Malo
Biography Malo
Malo (nee Soowol Cheong)
With both power and delicacy in her vocalization, Malo is one of the best jazz vocalists in Korea. Acclaimed as the most artistic, but also the most Korean-styled vocalist, Malo is the heroine who has promoted the status of jazz vocalists in Korea. She can freely sing the sounds she imagines, leaving musical limitations behind. It is a marvelous experience watching her sing breathtaking scat, for which she has been described as the “Queen of Scat” and the “Ella Fitzgerald of Korea.” Her performance was critically acclaimed by one journal as “phenomenally captivating with magical moments.”
Malo is also a versatile artist who performs every role including singing, composition, arrangement, and producing by herself. Malo has specifically focused on how to bring jazz into the Korean sentiment. Malo’s third, fourth, and sixth albums, which were written entirely in the Korean language, broke the common notion that the Korean language doesn’t fit jazz and was acknowledged to “have opened a new era of Korean jazz.” Especially, the third album ‘Cherry Blossoms Are Gone‘ was selected as one of the top 100 records in 2000’s by a webzine 100BEAT and a music portal Soribada.
With two project albums A Lonesome Camellia and Malo Sings Baeho, Malo proved the potential of Korean jazz standards, demonstrating how Korean traditional melodies can attain a modernistic mood when played in jazz. Malo keeps walking her unique path by exploring and seeking a way to bring together the universality of standard jazz with the particularity of Korean jazz into her music.
Malo came across jazz by chance. “When I was 22, I heard a saxophone tune playing in some coffee shop near my university [in Korea] and I couldn’t understand what they were doing,” she recalls.
It was love and intrigue at first earful. “I decided to find out what this ‘jazz’ music was all about. After I graduated from university, with a physics major, I flew to the States and enrolled at the Berklee College of Music [in Boston].”
Malo had grown up with a mixed musical bag. “My dad had an old song book that has hundreds songs of classic arias, world traditional songs, tunes of classic composers and black spiritual songs. I loved to sing those tunes, reading the scores and playing piano by myself. I sometimes also listened to classical, since my sister was studying classical composition.”
Naturally, Malo was drawn to vocalists. Her primary sources of inspiration were divas Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald. “Ella showed me how to approach jazz singing with my mind,” notes Malo.
But the artist who drew her most strongly into the jazz idiom was iconic saxophonist John Coltrane. It was an inspired and natural choice, as he was one of the first jazz musicians to explore ethnic and cultural areas outside the Western world, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbala and the teachings of Indian philosopher and spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Malo has gained renown for her jazz work in Korean, and the third and fourth of her five albums to date – Cherry Blossoms Are Gone and Now To You, released in 2003 and 2007, respectively – have Korean lyrics, with most of the numbers written by Malo. Despite her education at Berklee and her love for jazz, Malo does not try to come across as an American jazz singer. “I can’t be a ‘pure’ jazz singer because I have a different musical background and as a child I listened to Korean traditional music. They are influences that have remained with me all my life.”
In the last half century or so, jazz has increasingly taken on musical influences from around the world and Malo has followed suit, while taking the fundamental differences between English and Korean into account. “We have different structures and pronunciations of language. I’ve tried to put Korean words to my original melodies and to use Korean traditional rhythms. Recently, I’ve been working with old Korean pop songs, trying to bring them into the language of jazz.”
