Moving by Breath: A Conversation with David Leon on ‘Bird’s Eye’

Arguably, the essence of jazz lies in its use of improvisation. The ability of an artist to create in the moment based on the artist’s then-existing perspective – rather than merely trying to put their own spin on the choices of another or their past self – often causes the artist to reveal more about themselves at that moment in time. Consciously or subconsciously, elements of their life story and background rise to the fore through their craft. This aspect of the music, in turn, creates an art form that can serve as a cultural melting pot. Jazz itself originates from a marriage of African rhythms and Western harmony and instrumentation. Later incarnations have incorporated sonic cues from around the globe, whether Yusef Lateef’s Eastern explorations or Amir El Saffar’s use of Iraqi maqam. David Leon’s Bird’s Eye (Pyroclastic, 2024) follows this lineage by fusing the language of American jazz, Korean traditional music, and Cuban folkloric music. But even as the trio honors the tradition of incorporating different cultural influences, they produce an album that sounds unlike anything else.

Over the years, jazz and Cuban music have intertwined often, with everything from Dizzy Gillespie collaborating with Chano Pozo to Chucho Valdés’ Irakere. Adapting ideas from traditional Korean music into jazz is rarer but not without precedent, with Larry Och’s Kihnuoa serving as one example. But it does not seem anyone before Leon’s trio, with gayageum player DoYeon Kim and percussionist Lesley Mok, has simultaneously incorporated elements from both Korean and Cuban culture into jazz. By keeping their music open to both, Bird’s Eye does not lean too heavily towards one stylistic pull over others. 

The opening track, “Ay-ya”, as with much of the album, leaves a lot of space and air. Mok’s propulsive rhythms and the piece’s use of counterpoint evoke Cuban musical tradition. The band is precise and flows smoothly together, but the approach to time is not as apparent as that used in most Western music, relying more on gestures and moving by breath as in Korean music. Kim’s gayageum – an instrument that has played a central role in Korean traditional music since at least the sixth century – sounds a little more subdued in this piece. An unperceptive listener may even think she is playing harp, guitar, and bass on the track. But closer listening reveals note bends and scoops that could only come from an instrument from somewhere other than the West. Across it all, Leon’s loose melodic lines on the soprano often sound reminiscent of Dave Liebman, further underscoring the music’s ties to the jazz tradition.

Where a little more laidback on “Ay-Ya”, Kim’s gayageum comes to the fore on “A Night for Counting Stars.” Her strong playing seems to stretch and pull both notes and time. She also delivers an incredibly haunting rendition of poet Yun Dong-ju (윤동주), for which the song was named. Leon’s flute repeats a line that sounds almost as if coming from a series of finely tuned drums. It is an idea Mok mirrors, even while continuing to entrancingly guide the group without overtly revealing their course to the listener.

But trying to segregate out the sonic origins of any particular element of the album misses the cohesiveness of the whole project. On Bird’s Eye, the trio soars across a flight path all its own. There is a Korean proverb, “Ga-neun mali gowa-ya oneun gop-da (가는 말이 고와야오는 말이 곱다.)”. Roughly translated it means, “If the outgoing words are beautiful, then the incoming words will be beautiful too.” It is a fitting representation of the album as the gorgeousness of the recorded result reveals the equal beauty of its origins, wherever they lie. 

We sat down with Leon – recently named 2024 Music Composition Fellow by the CINTAS Foundation – to discuss the album, his Roulette commission, and what it means to follow a musical tradition. 

PostGenre: How did this trio come together?

David Leon: Oh, man. Well, I believe Lesley and DoYeon went to school together in Boston years ago. Or Lesley was at Berklee, and DoYeon was at the New England Conservatory. In any event, they knew each other and played together a little bit before. DoYeon then went to New York. That is where I first heard her perform. She was with Nick Dunston’s band. It was a one-off thing that he did with her.

I think after hearing that show, I thought, “man, I need to play with DoYeon.” At that time, I was already playing a lot with Lesley. So, I put a session together, and we really clicked since the first time. But that first time together was about a month before COVID hit the United States. Because of the pandemic, we didn’t play again for a year and a half or so. But we got back together and recorded once the pandemic ended. 

PG: When writing music for the group, are you writing parts for DoYeon’s gayageum? It seems like it would be difficult for someone trained in Western concepts and methods of composition to approach composing for the instrument unless they also play it or heavily studied it.

DL: That’s a great question. Through the process of us working together, I started writing more and more for her. I thought of writing for the gayageum as if I were playing a piano with only two fingers. I figured I don’t know as much about the instrument as DoYeon does, so I was better off writing something close to what I like and then letting her fill out the rest of the part.

But recently I have gotten more into learning to write for the gayageum and learning about the instrument. Traditional Korean music has many different symbols for specific ornaments and ways to shape notes. I’m starting to learn what those symbols mean and what they sound like. 

PG:  Before seeing DoYeon perform, how familiar were you with traditional Korean music and instruments? 

DL: I knew nothing about the tradition before I met DoYeon. But after I heard her, I was like, “Wow, what’s this?” She showed me a lot of great records and stuff that I wouldn’t have found on my own.

PG: One interesting thing about traditional Korean music uses notes in between what the West would recognize as notes. Things the West would call microtonality. But when most people in the West think about microtonality from around the world, they usually consider Indian music more than Korean. Do you feel there’s a reason why Korean music is not more often discussed in those conversations? 

DL: You know, I don’t know. But that question does make me think about this idea of microtonality as something that exists. In the West, we have the concept of microtonality. But around the world, the musicians are just playing notes. They have a broader range of notes to use and don’t think of microtonality as a concept. 

I learned about those notes as microtonal ones because I learned Western music first. When I heard DoYeon’s music, I felt it was crazy. The resonances do such special things. The ways that the notes are shaped are also very interesting. And as I’ve been working with her more, we rarely talk about microtonality so much as the resonance and feeling of a note.

But I’ve also long thought about how microtonal concepts connect to the jazz tradition. As an example, Johnny Hodges – the star alto player with Duke Ellington for so many years – was a microtonal player. One of his giant contributions was this tension and release thing with his scoops into notes, and he plays with pitch in that way.

I think there’s a very intuitive way of playing microtonally in these folkloric traditions, and I am calling jazz a folkloric tradition too. You use pitch expressively. As a trio, we thought about microtonality but more in the sense of “if this is where the note sits, how can we get the most juice out of this feeling?” And how do I find that on my saxophone? Of course, I have been able to do that too.  

PG: So, are you reaching those notes primarily through mouth control and false fingerings?

DL: Yeah, mouth control and false fingerings, exactly. There are some fingerings I have worked out, but a lot of it is mouth. The gayageum has a super smooth big string that bends up and down as pitches go into one another. The only way to do that on the saxophone is with your mouth. You bend the pitch down and then shoot it up.

PG: Do you find it difficult, given your Western training and use of a Western instrument, to keep in mind how to play that way, especially while improvising? 

DL: Yeah. It’s super unusual. I don’t know of any saxophone tradition that does that. Again, the closest thing I can think of is maybe Johnny Hodges scooping a major third into a note or something.  

In the Korean tradition, musicians think of every note as being alive. So, one note might extend down a major third and the back up. That’s just part of the way that that note is shaped.  But those of us in the West view those as totally different notes. It’s not note stretching. It is a different note. Changing my worldview and figuring out how to make these sounds with my face is part of why I’m so captivated by this project. I feel like I’m growing into something else with this band.

PG: You have also been studying Cuban folkloric music. Do you see a connection between your work with traditional Korean music and folkloric Cuban music?

DL: Absolutely. Ironically, this project with Lesley and DoYeon sort of started as a Cuban band. The stuff I brought in was much more explicitly rhythmic and based on the Cuban tradition in terms of chords. But as we played together, I quickly realized we were not going to play the music like Cuban musicians would and should go our own way.  I think the best way to play Cuban music is with people who study Cuban music or with Cubans. It is probably the same thing with Korean music. If you have the music in your ear or in your blood, the music will sound much more authentic.

For me, the connection between Cuban and Korean music lies in how time is expressed. Both musics have a way of pushing and pulling the beat. They are loose and stretch the gesture as much as you can until it hits. When it hits, it has a particular weight. It feels like a very abstract thing to connect them, but it was something that worked very well with this band.

The parts that I wrote started as more explicitly Cuban. Then we were like, “Well, what if we just play this in our own flow, respecting the counterpoint I wrote and trying to get things to have their own kind of place in this gestural counterpoint way.” And that use of time was the connection. To even say that feels a little different because so much Korean music is based on breath and breathing, and Cuban music is based on pulse and time. We couldn’t line them up. It didn’t work when we tried to stay with a metronome and try to play it “correctly”; as it looks on the page. But once we thought about it all with breath, we were able to find a cadence.

PG: Was it difficult creating music where time is based on breath and gestures instead of the more traditional Western conceptions of time in music? 

DL: It was challenging. Once we made that connection between these two folkloric traditions, we realized we already have music in the West based on those ideas. Even looking solely at the jazz tradition – the melodies of people like Paul Motion, Ornette Coleman, or Roscoe [Mitchell] fit breath into their song forms. We could play with gestural timelessness from phrase to phrase.

PG: And how does poetry fit into moving from phrase to phrase? The song “Night for Counting Stars” features DoYeon adding a poem by Yun Dong-ju (윤동주). How did the poem become a part of the album?

DL:  Well, for one, DoYeon is a great vocalist. There were a few moments where we felt that the music needed something added to it. The trio was already so barren and stripped down. We started considering things we could add. DoYeon started vocalizing, and it worked well. So, we decided DoYeon should add vocals and go find some text to pair with it. And we found the poem “Night for Counting Stars.” 

Yun Dong-ju was a Korean poet who revolted against imperial Japan in the 1940s. He wrote this particular poem while jailed in a Japanese Fukuoka prison. He wanted the poem to be aspirationally about what he would like to see in the world and his reflections on being in prison.

The way that DoYeon delivered the lyrics – I understood it after I read it in English since  I don’t speak Korean- was very compelling. She provided great counterpoint to the middle part of the tune, which provides a more placid place.

PG: Related to the marrying of different art forms like poetry and music, as part of your Roulette residency, you will present ‘A Divine Echo.’ The work will combine chamber music with wordless puppet theater. What do you see as the connection between chamber music and puppet theater?

DL: Great question. I will say, truthfully, that we are meeting next week for the first time to see how all the music and puppetry will work together. I just started getting into puppets last year after I saw a puppet show and ended up leaving in tears.

I think the way I’m going about writing the music for the piece is a lot more open. We are creating chamber music in that there’s one person for instruments. But I don’t think it’s going to be like a fully orchestrated work.

The style of puppetry we’re drawing from is called Bunraku puppetry, which is a Japanese form where sometimes three people control one puppet. So, there are super choreographed moments because you can’t move the puppet without knowing what the other puppeteers are doing. I found the teamwork aspect fascinating. But, at other times, the puppeteers may split up, and each control different puppets. I wanted to leave room in the story and musical score for all of us to improvise together, knowing where we’re going but also having enough freedom to each go our own way. Speaking more broadly, I see that interplay between collective expression and individual representation as something that puppetry and music both have in common.  

PG: Going back to something you mentioned earlier, you seem to believe an important part of Cuban music is counterpoint. But it seems when most people think of Afro-Cuban music, they think primarily of rhythms. Do you have any sense as to why counterpoint is overlooked when discussing that kind of music?

DL: Well, frankly, I think it’s probably a Western elitist point of view or just plain racism. I think when many people trained in Western music think of counterpoint, the first name that comes to mind is Bach. Too often, we study counterpoint out of books and think about it only in terms of harmony and motifs of development. But Afro folkloric musics have always dealt with counterpoint. As music opens up and you begin improvising, the whole game is really about maintaining a foundational groove and opening it up to counterpoint between people. And, sometimes, you land on the same notes. Sometimes you’re just looking for the hold, and everyone’s fitting into each other, knowing where they fit into that groove, into that pattern.

To me, that also feels like how jazz started. We open up a melody and see how far we can go from it while still having it reflect the melody. So, when I really started learning about Cuban music, I thought “Wow! This is insane how they have such great counterpoint while they’re also making it up.” But, ultimately, it’s not like it’s very different from what we see in the jazz tradition. 

When I first started studying Cuban music, I found it crazy that it had existed for so long, and I didn’t know about it. I feel like folkloric traditions often don’t get their due. Part of that is the musicians themselves. The music comes naturally to them. They were just born with it. And so when you ask them about it, they respond “Ah, you know, it’s just what people do.” 

PG: The press materials for the album have an interesting quote from you about tradition. You indicate that tradition is connected to radicalism, championing individual voices, and creative thought. But many artists can see tradition as a restraint on their creativity. Are you saying that you do not see that as an issue?

DL: Well, I think it depends on the specific tradition. When I said that, I was specifically referring to jazz. There’s a lot of jazz today that holds on to the sounds of the past and the way people made music years ago. We respect Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Cannonball [Adderley], and [Charlie Parker] and often hold them up as the way to play jazz. 

But I feel the reason we respect those people is because they were mavericks. They found their own sound. In keeping with the tradition they set forth, the thing to do is to keep going. Honoring them is not to mimic their style but, rather, to find your own, just as they respected their elders for finding their own, too. I have always said that if Monk or  ingus were around today, they’d be looked at as crazy motherfuckers. I don’t think they’d be accepted. People would say “This music is out” and exclude them from traditional circles. 

PG: Some have even claimed that if applying to a music school today, Monk would probably be rejected for sounding so different from everyone else.

DL: He made up his own rules in terms of how harmony moved. Now, we study it because it is uniquely Monk. But, yeah, I think if a student started making up their own rules at a school, they would get some blowback from not first learning how someone else played. I’m just saying that we can hold space for both. You can study Monk and see how he did things, but also not deny our own creativity and our own ideas.

PG: That is a great perspective because far too often, when people discuss the jazz tradition, they seemingly get stuck on what happened before and whether they are continuing that work. At the same time, you cannot simply ignore history.

DL: There are, obviously, things that come from the history, but I find that being bound to that history and simply trying to recreate it again is problematic. There are so many of us who are so passionate about the tradition but don’t wanna play it the same way that those people did. Why does that mean that I’m not a traditionalist? I feel like I am because the jazz tradition is to be a maverick. 

I will also say that I have found a parallel to that in Cuban music. Speaking to other musicians and playing with them, they’re all on the same page about tradition, as well. None of them say you have to sound like the music that came before. I think, in their case, they don’t even have recordings of what happened then to refer to if they wanted. There’s much more openness to finding your own way as long as you’re respecting the tradition.

PG: Tying back to the unconventional way Monk performed, we interviewed Kris Davis last year on her album ‘Diatom Ribbons Live at the Village Vanguard‘. In it, she mentioned how Monk’s unconventional approach partly came from him trying to recreate microtonal notes on the piano. Kris has also been a mentor of yours. What have you learned the most from her?

DL: That’s a great question. I think early on, Kris imparted to me that music means nothing without the relationships that you keep with the people. Music-making is really about making and maintaining human connections. Those connections are not only with the musicians you are creating with, but also the listener. 

I think many musicians that go through school first, myself included, learn how to play very technically “good” and “right.” But I think the thing that is missing in trying to play so perfectly is, in general, the human component. I think that’s why I’ve gravitated so much toward folkloric music, where the focus is on human connections. I think the human connection part is much more baked into folkloric traditions. A lot of jazz does that too. But I think, in the United States, we sometimes lose some of that aspect of the music. Musicians play gigs and meet with one another, but much of it is for the craft, not forging a personal connection. It’s that personal connection that is vital to creating meaningful music.

‘Bird’s Eye’ will be available on March 8, 2024 on Pyroclastic Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. Leon will also be hosting a free listening party for the album on Bandcamp. You can RSVP here. Leon will present ‘A Divine Echo’ at Roulette Intemedium on May 14, 2024.  More information on David Leon can be found on his website.