Oakland Freedom Jazz Society:
Jakob Pek Group + Sung Kim (solo)
Jakob Pek GROUP
Jakob Pek is a musician and artist based in Oakland, CA. He creates a contemporary world music for the new century. Avant-garde, experimental, and improvisational in nature, Jakob's music interweaves chaos with symmetry, harmonizing refined expressions of familiar sonic worlds with journeys into uncharted domains of abstraction and discovery. To hear Jakob perform is to hear a well-versed specialist of improvisation. Inspired in equal parts by nature and culture, Jakob's improvisations feel somehow transcontinental and transhistorical, yet distinctly of the here and now. A single improvised session by Jakob may traverse a multitude of atmospheres all with a well-trained formal flow and clarity.Established palettes and practices—American fingerstyle and blues guitar, Indian rhythm, electronic music, Japanese Noh theater, etc.—are comfortably present and spiritually represented amidst abstraction, experimentation, and a contemporary approach. His stream of diverse influences insists upon a clarity of identity and cohesion as found techniques and vocabularies emerge and overlap. Ingested idioms merge and transfigure in this creative matrix. A distinctive soloist, Jakob is equally comfortable joining others as he is guiding the stream on his own. He performs regularly as half of DunkelpeK, a duo with like-minded percussionist Nava Dunkelman. Jakob has performed with many pioneers of contemporary improvisation, such as Fred Frith, David Behrman, Arrington de Dionyso, Theresa Wong, Rent Romus, Chris Brown, and Sandy Ewen. Some of Jakob's notable performances have included performances at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Musica Medicina Festival in Pisaq, Peru, and the Haight Ashbury Street Fair in San Francisco. He studied music and the arts at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and completed graduate work in music at Mills College in Oakland, CA. A creative pioneer and artistic cowboy exploring the outer and inner limits of musical experience, Jakob's work inspires, challenges, and enlightens. He currently lives in Oakland, CA where he performs, creates, and teaches.
SUNG KIM
Solo set with newly-built instruments.
Sung Kim (b. 1975) is an improviser, sculptor, and instrument builder born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Washington, D.C. In 1989, Kim studied ceramic sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art. It was at Corcoran that Kim started building his own variations of the guitar. Kim received his BFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. In Chicago, Kim began to deviate from the guitar to explore other techniques, tonalities, and sympathetic resonance. He also began collaborating with musicians to explore his instruments in an improvisational context. Kim now facilitates his musical and sculptural endeavors by owning and operating an architectural woodworking design/build studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an instrument builder and improvising musician, he is also a former artist-in-residence at Studio Grand.
"My work as an instrument builder was born out of the necessity to create a voice for myself to articulate and to compose. My instruments are all works in progress and by treating them as such, I allow myself to constantly develop and build in an organic manner. Many of these pieces begin as individual components built as I develop solutions dealing with mechanics, playing techniques, and resonance. These components are then combined, modified, or discarded as needed."
DOORS 9:00 PM; SHOW 9:30 PM
$7-15 sliding scale
Oakland Freedom Jazz Society takes place every Monday night at Studio Grand. Lineups feature avant-jazz, experimental and noise performances by local and touring musicians and multimedia artists. OFJS is a long-running (5 years and counting!) series curated by Fernando Carpenter of VAMP. For more information, check out OFJS's Facebook page.