(All concerts take place at 8:00pm in the Music Recital Hall. Admission for each is $15 general and $8 for students).

The World Music Series this spring opens with Korean music performed by Jin Hi Kim on Tuesday, February 7. Kim is an internationally acclaimed innovative komungo (Korean fourth century fretted board zither) virtuoso and a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition. For the past three decades she has performed as soloist her own compositions and improvisations at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Royal Festival Hall (London), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and many significant new music festivals, jazz festivals, museums and universities throughout the USA, Europe, Canada, South America, Russia, Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

Kim's compositions have been commissioned by leading contemporary musicians and producers including Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Chamber Music Society for the Lincoln Center, Xenakis Ensemble, Boston Modern Music Project, New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Zeitgeist, The Kitchen and Japan Society. Kim has received the Award for Music Composition from the Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, which was created by John Cage and Jasper Johns to support innovative creative work in the arts. She is a recipient of American Composers Orchestra Composer Fellowship, Wolff Ebermann Prize for at International Theater Institute, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, MAP fund from Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Meet The Composer US Commission as well as the artist residence fellowship for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy, Asian Cultural Council to Japan, Djerassi Foundation, California, and Freeman Artist-In-Residence at Cornell University.

On Saturday, April 7, Turkish music will be presented by the Aksak Duo, featuring guitarist Mesut Özgen and violinist Cihat Askin. Mesut Özgen has performed and taught master classes throughout the United States, Spain, and Turkey and has been on the guitar faculty at UC Santa Cruz since 1998. He was the first guitarist to be awarded the "Dean's Prize," which is the highest honorary prize of the Yale School of Music.

Özgen began playing guitar in 1981 while pursuing his study at the School of Medicine. During his seven years of medical practice, as a self-taught guitarist, he also played concerts and taught guitar at the Gazi University School of Music Education and the Hacettepe University in his native Turkey. Özgen completed both his Master of Music degree and Artist Diploma at Yale. Later, Özgen studied with Professor Frank Koonce in the doctoral program at Arizona State University.

Cihat Askın was born in Istanbbul and began playing the violin at the age of 11, giving his first recital at the age of 12 and being able to play all Paganini Caprices before he was 15. After his recital in 1983 he was invited by the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra to play Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.

Askin graduated from the Turkish State Conservatory at Istanbul Technical University in 1989. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and at City University in 1992-96 and became an Associate Professor in Istanbul Technical University in 1998. He has been a violin teacher at the Keshet Eilon Violin Master-Classes in Israel since 1999, and is the music director of the Istanbul Chamber Orchestra and a founder of the Istanbul Modern Music Ensemble (IMME).

He has won several awards including the Istanbul Philharmonic Society Award, Best Bartók interpreter at the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition (1987), Outstanding Merit Prize at the London Carl Flesch International Violin Competition (1990) and Foyer des Artistes (Italy, 2002). He is currently Professor of Music at the Turkish State Music Conservatory, and uses a violin by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume (1846) in his concerts.

The Kora Band will blend African music and jazz on Wednesday, April 11. Pianist, composer, and bandleader Andrew Oliver is a rising young musician on the Northwest jazz scene, directing a number of diverse groups in Portland and Seattle. After growing up in Portland, he relocated to New Orleans to study jazz, but was flooded out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and returned home. He began playing with New Orleans native saxophonist Devin Phillips and long-time New Orleans drummer Mark DiFlorio, who had also relocated to Portland after the storm. In 2007 Devin’s quartet featuring Andrew and Mark was one of ten groups selected from a pool of 200 bands to particpate in the U.S. State Department’s Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad program. They toured five West African countries performing, teaching workshops, and working with local musicians as cultural ambassadors of the U.S.

After this unique experience, Andrew was inspired to dive deeper into the relationship between jazz and West African music. His exploration eventually led to the founding of the Kora Band, featuring atypical instrumentation that highlights Kane Mathis on the 21-string Kora, a traditional harp from West Africa. Kane is one of the most accomplished American Kora players, having studied with the famous Jobarteh (Diabate) family in Gambia, in the same compound that produced three generations of the country’s most famous musicians. This study resulted in diplomas and certificates of recognition from Malamini Jobarteh, The Gambian minister of culture, and the President of the Gambia.