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Eunhye Jeong: Far Beyond Home -- notes by Paul r. Harding
I cannot fathom a piano. I cannot un-understand the being of a piano. The ubiquity of its universe. Small as a baby’s hand and then as blinding as an octopus’s swinging arm. All dimensional, intricately percussive sensitive as a drummer’s feather brush.
Eunhye Jeong’s piano takes us in, under, out, and above the brushing, the map and the lost.
Eunhye Jeong began music at the age of four but did not pursue music until she was nineteen. After a great love for reading, she discovered there were “too many agendas through language and text.” Thus, she became a “detector” of The Music. In this new recording we discover pursuance beyond the orthodox understanding of song. More than the thin outgoing tide but all 88 keys make a shoreline. In this case an ancient and future beachhead, a world of other ‘lettering’, like King Sejons (15th century, created the Korean alphabet based on Korean traditional music) truly while “Thelonious Monk was the pivotal figure.”
The daunting entrance of “Point Expands to World” un-tells an introduction of mystery and sure footing down an organic clean trail, cutting down every prop and ‘special effect’ in its way through pre-dawning sharp rays called musical notes. My kind of brave piano individualism served in a poignantly adventurous, lovingly dark, and yearning technique.
“Volcanic pansori vocalization and Black American musicians, artists… inspired me.” Second track “And Then She Was There” is a winding stair to climb, banister (bass) to hold onto but no top stair, only a looking glass of reflection yet to look or reflect. Yes, a master short storyteller, each key on the piano knows her wanting while wanting for nothing from this “cosmic explorer” Her piano knows there is a such thing as nothingness. The percussive path is reminiscent of Andrew Hill’s hands—a bubbling desert where everything but the oasis is unreal—finds everything numbered while Ms. Jeong’s finds the numberless like one might find orphans of war. Each piano note a sign of water for the thirsty ear. And I say “unreal” not in a negative way but a way that genuinely matters to love—and that is originality! New, unmarked, without ambition, arpeggio’s way past (within/without) “external pressures”
This entire recording is seeking without searching, vice-versa? In hope for “importers of knowledge” from more “powerful dominant countries” as each note of ‘Points Multiply Constant Beauty’ is a seedling, an inch or two of sound digging… to put… to not grow but to anticipate growing. To caress and dig the root before the bark forms. The pre of predawn intervals.
A sensation of blooming in the still dark morning makes her piano new light of a forest. Pianos find themselves. This pianist began with who she is; like a child doesn’t know what childish means: a quandary of wisdom, of freedom. Of walking between Michael Bisio’s dusky, diligent steps is path-finding in humanity’s purest walk.
“Points Multiply Constant Beauty” arriving collectively (meaning: including the listener), departing individually at times; as Duke Ellington perhaps did at the end of his very first playing of his “Solitude.” Eunhye stops ever so briefly for a duo coming closer to the safari trail’s edge. To lead the way internally.
If we stop to inquire about the canon of The Blues (in trouble in a troubled world?) one only need stop for Joe McPhee’s tenor to join the expedition. To speak on the “metaphysical qualities in common that seem to connect the people on a deeper level” the dimensions while the reality of market labelling of a society thrown into the lion’s den of commodity competition is no less a sin than killing and starving a child in military invasions. Pain, as in the bells of “Morning Bells Whistle Bright,” have my ears lift its hat and wipe my brow of the sweatless ivories. Of the leaves without trees, vice versa? Falling up in “Drinking Galactic Water.”
This music “concerns real energy vibrating through the music past present future” is about where the drone drones. Where the hope “is that people liberate themselves through their own individual power” like “Morning Bells Whistle Bright” original says every life starts from the patience about pre-birthing, waiting for the first sound (after birth!) McPhee’s horn brings this melodic anxiety with his saxophone’s new yet ancestral terms for hope. “This ideal humanity is aligned with nature at the same time it is a way to reconnect with ancient wisdom”
The other tales of her journey warrant stopping to make camp for her piano kindling. And “connect: something of an old soul in Eunhye offers… more free esoteric than Avant-Garde appealing. Something allergic to cliché and postcard swing in her mindful hands. Overwhelming if simplicity can be! Day-breaking in smallest loud places. On the other side of the moon is not dark shadow in Eunhye’s piano but rather an introducing of illumination. With no map or chart something neither crowded, toxic, or of intentions to impress (in a Jazz propaganda intellect) but rather rub down, as if each key an unknown oil of sound, and without force or intimidation, but by way of making a verb out of the word one, this piano reinvents itself… as all great stories due. The sounds between the ones where whatever we know vanishes into a freedom of conscious heart.
This musician is an artist. This pianist is a pursuer not of dreams but the making of dream in the purest sense. In the lush of “Jaybird.” The themes being crests cutting back and forth through qualms of rising sea, this album is where many of the great pianists of my day wished to enter of the horizon of; where the McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock influences of the '60s/'70s kept faith in a color called tomorrow. In a switchblade peeled apple skin shining before biting music. Interplaying broken dates or love on first sight… in prologues that are really index. That is not a piano in Eunhye’s hands but rather a structure of a circling reinventing itself through interplay… through sudden stops and go-s that turn time itself into tales between seed and tree. Fingers of her own dimensions… from branches somersaulting in neither slow nor over-pronounced motions… nor high diving tightrope chords… but the blood cells and nervous systems of a forest called The Music.
If light sound than welcome this dawn. No cliches means not contrived are her colors and tints but rather her turning the piano into a mind, an opening to first light lasting as long as it takes for the courage of predawn Stride, future Rag, and the present new sonnets of piano from “far beyond home” where “every creation grows from a particular soil, its birthplace… shaped by the complexity of its reality,” like “Coda for Tomorrow.”