Few things can heat up a chilly March night in Juneau quicker than a live, high-energy performance. Juneauites will have the opportunity this weekend to warm up with seven world-class performers from Korea.

Soul Beat Project will perform their blend of improvisational jazz, world music, percussion, singing and dancing at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Juneau-Douglas High School auditorium. Their presence here is due to the hard work of the Korea Foundation, the Juneau Arts & Culture Center and CrossSound.

"I think there is something in it for everyone - those who like popular music, world music, classical music, jazz music, crossover, folk, new - it's all contained in this ensemble," said Jocelyn Clark, director of CrossSound, one of the event's organizers.

Soul Beat Project also is called Yesanjok, which translates as people (jok) who try to make a big mountain (san) with arts (ye). The group draws on Korean traditions while adding more modern elements such as American-based jazz and improvisation.

"Yesanjok is trying to expand people's idea of what jazz is, at least in Korea, (and is) inclusive of other improvisational genres like Korean traditional music. This is happening all over East Asia, the region of which Alaska is more or less a part - the North Pacific. ... Alaskans don't always realize how close we are," Clark said.

The group is made up of seven musicians who also perform as three separate entities in Korea. They combined forces to create Yesanjok in 2006, after running into each other repeatedly at events and foreseeing that they could do something interesting as a whole.

The performers are Lee Kwang-Soo, a singer and dancer widely-known in Korea; Park Je-Chun and Miyeon, a jazz piano and percussion duo; and a traditional Samulnori quartet made up of Lee Young-Kwang, Saon Gyeong-Seo, Gwean Ji-Hoon and Ham Ju-Myung.

A few days ago, Miyeon and Park won two Korean Music Awards, one for Best Crossover and Jazz Album and one for Best Performance. Yesanjok was awarded Performance of the Year in 2008.

"They are all trained in different ways in Korean traditional music. Some have come to it through jazz and rock, and others through shaman song and others through samulnori, meaning 'playing with four things' - in this case four different percussion instruments," Clark said

Those four percussion instruments are a jing, a deep gong; a ggwaenggari, a high-pitched metal instrument resembling a gond; a janggu, an hour-glass shaped drum; and a buk, a barrel drum. Each is linked to a particular phenomenon in nature: wind (jing), lightning (ggwaenggari) rain (janggu) and cloud (buk).

Samulnori is also the name of the group that made the genre famous, a group that visited Juneau in 2001 and received high praise. One member of Yesanjok also played in Samulnori, which has disbanded.

Roots of Korean folk music

The roots of Samulnori come from a type of Korean folk music, "nong-ak" (farmer's music), that combined folk music, acrobatics and dance, and was traditionally performed to celebrate harvests. Kim Duk-Soo, a Korean performer and founder of the group Samulnori, revived the tradition, adding the improvisational elements of American jazz.

At that time in Korea, however, drumming had come to be associated with political protesters, and performances often aroused suspicions of the government. According to a 2006 interview with Kim Duk-Soo in a Korean magazine, traditional instruments were so closely linked with protests that anyone caught playing them could be arrested.

"Actually, Korea's late 19th and 20th century history and its consequences for traditional arts and culture is somewhat similar to the experience of Alaska Natives, though the context is of course different," Clark said. "Nevertheless, a lot of the same cultural issues are being debated in Korea as in Alaska -- not subsistence and climate change, but language and preservation and revival of traditional arts, traditional arts and modern arts . . . continuity."

The traditional aspects of the music, and the spiritual tie that the musicians have to it, may be difficult for Americans to grasp completely.

"You can't really explain the rhythm in simple religious terms or from a Western point of view," Kim Duk-Soo said in the 2006 interview.

But that should not prevent Alaska audiences from being fully engaged in the musicians' art.

"For an outsider, the revival of drumming traditions means an energetic and entertaining stage production that will have you on the edge of your seat. For Koreans, it is their soul. It is why this project is called Soul Beat Project," Clark said.