music of my own, little pop songs.
Composition often means you’re able to channel your own life and whatever’s going on… For a teenager, that was more powerful and spoke to me more than the drawing obsession. That’s how it started for me.”
Yun had taken two years of piano lessons in Korea, which gave him the ability to write his pop songs. He never joined the school band or took part in high school music. His uncle wasn’t supportive of his musical efforts, so he played whenever he could find a piano, by himself. He studied philosophy and French literature at Randolph College in Virginia, but his plan was always to be a musician and composer. When he was about 22 years old and done with his degree, he went to Berklee College of Music to study music and gather the skills to do something beyond the songs he had been writing. “That was tough – I was much older than a lot of people, and I was way less skilled (than students who) grew up studying music, had been mentored, been part of jazz band or whatever… That was never really the case for me. I was always just writing.”
“Berklee was when I had to learn music, but that’s when jazz opened up to me. Improvising was fascinating and it was really challenging. You can’t just ‘play jazz.’ Jazz is more like speaking a language, you’re not just reciting something that you’ve memorized on paper. Speaking comes from internalizing the language. It doesn’t have to be something radically new, it just has to be spontaneous, appropriate to the context that you’re in. It has to be conversational. In order to do that, you have to have some sort of intuitive understanding of the theory, the “grammar,” the chords, scales and all these things.” Jazz was also a lot more rhythmically complex than the pop songs he had been writing. “It kicked my butt, it was hard! I thought I was talented in music; jazz told me no.” But Yun liked what he heard and kept digging at it. The more he unearthed, the more interesting it became.
At Berklee, Yun studied music production and musical composition; composition is still his primary goal. He learned to compose for film, commercials and video games, as well as the different technologies involved – but in his own time, he put everything into studying jazz. “I just kept hacking away at it… And here I am now. Now I play more jazz than I compose for anything else.”
When asked how he became a prestigious Strathmore Artist in Residence, he thanked past Artists in Residence who told him of the opportunity. Yun auditioned and got in. “I was really grateful to have been selected, because I got to meet a lot of people; it’s a huge network of really talented musicians.” It was also a sign that some of the creative things he was doing were appealing to a broader group of people.
When asked what inspires him, Yun said, “Passion and sincerity. Is this something real? Sincere? Is it coming from a genuine place? It doesn’t have to be serious, there can be a lot of humor. You have to feel like the person making the joke enjoys the joke… They want to share it with you.”
His current performance schedule is limited, as he’s been recording and mixing a new album. It features a lot of jazz, some hip hop, a metal track, free jazz, spoken word, a bit of techno and even a pop song. Every song uses voice in a different way, with singing, poetry, spoken word on top of music – so the different parts make sense within the theme.
We are fortunate to have Yun at the Arts Barn December 7th for a holiday concert, played on the Arts Barn’s new grand piano! It will feature some of his favorite Christmas tunes, jazz standards on a “winter” theme, as well as his own compositions about his personal holiday feelings, including playing Korean games and a more melancholy tune inspired by a COVID Christmas.
Fun fact: Yun is a true Thelonius Monk fan. (In the past two years, he’s memorized 50 of Monk’s about 70 compositions!) In this concert, Yun will play “A Merrier Christmas” that Monk thought would be a hit – but it never wound up being recorded. As a result, it’s rarely played. “It’s a really weird, quirky song, like a lot of Monk’s songs. It’s an endearing, silly Christmas song.”
Joining Yun onstage will be Jeff Cuny on bass, Sara Zhu on flute and Angel Bethea on drums!
Humor, nostalgia, a bit blue… Enjoy the holidays in a different way with “Cool Yule with Alfred Yun – Holiday Jazz with a Twist” at the Arts Barn Saturday, December 7th at 7:30 pm. Tickets: https://ci.ovationtix.com/36017/performance/11510005.
