It’s like finding a parallel reality.

After having finished a sponsored to South Korea for music professionals in October, I stayed in the field, taking the flight alone. I did an exercise for the Jarasum Jazz International Festival, a few hours before Seoul, and I arrived in the middle of a set through the foreign couple of Paolo Fresu, Omar Sosa and Trilok Gurtu.

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I made a double plug, then a triple plug. A general public of the maximum of the time smiled and danced, appearing a wonderful love for music. I looked for a credible explanation. Was a K-Pop video on a screen near the jazz trio? No, a festival volunteer explained: the enthusiasm of the crowd all for the improvised trumpeter, pianist and percussionist on stage. Young people, he said: They like jazz.

“Walking to the level at the Jazz Jarasum festival is like stumbleding in a universe of choice where jazz is young, modern, sexy and great,” explains Joshua Redman, the remarkable American saxophonist.

After Redman played Jarasum a few years ago, the director of the Festival in Jae-Jin remembers that the saxophonist who said he was looking to bring part of the public to the United States, were used to hear this kind of thing.

“In fact, many foreign visitors are so surprised to see the young audience in Korea, especially for this festival,” he says. “Wherever I attend Jazz festivals, the public usually has more than 50 or even 60, but my festival is twenty years and thirty years. “

Now in his twelfth year, Jarasum Jazz Festival was registered between 200,000 and 250,000 other people for 3 days. Jarasum estimates that 88% of his 2015 audience was under 40. To put this demography in perspective, the figures were fundamentally returned to the Newport Jazz Festival, where a 2012 survey revealed that 82% of its audience is over forty -five years old.

The art of jazz is blooming, we know, with young musicians who come from music worldwide. But the jazz company sees a lot of hair in the aging of the music, its sea of ​​gray hair. And nowhere in the world, I have noticed a jazz as young as in Jarasum: the crowd was felt anachronistic, as a resurrection of the 21st century of the popularity of the jazz swing time.

A young jazz audience is a rarity, in fact, that has a kind of holy grail for presenters. So how does Jarasum do it?

Zen and the art of presentation

Koreans temporarily emphasize that music festivals in general are elegant among other young people. Music festivals are really popular among other young people in the United States as well: Jazz festivals, not so much.

The traditional wisdom of coming to a Jazz-Faestival audience is to make programming bigger, which means adding heads of friendly posters for pop. It is true that jarasum is not exactly a fear rate in the face of jazz authenticity. In several stages, the festival presents an aggregate of jazz and global music, local and foreigners, sounds and plasticizing multitudes. Jazz Cognenti does not seem worried that Spyro Gyra is also the maximum to reach the headlines that Heath brothers. Korean jazz qualifiability is quite represented in the program, and there is also an annual popular festival for emerging Korean musicians. The maximum programming characteristic of Jarasum is his globalism: this year’s appearance was the Brazilian guitarist Badi Assad, the bassist born in Cameroon Richard Bona and the Russian saxophonist Igor Butman, as well as many maximum productive musicians in Germany “Focus Country” of 2015.

The technique of giant tents is almost almost total history. In fact, the festival is literally based on many small tents. As for Jae -Jin presented the Jarasum for the first time in 2004, the festival frame, an island of the river that hit the heavy rains, seemed more productive choice to be more productive. But a fashion of the camp began almost at the same time and helped make the region an ecological destruction of the first.

After the first years of the festival, when it was said that its main financing of the local government arrived here with too many heavy applications (Festival football fields, for example), began to build towards what calls a “gold balance”: a financing of the government of the third part, a third of commercial financing and a 3rd income of price tickets. After some raw patches, Jarasum’s budget has been established more or less in this equilibrium of 3 parts, and the festival is booming. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea has appointed Jarasum the most productive country festival in 2014. In itself, it also won renown, giving meetings about “media performance” in a university and publishing a 2014 thesis entitled Youth is a hot jazz festival.

In addition to a broad mentality program, a Cross -camping frame and forged funds, there is a contradictory thing in the good fortune of Jarasum. “From the beginning,” he explains, “the main themes of my festival were nature, friends and family, and rest and refrigerium, with less accessories about music. “

Yes, that is correct. In attributes, the good fortune of its music festival to a music philosophy at the end. Discover the logo in the 2015 Jarasum trailer:

In an announcement that Wes Anderson may have done, Jarasum sells an adventure of the past fashionable camp, selling the island of the River Island Festival as the Hipster Wonderland. The names of the interpreters musicians seem on a ship, a card, an electronic book, accessories for a weekend in the country, sending a message that music is an accessory for the global revelation of Jarasum.

“Verify that I dream of the public,” he said when I asked him questions about the promotional film. “They just need to spend one or two days spending a very non -violent vacation with a circle of family and friends, and maybe there is also music. “

As is what the trailer does not have. There are no low angle plans of the artists, which forces the viewer to search with a mandatory arch; There is no bill of mythical artists, who require wisdom of the initiates of what makes them so mythical. Nowhere, the Jarasum trailer hints only the jazz heads will appreciate the festival very well.

In Jarasum, I have an idea of ​​the Bluegrass festival in Les Teluride near my house in Colorado, where a mountain stage and a camp scene are based on the festival attendees both as the official music program. But Jarasum’s ecosision defines his drawing so massively that his program can be out of purpose. The last afternoon of the festival, I discovered Kim Chan-Hee, 26, and her boyfriend, 32, hitting selfies with a large signal from the Jarasum Jazz festival. It was his moment at Jarasum, they said, although when I asked questions about their favorite act at this festival this year, they could not even call one.

“We had just come here for the atmosphere, to appreciate the atmosphere,” Kim said, looking a bit that he needed to say this. “We brought a tent. We don’t know much about jazz, but that’s good. ” Around 3 rooms of the festival, the attendees I met had a similar story.

In the other spectrum end, I discovered Lee Cheong-Ah, 28, listening to the Jeon Yong Jun group, a Korean quintet, when he appreciated the wine and a picnic. (Festival attendees can bring any food and drink to the Jarasum field, and occasionally look as well -dressed nomads while traveling in their provisions made in stacked bags and refrigerators). Lee said he was listening to jazz from the best school. Jazz is his favorite type of music, and Michel Petrucciani is his favorite musician. In addition to making an annual pilgrimage to Jarasum, Lee buys jazz recordings and moves Seoul jazz bars like once on a blue moon.

Around a quarter of the festival, the attendees I met were the serious fans of Lee’s jazz. The abyss between Kim Chan-Hee and Lee Cheong-Ah, between Jarasum jazz agnós and jazz fans, extends. Many festival attendees did not laughed who is in the program, however, those who seem devout genuine jazz.

Some of the lovers of the festivals excited in Jarasum were local holiday infantry men. In the front of the festival, an organization of these camouflage boys, all over 20 years old, told me they were about to listen to jazz for the first time. I wondered how music would like.

“Of course, we will love,” said one of them. “Because?”

It’s jazz, but I love it

“They really took me through the young and incredibly enthusiastic public, as well as mass participation,” said American guitarist John Scofield, who directed in the jarasum in 2012. “The youngest Korean audience in general is very favorable for jazz enthusiasts who behaved as if they were a rock concert. ”

Even the many other people in Jarasum who do not know jazz demonstrate this enthusiasm of the rock taste for that. This predilection can have something to do with the recent cultural history of South Korea. For decades, an authoritarian Korean government has established an impediment to the country’s musical development. Jazz is, therefore, new for Koreans.

“Although Korea also had a jazz story at the time of Swing music, the genuine time of the advent of jazz in Korea was the end of the 80s,” said Kim Gwang-Hyun, editor of the jazz magazine per month of jazzzpeople per month. “At the end of the 1980s, the era of democratization in Korea was introduced, other types of culture were introduced. In addition, jazz was used in many videos and television systems in this period, which helped popularization. “

In Korea, jazz is not a primary musical culture opposite to which rock rebelled, so Koreans are not predisposed to see jazz as the obsolete predecessor of new and young pop and pop pop. In other words, an express musical story provides jazz with a greater probability of sympathy among young Koreans.

But Jarasum builds a lasting jazz audience? After attending the festival, all these young Urbanites pay the jazz clubs in Seoul? Do they pass their smartphones and buy everything in the Scofield’s rear catalog? The general belief is that some do so, perhaps, but not the majority. For “Korean young people who live very busy lives in big cities,” Kim of Jazzpeople says: “Jazz festivals are a delegate once a year to spend the picnic time with music. It is not simple to wait for you to hear them serious. “

The wonderful opportunity at the Jarasum festival, the public, does not care if it is jazz, perhaps a great challenge outside the festival: the public does not care about jazz to expand a deeper appreciation. While Jarasum exposes other people to jazz in a live environment, Kim says that education is mandatory for a sustainable audience. And that raises a paradox: a more edifying technique for jazz can alienate many of those who now like such informal music at the festival.

“It was a new delight for young Koreans, and in many ways, he succeeded,” Kim said. “But I will have to say that a festival cannot replace everything. It is vital that Americans pay more attention and are impatient to know more. “

Therefore, it is difficult to say how many 200,000 Jarasum participants will be serious jazz fans. However, the festival manages to make millennials exceed their jazz scenes, and that only seems a victory for this American. If, for a single weekend in October of each year, each of the Koreans must be at a jazz festival, it will have to be intelligent for music, right?

“The majority of the public do not have many opportunities to pay attention to jazz,” said Jae-Jin Promoter. “But my festival can have this opportunity, and perhaps the public can locate that jazz is quite type and is not bad. “

Americans reproduce the relative novelty of jazz in Korea, and we don’t want; Our deep jazz history is a national treasure. But American festivals can be informed of the presentation of Jarasum Jazz, which gives music as a component of a refreshing weekend; who does not expect commitments with a jazz fraternity; That he is happy with a “quite charming and is not bad” reception.

As a user who has also been the only or thirty years in a crowd, the young animated audience of Jarasum gave me an instinctive hope. During my weekend at Jarasum, I didn’t worry about the whole long jazz streak.

Michelle Mercer reviews jazz and music for everything considered.