Metropolis Ensemble hosts internationally acclaimed gayageum artist, DoYeon Kim, to celebrate the release of her debut album, Wellspring, at One Rivington.
November 8th, 7:30pm (Doors @ 7:00)
About The Event
Seoul-born, Brooklyn-based DoYeon Kim plays the gayageum, the Korean silk-string zither. In Wellspring she brings her inner world into dialogue with the world around her. Rather than starting from established categories, she builds each piece through a process of inquiry, folding Korean lullabies into free improvisation.
Fresh off her debut album and two sets at Big Ears, she’s joined by saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock (Anti-House), bassist John Hébert (Fred Hersch Trio) and drummer Satoshi Takeishi. The structures are carefully shaped and the players’ voices push them somewhere new. Kim shares something personal without prescribing how it must be heard.
About The Artists
DoYeon Kim
DoYeon Kim is a Korean artist, composer, improviser, and gayageum player based in New York. Featured by The New York Times for “blazing a trail for a traditional Korean zither in jazz,” Kim is known for her expansive and pioneering performances and compositions and for developing new possibilities for the gayageum within contemporary music.
Her work explores music as a practice of listening, connection, and transformation, drawing from Korean musical traditions, composition, improvisation, voice, and the physical possibilities of the gayageum to create a musical language of her own. Rather than approaching tradition as a fixed boundary, Kim understands it as a living source of knowledge, memory, and possibility. Through the gayageum and voice, she explores questions of memory, grief, identity, relationship, and shared humanity. For Kim, the instrument is not simply a carrier of cultural heritage, but an extension of her own voice and a means of discovering sounds and relationships that have yet to exist.
Kim’s debut album as a bandleader, Wellspring (TAO Forms, 2026), features Tyshawn Sorey, Mat Maneri, and Henry Fraser and has received international critical recognition. DownBeat described the music as “simply breathtaking,” while NPR Music praised Kim’s “masterful debut as a bandleader.” The Wire described her music as “as capacious as an open air temple and as heavy as falling timber,” and The New York Times featured her as an artist “blazing a trail for a traditional Korean zither in jazz.”
Kim has performed and recorded with artists including Tyshawn Sorey, Mark Dresser, Kris Davis, Peter Evans, Matt Mitchell, Anna Webber, Joe Morris, Ingrid Laubrock, Mat Maneri, Cooper-Moore, and others. Her work has been presented at the Vision Festival, Big Ears, Lincoln Center, and venues throughout the United States and internationally. She has also served as a music director, improvisation conductor, and educator.
Kim received the Van Lier Fellowship in 2023, was nominated for a Korean Grammy Award in the crossover category in 2018, and was selected as a Next Jazz Legacy awardee in 2025. In 2025, she also served as Music Director for the ACC X Festival in Gwangju, Korea.
Kim holds degrees from Seoul National University, New England Conservatory, and Berklee College of Music. Based in New York, she continues to develop music that asks not what a tradition should remain, but what it can become.
Ingrid Laubrock
Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer whose work explores the boundaries between musical realms, creating multilayered, dense, and often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock has been described as a “true visionary” by pianist and former Kennedy Center Artistic Director Jason Moran, and as a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by The New Yorker. Her composition Vogelfrei was named one of The New York Times’ “25 Best Classical Tracks of 2018.”
Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Nels Cline, Tyshawn Sorey, Tomeka Reid, Mary Halvorson, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, Tom Rainey, Wet Ink Ensemble, and many others. As a composer, she has written for ensembles ranging from solo performers to chamber orchestras.
Her awards and honors include a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2025 German Jazz Prize, the 2019 Herb Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Music Composition, the 2022 Herb Alpert/Ucross Prize in Music Composition, the 2021 Berklee Institute of Gender Justice Women Composers Collection Grant, the Fellowship in Jazz Composition from the Arts Foundation, the BBC Jazz Award for Innovation, the SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, and the German Record Critics’ Quarterly Award. She has also been named a DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star on soprano saxophone (2015), tenor saxophone (2018), and in composition and large ensemble (2025).
Laubrock has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Yarn/Wire, Grossman Ensemble, The Shifting Foundation, the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, the Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, the Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, jazzahead!, the Wet Ink Ensemble, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, the New York State Council on the Arts, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series, and the EOS Orchestra, among others. She was an Artist-in-Residence with the Wet Ink Ensemble in 2022–23.
Laubrock is part-time faculty at Columbia University and The New School. She holds an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
John Hébert
Bassist John Hébert is a musician, composer, and bandleader whose work is informed by the soulful traditions of his Louisiana roots, the cutting-edge energy of New York’s musical scene and the placeless language of jazz worldwide. Raised in a musical family, Hébert was equally affected by the high-voltage street performances of the Mardi Gras marching bands and New Orleans local jazz scene. John embraces dissonance and spontaneity, built on a foundation of melody and groove, for a sound that is both deeply rooted and boldly exploratory.
Hébert’s work as a bassist prioritizes texture and rhythm--and discovery. His improvisations are not merely a technical display but a way to claim new musical territory, to honor the legacy of jazz while pushing its boundaries.
He’s collaborated with incredible talents including Andrew Hill, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, John Abercrombie, Kenny Wheeler, Paul Motian, Joe Maneri, Mary Havorson, Tomasz Stanko, David Liebman, Uri Caine, Greg Osby, Bill Stewart, Marc Copland, Fred Hersch, Toots Thielemans, Maria Schneider, and many others.
He has played at international festivals and jazz institutions in Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Latin America among others.
In 2023, John received a masters in music from Rutgers University.
His current creative practice includes composition as well as bandleading. Hébert believes in the generative power of collaboration as the true heart of creativity, and of jazz.
Satoshi Takeishi
Satoshi Takeishi, a drummer, percussionist, and arranger, is a native of Mito, Japan. He studied music at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Whether behind a drum set, a hybrid percussion set, or computer-based electronics, Japanese-born musician/ improviser Satoshi Takeishi strives to "connect contrasting elements beyond genre in quest of the essence" in his performances. After attending Berklee College of Music, he lived in Colombia, South America, and Miami, FL before arriving in NYC in 1991. He has performed and recorded in a vast variety of genres, displaying styles such as jazz, rock, contemporary classical, avant-garde, experimental electronic, and world music. Takeishi continues to move among a wide range of musical environments and constantly strives to integrate his diverse musical experience and knowledge.
