Combining traditional Korean instrumentation with improvisational jazz vocal stylings, female quartet Janya aims to restore the lost art of shamanic music, with an added element of appeal for listeners in the Western hemisphere. Drawing on singer Lola Danza’s background in modern and classical training from Berklee College of Music and the Aaron Copland School of Music, ensemble mates Seungmin Cha, Eun Sun Jung, and Woonjung Sim intermix a lively melange of Eastern rhythms and tones.
Danza talks with BlogCritic Justin Kantor about the evolution of her style and how Janya came to light.
Tell me about Janya. How would you describe the group’s style, and what is each player’s role?
Janya is very new. We met in March through my bass player, Sean Conly. I was looking for some Korean shamen. Sean said he knew these three girls playing this traditional shamanic music who were here on a grant. I was singing at the New York Vision Festival series at The Local 269. They came to the gig, and we told them about me. They were looking for a jazz singer. The Daegeum player, Seungmin, gave me a CD. This music was shunned in Korea a while back; it became this gypsy music when Christianity took over. So, it’s a lost art form which the government is now putting money into educating other countries about. It’s coming back.
Anyhow, Seungmin is also an illustrator and a poet. All three girls schlepped their instruments in a cab to my house. We started playing together, and it just clicked. It was something I’d been looking for the last two years. The instrumentation is traditional, but the music is modern. Seungmin plays the Daegeum, which is a bamboo flute. Eun Sun Jung plays a form of zither called a Gayageum. Originally, it was a pentatonic instrument, but then it was modified for modern music. It first had 12 strings, but now has 18 to 25 strings. It’s played by the left hand pressing the strings while the right hand is plucking them. Our drummer is Woonjung Sim, who plays the Janggo as well as gongs and bells.
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