Jason Kao Hwang

Soliloquies

True Sound Recordings

António Branco03 outubro 2024

Jazz.pt

(Google translation from Portuguese)

In “Soliloquies”, violinist and improviser Jason Kao Hwang faces the ghosts of his own existence, in an album in which he uses only pizzicato, in the hope of an answer.

A soliloquy is a literary or dramatic resource in which a character addresses himself, expressing in a logical way what is happening in his consciousness. The term comes from a Latin word that precisely means “to speak to oneself”. The North American violinist, violist, composer and improviser Jason Kao Hwang (b. 1957) uses this figure in the musical context in his most recent album, just released by True Sound Recordings, where he explores in improvisations for solo violin a wide range of new perspectives on the autobiographical aspects of his own distinct musical language, developed to bridge the historical-cultural gap that divides his family's first- and second-generation immigration experiences, writes saxophonist and academic Scott Currie in the liner notes. The central question is launched without delay: how can an artist like Jason Kao Hwang reconceive this practice in a context of improvisation, in which the Author and character are one and the same, and his musical statement is composed as extemporaneously as the freely spoken words?” Son of Chinese parents from Hunan who emigrated to the United States at the end of the Second World War, Jason Kao Hwang is a highly experienced musician who has built a very interesting career, playing in various bands, both in his own projects and in collaboration with central figures. jazz and related improvised music of recent decades, such as Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill or William Parker.

The word to Hwang himself: For the children of war survivors, there are conversations with our parents that we wish we had had but couldn't. I often wonder about my parents' vague allusions to the atrocities they survived in China during World War II, because their trauma was far greater than I can imagine, even now, more than twenty years after their deaths. One of the fundamental characteristics of his approach is the way in which he explores the wide range of sonic possibilities provided by the combination of elements from stylistically less restricted jazz, free improvisation, contemporary classical music, and ancient Chinese culture, translated into works for different instrumental configurations, from small ensembles to an opera, “The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown”. In more recent years, Jason Kao Hwang has released a set of relevant albums, which jazz.pt has been reporting on: in 2018 “Blood” appeared, the second album from the Burning Bridges project; the following year the musician presented, in a duo with pianist and vibraphonist Karl Berger, “Conjure”; in 2020, he released the debut record of the Human Rites Trio, with double bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Andrew Drury and in 2022 “Uncharted Faith” in a duo with electronics manipulator J.A. Deane, now past. In 2023 it was the turn of “Book of Stories”, the debut of the trio Critical Response, formed by Hwang, guitarist Anders Nilsson and drummer Michael T.A. Thompson. In “Soliloquies”, Jason Kao Hwang honors “their courage by embracing their voices within mine, to sing in our unknowable silence that surrounds dreams. I'm playing especially for my father, who suffered several strokes, the last of which took his voice."

In this vast and diverse body of work, it is possible to discern a distinctive musical language that “expresses the challenge of speaking one language through another, while at the same time giving voice to the aesthetic life story that shaped it.” His repeated efforts to absorb East Asian musical traditions through his own collaborative conception of contemporary jazz seem to echo his personal struggles, as a monolingual English speaker who grew up in a bilingual Chinese-American home, "to make sense of to his parents' musical conversations, gleaning the meaning of words he couldn't understand by attuning his ears to the native nuances of prosody and rhythm that also accentuated his adopted English, suggesting deeper meanings that would otherwise be lost in translation," points out Scott Currie. The undertaking that Hwang proposed is difficult and risky: an entire album of pizzicato violin – a technique often relegated to punctual effects by classicism – a challenging exercise for himself and for those who listen. The seemingly fortuitous choice to begin the recording session in this way revealed an entire possible path, which required immediate exploration. Following the initial soliloquy, there were many other strummed improvisations, one leading to another, hour after hour, the best way he found to express “unspoken traumatic stories and unresolved emotional legacies.” His extraordinary technique is rooted in the first exercises that date back to his emergence on the New York scene, in the late 1970s, when he became involved in intercultural dynamics, accompanying the dance productions of choreographer Theodora Yoshikami at the Basement Workshop in Chinatown with his loftmate, multi-instrumentalist Will Connell, at his side.

We hear a continuous narrative arc that begins with the echoes of a distant east, in space and time, of “At the Beginning”, with its dramatic tremolos, characteristic of the Chinese pipa masters with whom Hwang collaborated. In pieces such as “Silhouettes Lean Forward” – which takes on more exploratory and abstract contours – or “Bending Branches Into Roots” – which evokes the cycle of life (and death) permanently renewed –, through the percussive attack of plucked violin strings, seeming to accumulate the roles of guitarist, double bassist and even drummer. “Before God” evokes a primordial time, when there was nothing for everything to exist, with the strings plucked with absolutely remarkable precision and delicacy. Harmonics that look like bells, closely associated with the zither traditions of Asia (after all, so close by) punctuate the first section of “Remembering Our Conversation”, of sinuous emotions, and conclude “Hungry Shadows”. Notes for the more flat and tonal “Dreams Dream” and the enchanting “Encirclement”, with the motifs repeated and continually reformulated. “Shards”, which revisits the pipa technique, brings a mysterious and unsettling atmosphere, with a percussive nature that points to the African-Asian sonic nexus, in a way also addressed in “Spinning Coins”. “Vagabond” is a vignette with a detailed melody and “When The River Runs Both Ways”, a hopeful epilogue, evokes the Korean gayageum (an instrument similar to zithers), which postulates in music what communication should be.

With “Soliloquies”, Jason Kao Hwang wonderfully continues a long musical journey, in “hope of an answer”.