eJazzNews Archive

N. Korean Flees for Love of Jazz Piano

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By Frances Yoon

In March 2006, eJazzNews carried Frances Yoon’s report from Seoul on Kim Cheol-woong, a classically trained North Korean pianist who left his country after hearing Western popular music and jazz while studying in Moscow. He was 31, teaching music in South Korea, and told the reporter he dreamed of playing Carnegie Hall. Three years later he made his debut there.

What the 2006 report said

Kim came from a privileged family, which allowed him to study piano at an elite music university in Pyongyang. He said the curriculum was built on classical music written before the 19th century, and that everything outside the approved styles was lumped together as “jazz” and treated as barbaric, the worst of capitalist culture. During further study in Russia he heard music in a Moscow cafe that he could never have played at home, above all Richard Clayderman’s “A Comme Amour.” After he returned to Pyongyang in 1999 and joined a state orchestra, a security official caught him playing a Clayderman piece and he was made to write a 10-page apology.

In 2001 he crossed the Tumen River into China. There he worked 12 hours a day loading wood at a factory, until after seven months he found a piano at a nearby church. After two failed attempts to leave China, the report said, he reached South Korea in the spring of 2003, where he played in bars, taught piano and founded an arts organization for North Korean defectors. He told the reporter that in the North “We musicians were only a means and a tool to maintain the regime,” and that he hoped music could help bring the two Koreas closer.

What he has said since

In a 2015 interview with the BBC, Kim added detail the 2006 report left out. He had been practicing “A Comme Amour” to play when he proposed to his girlfriend, and someone passing his home heard the French ballad and reported him to the state security department. After the interrogation and the written apology, he decided to leave. At the Tumen River he handed the $2,000 in cash he was carrying to soldiers who then helped him across, and he later worked on farms and as a logger before the church and its piano gave him a way back to music.

On censorship, he told The Korea Herald in 2020 that Western music written before the 20th century can be played freely in North Korea, while later music has to be screened by the authorities, and that every type of music is censored. The 2006 report had already noted that people could be imprisoned for listening to South Korean music.

Carnegie Hall and after

According to the Korea Herald interview, Kim performed with the London Philharmonic in 2005, gave his first solo recital in South Korea in 2007, the first of his life, and made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2009. The same interview described him as a professor at Seoul National University of Education, and said he had staged a concert of music from both Koreas every year since 2013. By 2015 he had also founded a youth orchestra that brought together teenagers from North and South Korea, and in 2020 he said he was widening his repertoire toward jazz, naming George Gershwin’s An American in Paris as a current interest.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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