Thursday, December 19, 2024, 8:00pm
Set 1 – DoYeon Kim Quintet
Set 2 – Leo Chang and Young Mong

Friday, December 20, 2024, 8:00pm
Set 1 – Lesley Mok
Set 2 – Yuko Fujiyama Duo+

Tickets: code AsianinNY for $15 Discounted Tickets

$25 ADVANCE; $30 DOOR; $20 STUDENT/SENIOR
(w/ ID, SENIOR 65+ – advance and at door)
www.roulette.org

Japanese pianist Yuko Fujiyama founded Contemporary East, Inc. in 2022. The new nonprofit organization aims to showcase the beauty of Eastern expression in improvisational music and provide opportunities for artists of diverse backgrounds across disciplines to converse and create together.

For its inaugural curatorial project, in partnership with Roulette, the Contemporary East Series is thrilled to present four ensembles over two days featuring projects by raising stars Lesley Mok, DoYeon Kim, Leo Chang, and Yuko Fujiyama.

On the first night, Thursday, December 19, 2024, the series kicks off with former Roulette Awarded Artist DoYeon Kim, a renowned traditional gayageum player with a uniquely broad approach to music which incorporates Korean music, jazz, and improvisation, among other influences. DoYeon introduced the gayageum into the improvisational music scene worldwide. Her recent collaborative projects have expanded to include dancers, actors and visual artists. The second set will feature the former Roulette commissioned artist Leo Chang with his band Young Mong – a project with Alex Zhang Hungtai and Che Chen, whose long form improvisational experiments create a rootless, stateless, and borderless state of mind. Young Mong performed at Roulette in June of 2024 with Tashi Dorji for Chang’s commission. Chang lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai and moved to the United States in 2011.

For the second night, drummer Lesley Mok will perform works from her debut record The Living Collection featuring a 10-piece band that crosses musical communities – jazz, concert music, experimental electronics, and beyond. Lesley’s work focuses on overacting humanness to explore ideas about alienness and privilege. Their work draws from queer and feminist art practices, Chinese philosophy, Afro-Cuban musical traditions, futurist perspectives, and ancestral knowledge.

Lesley is a recipient of the 2022 Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium, 2021 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award, Hermitage Fellow, and the 2021 Van Lier Artist at the Asian American Arts Alliance. Their work has been commissioned and performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, and JACK Quartet.

The series will conclude with a performance by Yuko Fujiyama, a renowned classically trained pianist whose improvisational compositions and collaborations have established her as an essential part of the experimental scene in New York City since 90s. Fujiyama will perform her original compositions and improvisations in collaboration with Mok, flutist Robert Dick and dancer Miki Orihara, a former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

This series is supported by the New York Council on the Arts. During the evening, there will be a sake tasting provided by Dassai, an exquisite quality of sake produced in upstate New York.  

For more information about this series please visit www.contemproaryeast.org