Youn Sun Nah feat. Bojan Z

Youn Sun Nah

Youn Sun Nah is among contemporary jazz’s most admired vocalists, an international award-winning singer, songwriter, and performer, hailed by The Guardian for her “seamless” movement “between impressionistic high drama, abstract improv, or a folk artist’s candid simplicity.” The Seoul, South Korea-based artist began her musical journey with piano lessons as a child before singing gospel with the Korean Symphony Orchestra in her twenties. A career in musical theatre beckoned but Youn Sun Nah instead chose to pursue her own muse by attending Paris’ Institut National de Musique de Beauvais, Nadia and Lili Boulanger Conservatory, and the CIM, a school of jazz and contemporary music. Youn Sun Nah quickly aMirmed herself as an exceptional vocalist, winning prizes at jazz festivals and competitions before truly arriving in 2001 with her debut album Reflet. A series of increasingly acclaimed albums followed, including 2010’s breakthrough Same Girl and 2013’s Lento, earning her Gold certification in both France and Germany amidst a plethora of honors and accolades.  

Along with her growing body of work as recording artist, Youn Sun Nah has performed countless live shows and tours in historic venues and at prestigious festivals across Europe, Asia, and North America, including performances at closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2017 International Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert in Havana, Cuba, the latter of which saw her performing alongside such fellow icons as Herbie Hancock, Regina Carter, Esperanza Spalding, Antonio Sanchez, and more.  

Appointed Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2019, Youn Sun Nah made her Warner Music debut that same year with the highly lauded Immersion. Stuck in place by the pandemic, Youn Sun Nah wrote and recorded her first ever collection of all original songs, 2022’s evocative Waking World, marked as always by deep emotional insight and a haunting musical approach bridging pop gestures, folk intimacy, and surprising jazz instrumentations. In 2024, with the remarkable Elles, Youn Sun Nah continues to explore musical possibilities through her idiosyncratic creativity and deep sense of craft, reaching across boundaries and borders to once again touch something universal and true.

BOJAN Z 

Multiple award-winning pianist Bojan Z (for Zulfikarpasic) was born in former Yugoslavia  in 1968 and grew up in an environment where music was a widespread, daily activity. Starting classical piano lessons at the age of 5, he found himself in the Belgrade rock scene as a youngster, obtained a scholarship at the age of 18 to study jazz with Clare Fischer in the US, to be awarded ‘Best Young Jazz Musician of Yugoslavia’a few years later. At the age of 20 he left his hometown and settled in Paris, where he established himself as an inevitable element of the French jazz scene.  

More than two decades later, he has an impressive record to his name. Apart from being a much sought-after sideman, collaborating with outstanding names like Henri Texier, Michel Portal and Julien Lourau, BZ has made eight albums under his own name. Six of them were released on Label Bleu, covering a wide range of styles and formations. The first three, two quartets and his multi-ethnical project Koreni, resulted in BZ’s status as the pioneer who brought Balkan influences into jazz. They were followed by his successful first solo album Solobsession and two trio albums on which he collaborated with contemporary jazz greats from the American scene. 

His later works have been released on Emarcy/Universal, among which his acclaimed and award winning second piano solo album entitled Soul Shelter, released in February 2012, on which he plays both his beloved Fazioli piano and the customized fuzzy Fender Rhodes, also known as ‘xenophone’, that became one of his trademarks. 

BZ has also been producing albums for other musicians, like Michel Portal’s Baïlador (featuring Jack Dejohnette, Scott Colley and Ambrose Akinmusire) and in 2021 the very well received MP85 celebrating the 85th birthday of Portal, Bosnian singer Amira Medunjanin’s Amulette.  

He recently released two albums as a co-leader: Duo with saxophonist Julien Lourau and Housewarming with trombonist Nils Wogram. He also released a new solo album, As Is, as well as the Pianoforte album with the 4 pianists band, which includes Baptiste Trotignon, Pierre de Bethmann, and Éric Legnini. With this band, he won two ‘Victoires du Jazz in France’ in 2025 for Best Album and Best Concert. 

BZ has a very personal sense of style, somehow always escaping classification. He harmoniously blends and twists his colourful musical baggage, ranging from his thorough classical music schooling, through Brazilian music and The Beatles to Balkan folklore, blues and jazz. Bojan Z, not afraid to wander off the beaten tracks, yet never losing his taste for melody and song form, definitely counts as one of the most remarkably individual talents of European jazz.