My First Jazz Composition
- 작곡하는 경영학도 Hakdo
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
One night in May of 2017, just after I had become an adult,
I sat alone on a bench near my house, listening to Bill Evans' My Foolish Heart.
Within thirty minutes, I forced four bottles of soju(Korean liquor) down my throat.
It was an act of desperation born from heartbreak.
I wanted to completely numb my body and mind with an absurd amount of alcohol.
At the same time, I poured the music I loved most into myself through earphones pressed tightly against my ears, hoping its beauty would overwhelm the emotional pain that heartbreak had left behind.
I wanted to expose my entire being to a pleasure so overwhelming that it would drown out every trace of suffering.
As the alcohol rushed through my brain, Bill Evans' unmistakable lyricism—lonely, fragile, and devastatingly beautiful—wrapped itself around me like a giant anaconda.
I experienced what I can only describe as the most intense musical ecstasy of my life.
Not long afterward, I lost consciousness right there on the bench.
Later, my family told me they had received a call from the police and carried me home safely.
.
.
.
Nearly ten years have passed since that night.
Even now, whenever I drink and begin to feel intoxicated, I always find myself returning to Bill Evans.
Classical music has always been my greatest love.
Yet strangely, whenever alcohol begins to cloud my mind, it is never classical music I reach for.
It is always jazz.
More precisely, it is always Bill Evans.
There is something uniquely poetic about his voicings and harmonic language.
His music carries a melancholy that seems to mirror the loneliness and tragedy of a life often described as "the longest suicide in history."
Listening to him has a peculiar effect.
His music gently uncovers the deepest wounds hidden inside each listener while, paradoxically, healing those very wounds through an artistic beauty that feels almost like a blessing.
Every time I listened to one of his jazz ballads, I fell deeper in love with his music.
At the same time, a desire slowly grew stronger inside me.
I wanted to write a jazz ballad of my own.
Not simply a jazz tune—
but a jazz ballad capable of moving someone's heart the way Bill Evans had moved mine.
For years, I wrote nothing but classical music.
Only recently did I decide that if I truly wanted to understand his world, I needed to study jazz myself.
Earlier this year, around February, I had the privilege of meeting an incredible teacher (@haning__i), and that marked the beginning of my journey into jazz.
The piece that ultimately convinced me to learn jazz was Bill Evans' rendition of Like Someone in Love.
Whenever I listened to those breathtakingly beautiful harmonies unfold through his deeply expressive voicings, my heart felt as though it might burst.
I was overwhelmed with excitement.
"What on earth am I hearing?"
"What kind of harmony is this?"
The mysterious beauty of those harmonies was unlike anything I had encountered in classical music.
I became so captivated that I immediately searched YouTube for a transcription of the performance.
I remember thinking,
"I'm finally going to discover the secret behind these unbelievably beautiful harmonies."
But the moment I opened the score, that excitement quickly turned into frustration.
Everything I had learned through classical harmony seemed completely useless.
No matter how hard I analyzed the chords, I simply couldn't understand them.
Notes that, according to everything I knew, should have clashed horribly somehow coexisted within a single chord—
and together they created harmonies more beautiful than anything I had ever heard.
Months later, after immersing myself in jazz harmony, I finally understood what I had been hearing.
Those mysterious sounds were not exceptions.
They were tensions—
notes that jazz musicians use as naturally as breathing.
I began studying jazz in February of 2026.
Three months later, thanks to the guidance of my wonderful teacher, I found myself writing my very first jazz ballad.
Although I'm not entirely satisfied with the recording itself, this piece means a great deal to me.
For the first time in my life, I was able to compose using rich jazz harmonies and colorful tensions that had always felt completely out of reach when I was writing classical music.
That alone makes this composition incredibly meaningful to me.
I hope my very first original jazz composition finds its way into the hearts of many listeners.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way,
it may become the beginning of another long musical journey—just as Bill Evans' music once became the beginning of mine.
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