For This South Korean Composer, Jazz Was An Unexpected Home

When she’s onstage, Jihye Lee does not belong to her audience. Instead, she’s at one with her band. As the conductor, her hands sway with intention, and every member of the orchestra ebbs and flows through each piece. The songs they play are rife with emotion — they reflect not just Lee’s own stories but those of her female ancestors, who live on in each riff and each melody.

Even if you’re not a jazz aficionado, it’s easy to get quickly drawn in by Lee’s music. Driven by pulsating rhythms and swells of brass, each track on her album ”Infinite Connections,” which dropped earlier this year, is a journey on its own. The harmonies feel fresh and full of surprises, yet comforting at the same time.

Born and raised in South Korea, Lee is not only a conductor but a composer, arranger and producer who leads her own 18-piece jazz orchestra. Still somewhat of a newbie to this world, she’s already won numerous awards for her work. Lee has received critical acclaim for the way she translates cultural stories into songs that wordlessly reveal so much about her own experiences.

Lee’s immersion into jazz came from curiosity rather than formal training, and it involved a lot of experimentation. “That made me even more eager to learn about music,” she says. She taught herself to play the electric guitar while in high school, studied vocal performance and songwriting in college, and eventually delved into the indie pop world in Seoul.

Her stint as a K-indie pop singer didn’t last very long, though, as she realized she didn’t enjoy performing as much as she did songwriting. Pretty soon, she discovered that her yearning wasn’t about lyrics, either. “It felt limiting to create something with lyrics, because when you have words, it’s very specific. So I’ve found that it creates limitations on how I can fully express myself,” Lee tells me of her very intentional musical transition.

After moving to the U.S. in 2011 to study jazz composition, she began diving into complex rhythms and found that harmonies turned out to be a natural fit for the genre’s experimental nature. It felt as if she could be herself with a soundtrack that was totally different from what she’d been used to her whole life.

She built her musical community, little by little, through social media and word of mouth — and she eventually had her own team in the form of a big band. It then became all about splicing the foundations of jazz with traditional music from her homeland. The move was inspired by a conversation with two fellow composers, one Japanese and the other Brazilian, about the magic that could come from fusing their musical roots with the most intrinsically American music. “So I started my first experiment back then with a Korean folk song called ‘Bird Song,’” Lee says. “I rearranged that song into a jazz orchestra setting.”

Whenever she performed the song, it appeared that Korean concertgoers appreciated her twist on Indigenous Korean folk rhythms, while non-Korean listeners enjoyed dipping their toes into the fusion of musical styles. Happily, this odd, in-between space felt incredibly energizing to her.

Soon after, in 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns triggered an identity crisis of sorts for Lee. Up until then, she’d been able to visit home whenever she felt depleted — and that was suddenly taken from her. “‘Who am I?’ was the question I kept asking,” she says. “I really questioned what defines me.”

During that time especially, music kept her above water. Amid processing her newly blended identity, she began working on “Infinite Connections.” Each of its nine tracks seamlessly blends contemporary jazz with a particular set of traditional Korean rhythms, which are often characterized by long, repetitive meters that sometimes increase in tempo as a piece progresses.

In the years that followed, grief would be an integral part of how Lee continued to create. Lee was composing a piece about her grandmother, titled “Born in 1935,” right before she passed away. Then, two years later, Lee’s mother had a stroke that left her in an unresponsive state.

“Korean astrology really taught me how to surrender to a bigger being,” Lee says. “The death of my grandmother and my mother’s fate — when you have incidents that you have no control over, you can only blame the sky. You just realize how small we are; we’re just humans. We really have no control over lots of things.”

These twin tragedies left her thinking deeply about “unmyeong,” or fate — a motif on ”Infinite Connections.” With the track “Karma,” Lee suggests that instead of trying to fight fate, perhaps one should simply try to play the cards they’re dealt. “In Asia, we take it as karma. In a way it’s depressing and miserable, but at the same time, it gives you relief,” she says. “It’s not my fault — maybe I was given this life and there are certain things I have to learn.”

And so, Lee’s female ancestors were unexpected muses reminding her of who she is when she felt lost. Through music, she learned that whenever she couldn’t return home to the familiar, she could access comfort through their stories, their experiences and the strength they passed down.

Despite the poignant subject matter on ”Infinite Connections,” many of the tracks shimmer with hopeful energy. Lee explains that while part of this sound can be attributed to the role of brass instruments in jazz generally, she wanted to convey a message of hope and triumph.

For instance, take “Crossing the River of Grace,” her album’s final piece. “Even though it’s about death, I don’t see death as a bad thing — it’s just a transitioning process,” she notes. “As a warrior, you’ve lived through this life, and now you are going to a new and better place.”

Similarly, “Surrender” is not about surrendering out of fear or despair, but rather making peace with the universe. “You’ve fought for it, you questioned, you blamed, you got angry, but in the end, you’re gladly surrendering to the whole, to a bigger existence,” Lee says. “It starts from sorrow, but it doesn’t end with sorrow.”

Lee’s ancestral ties fueled this album in a way that felt baptismal to her. “It really got me thinking about death and birth, the circle of life and how we’re all connected to nature and [to each other],” Lee says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m really from my mother’s belly — I literally took her blood and flesh, and I’m made out of her body.’ And my mother had it with my grandmother. And if we go really far up, maybe all human beings are from one creation, so horizontally and vertically we’re all connected.”

While this journey was like therapy for her, she knows her music will sound and mean something different to anyone who takes the time to listen. “The audience doesn’t need to know all the stories,” she says. “My role is to create, but once it’s released, my baby will live its own life.”