Lindsey: Whoo!
Fiona: I got goosebumps! This is so good!
Lindsey: What?!
Umu: Now, we're about to react to an artist named Lee Dong Woo, who started out as an artist in a Korean boy band and eventually became a comedian
and then a solo artist after becoming blind and starting a family.
Hugo: Oh, my God. Rachel: Whoa!
This first song that you are going to react to
is called 'Sweet Island', and it's featuring a female jazz singer named Shin Yona, who has
also helped Lee Dong Woo as a vocal coach during the recordings. The song was actually originally written in English, and Lee Dong Woo
visited the studio and came up with
some feedback, and then worked on the Korean lyrics later. Who I like to call the Swedish
jazz dream team composed this song: Andreas Öberg, Gustav Karlström, and Simon Petrén. Lindsey: That is a dream team. Umu: They wrote this song, and
Lindsey: I only know one of those people. Lindsey: Andreas is the guitar player in this track
Fiona: Sick Lindsey: That's cool!
Hugo: Un, deux, trois.
Kevin: Ooh, some Chopin technique there.
Isaac: (mimicking piano) Kevin: That was a Chopin arpeggio, specifically.
Melissa: Wow, I love this.
Melissa: This is like jazz Debussy Elizabeth: This is like Debussy
Elizabeth: What?! Melissa: Oh my god!
Melissa: Oh, wait, he's singing.
Fiona: His voice sounds like Christmas.
Lindsey: Her voice is like a blanket. Fiona: The recording quality sounds so good. It sounds so refined. Lindsey: It's very clean. Yeah.
Lindsey: Whoo!
Fiona: I got goosebumps! This is so good!
Lindsey: What?!
Elizabeth: Yes! Yes, trumpets! Melissa: I literally ready to go get a Christmas tree right now. Elizabeth: I love screaming jazz trumpets!
YES!!
Hugo: Mmm!
Jazz!
Rachel: Yeah, jazz.
Yeah. He's also got like a very solid middle range, but I like the bottom, too.
Hugo: Yeah, it's good. Rachel: Wah, wah, wah
It's very interesting with this language.
Seiji: It's like a Count Basie Christmas album. Stephen: Yeah
Stephen: You can tell the drummer has played rock music before.
Jarod: That's some tasty trumpets. Trumpets... Collin: Dude, they have our two favorite instruments, trumpet and guitar.
Kevin: It's got the Christmas sequence. It's got those Christmas sequences.
Lindsey: Oh, that's Andreas.
Fiona: Aaaaaaa!!
Rachel: I like this.
Hugo: Yeah! Guitar solo, huh?
Collin: Dude, I'm enjoying this too much to talk about it.
Rachel: Oh, my God.
They're scatting in Korean!
Seiji: Get some bebop in there.
Stephen: Yeah, that's bop, right there. Seiji: Yeah. Stephen: He just quoted it, too.
Seiji: Yeah.
Seiji: This is pretty straight ahead.
This is like, some straight ahead, hard core jazz. Stephen: Yeah.
Fiona: Off the beat brass hits, giving me life.
Very forward moving song.
Hugo: Their voices fit very well together. Rachel: Yeah
Not too heavy.
Hugo: Mmm!
Rachel: Yeah, their vibrato's going very well.
Hugo: Oh, key change, here we go! Rachel: Here we go!
Stephen: Oh, snap!
we went up!
Stephen: 3 6 2 5, there you go.
Stephen: This is called a shout section.
Hugo: Oh, sh*t! Wow, guitar player went ham on that lick!
Both: (micking guitar)
Lindsey: I'm gonna write a musical, it's going to be entirely centered around the concept that this is the big dance number.
Fiona: Yeah
Lindsey: Just kidding! I'm so not gonna do that.
Seiji: Whoa!
Kevin: That old major scale at the end--just like, yup!
Melissa: Yeah! Elizabeth: Ooh, yeah, let's end it.
Elizabeth: Ooh, did you hear that trill in the brass? It wasn't a gliss down, they just trailed.
Melissa: No, they didn't.
Elizabeth: Yes they did.
Melissa: They glissed it down.
Elizabeth: No, they didn't. Melissa: They did the thing where you like wiggle your fingers and you're like, (mimicking instrument). And then your band director thinks that's a chromatic scale.
Collin: Stop
Every time, damnit!
Okay. It was good. I really enjoyed it. The guitarist was good. I enjoyed his
improvisation, I think.
Jarod: I really liked that. Collin: Yeah, I really did, too. Jaord: I really liked the way their voices"
worked together, too, like in some of the harmonies that they had going on. Really beautiful.
It felt like, you know, Korean Michael Bublé , hanging out with Korean lady... Collin: Aww, don't say that, man.
Oh, sorry! Go on, go on.
It's better than that!
Jarod: Well, obviously it's better than that. I'm just like finding a comparison. Collin: Sorry. Sorry.
Jarod: More than a sense of... Collin: That's like Sinatra, man.
Jarod: Well, more of a contemporary artist
bringing back a style of, maybe not necessarily like Michael Bublé himself, but more just the concept of bringing this classical
jazz art form into the forefront with something that it felt did a really great
job at portraying jazz music. Collin: I mean yeah, was like it just...
Jarod: I felt like it did it, sometimes you see like, you know, these Korean groups trying to pay homage to some sort of genre, and it ends up
not really paying any kind of homage to that sort of genre.
Collin: (singing Mozart 40)
Jarod: (joins singing)
Jarod: Right, where I felt like this did a very great job, and you know.....
Stephen: This was clearly jazz big band,
it had solo section, it had a shout section, there was a clear head, a walking bass line, Seiji: It's like a Sinatra album, pretty much.
Stephen: Yeah
So, it's like jazz pop, kind of. Seiji: It's mixed a little funny. Stephen: Yeah, and like I feel like
the way that the drummer played that I would not have played the same way,
but it was still good. It was still great.
Umu: How would you have played it differently?
Stephen: Well no, like so, for example, a lot of what he
was trying to do is something called a boogaloo groove,
like, when you do something like that,
he was still trying to break up the time, which is something you'll hear like in combo jazz just or modern playing,
but for big band it's not as effective.
Also, like he played the same right cymbal pattern.
That's why you could tell he plays pop or rock music more, just because that's more groove
oriented. To make it sound like a really good
jazz swing groove, you
can't play the same pattern all the time. You like have
bigger
phrases in like two or four bars, you know. Seiji: I think the setups, too. There probably would have been a little bit more setups in it.
Jazz Stephen: Oh, yeah.
Seiji: A little bit more, I don't want to say
crazy, but probably a little bit more crazy. Stephen: Yeah
Stephen: Plus, the equipment he was playing is definitely a rock kit. You can just tell by like how it's pitched.
Lindsey: Wow, that was unreal. Fiona: Wow, this song is so good. It like created a setting.
It wasn't just like a song, you know like it had a story. Lindsey: Yeah, it's like came up with a story.
Fiona: Yeah, it's like, it created a setting. Like, if you close your eyes like you can imagine yourself
somewhere else because of that song. In like a jazz club, and there's an audience, there's people around, Lindsey: Oh, yeah
Fiona: glasses clinking. Lindsey: Yeah Fiona: It just sounds like such a good time.
Lindsey: Yeah. We didn't even have lyrics, and we wrote a story.
Fiona: Ah, so good!
Isaaac: I really like the phrasing. I'm starting to notice more insight, where you have
unisons with the instruments, and then use you space it out, and so like, you have
unisons and then just the instruments, and then you have unisons once again. But then later you have developing motives, where it's like you take
syncopations. So it's like, this one specifically was a dotted eighth note, followed by a sixteenth.
And it just goes da-da, da-da, da-da,
and it keeps going. And so, it's like, the way they develop each one of the sections, it's very fascinating. Kevin: I think it's very
special, when a vocalist sings a happy song but there's some sort of lingering sadness that you feel afterwards, just from
his voice. I think Lee Dong Woo has that, and it might be because of just his life, and you know with this album cover,
I hadn't really taken it into consideration until
you just introduced that he became blind.
And I think this might sound very stereotypical or cheesy, but I wonder if that does affect the way
he sings. And even though I don't understand the lyrics, there's something so beautifully
sad about his voice, even though the song is so upbeat. And I am mesmerized throughout it,
and I just think the song is wonderful.
Hello everyone, I'm Umu, and I'm the channel runner of React to the K. I really hope you enjoyed watching this video. If you're curious about the
videos that we'll be reacting to in the future, I put a link to a
doc with our release schedule
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on our Patreon. On Patreon, you can get access to full unedited pair reaction playlists, reactions to Japanese releases,
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