I’m not the biggest jazz fan, a lot of it is too melancholic for me. But jazz can also be very cool, classy, sexy.
This two-and-a-half-hour recording is a real stroke of luck. There are also guest appearances by a Korean haegum player and a Mongolian singer.
Haegum is a two-stringed tubular skewer fiddle from Korea. As for Mongolia, it’s a country with just 3 million inhabitants, jazz has a fifty-year history.
Interestingly, it is a German named Martin Zenker who discovered Mongolia as a vibrant jazz laboratory twelve years ago and has been helping to advance Mongolian jazz ever since.
Last year, Zenker even started a “Big Band Project” in Mongolia. In the capital Ulaanbaatar, there are also some appealing jazz clubs such as the “Fat Cat.”