Below the 38th Parallel
Alto saxophonist Jim Snidero is combing through his and his wife’s collection of Korean antiques in their Hell’s Kitchen apartment—a mouri jang chest with bamboo nails, a wealthy woman’s namaskin rain shoes, and a small wooden temple guardian. “It stands guard over the Buddha,” he tells JazzTimes about the figurine. “There’s sometimes over a hundred of them.”
Defensiveness, he says, is a quintessentially Korean emotion.
“I think they feel like people have been messing with them all the time,” Snidero says. “That’s one of the most valuable pieces of property on Earth, that peninsula. The Chinese invaded them, the Japanese invaded them. The Japanese made my [Korean] mother-in-law change her name to a Japanese name while they were occupying. So they have this feeling like they can’t really control [their lives] because these countries are so big.”
There’s an ancient Korean word for this feeling: han, encapsulating resentment, incompleteness, and regret—but also resolve.
Jim Snidero’s latest album Project-K, which came out in January, is bookended by two songs referencing that word: “Han,” an original tune, and a cover of “Han O Bak Nyun,” a 500-year-old public-domain folk song. Using a jazz sextet outfitted with gayageum, a folk instrument resembling a zither, the album explores his personal and creative connection to Korea.
There are good reasons for the American saxophonist to reference that country. His wife of 23 years, Myoung-Shin, is Korean, he’s been to South Korea “many, many times,” and he speaks a bit of the language, Snidero was able to break out of the boundaries of bebop, a style he’s been associated with on the New York scene for more than 35 years.
