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South Korea

Discovered in a Daegu nightclub, 1970

Jang Hyun

Shin Joong-hyun, already Korea's most important rock guitarist and producer, discovered singer Jang Hyun performing in a Daegu nightclub and brought him to Seoul. Shin wrote and arranged material for him and fronted his backing band, billed as "Jang Hyun & The Men." Jang debuted in November 1970 and recorded through 1975. That year Shin Joong-hyun's marijuana arrest set off a government crackdown that banned dozens of Korean entertainers from performing, and Jang, then at the height of his career, was one of them. He left music for a garment business the following year. Decades later, reissue labels brought his recordings back as part of the wider rediscovery of Shin Joong-hyun's circle. He died in Seoul in 2008.

Daejeon to New York, one cello

Okkyung Lee

Okkyung Lee left Daejeon, South Korea for Boston in 1993 and studied film scoring and improvisation at Berklee and the New England Conservatory. She then settled into New York's downtown experimental scene, where she has treated the cello as a noise instrument as readily as a classical one. 2011's Noisy Love Songs, released on John Zorn's Tzadik label, pushes her extended technique (scraped harmonics, splintered bowing, sudden silence) into some of the most abrasive and personal playing in her catalog. She has since worked with Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Christian Marclay, and Arca, and in 2015 she won a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Few cellists anywhere work this far outside the instrument's own tradition.

Traditional instruments, rock band

Jambinai

Lee Il-woo, Kim Bo-mi, and Sim Eun-yong met while studying traditional Korean music at the Korea National University of Arts and formed Jambinai in Seoul in 2009, adding drums and bass to make a full band. From the start they played the haegeum, piri, and geomungo with real traditional technique instead of bending them to imitate Western instruments, and that set them apart. Lee has said flatly, "we refuse to label our music 'gugak,' since what we do is music." 2012's Différance won Best Crossover Album at the Korean Music Awards, and the band later played the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

The Collection