Those who follow arts, in general, might be familiar with Oan Kim, a renowned French photographer and a professor of visual arts.
Yet, Kim’s artistic interests don’t stop there, as he has been playing with bands that go under the names of Chinese Army and Film Noir, for whom he has directed a number of music videos.
Now Kim goes a step further in his musical pursuits, releasing a solo album under the name of “Oan Kim & The Dirty Jazz.”
As he has a multitude of artistic interests, Kim’s musical tastes and interests obviously don’t limit themselves to one type of music or genre. Going anywhere and everywhere, from jazz to oriental folk to electro and anything you can label as experimental music.
Kim explains the concept he applied to music on this album by saying that he wanted the music to evolve freely “without ever knowing where they would take me, operating almost in a vacuum of space and time gave me a lot of freedom.”
Still, there’s a sometimes thin, and at other times not so thin jazz line that connects all the tracks, driven by Kim’s excellent saxophone playing throughout. As he puts it, “Pop music will never have that miraculous improvised flair of a good jazz solo, while jazz rarely has the enthralling efficacy of pop music. But who said music had to be as polarized as politics? So I wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.”
This jazz thread which Kim weaves in through all tracks makes him not lose the path through all his meanderings and made sure that he actually came up with an intriguing, very coherent debut album.
