Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday January 18th, 2012 with Bernard Stepien
Henry Kaiser and Korean music

Henry Kaiser is a very prolific San Francisco Bay Area guitarist. The terminology prolific can be applied to both the quantity of music, usually measured by the number of recordings, the quantity of musical styles he approaches and integrates and finally the quantity of technical experiments he attempts on the guitar. In short, Henry Kaiser is in the lineage of British guitarist Derek Bailey which of course is very far away from the style of Django Reinhardt and has had a mutually beneficial parallel career with Fred Frith, another post Reinhardt guitarist that has pretty similar artistic preoccupations. Among the many musical sources of inspiration, Henry Kaiser has developed a fascination for world music like many other avant-garde musicians. Tonight we will examine his work with Korean kayogum and tonso player Sang-Won Park where Kaiser performs a rare exercise of blending in and out of the musical source, Korean traditional music in a way that is usually more common to visual arts rather than music.