BLISS RATING: ★★
“Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.” – Louis Armstrong
This series had all the earmarks of being a classic BL and a thought-provoking saga. But it all fell apart in the end. Sadly. It had every human emotional overtone possible. I was so engrossed with its chronicle that I wondered how it was all going to end. And for me it simply crashed and burned.
It starts out so promising. A young pianist Yoon Se Heon (Kim Jin Kwon) is part of a family of classically trained pianists His father is quite a stern taskmaster, and his older brother Yoon Se Jin (Ko Jae Hyun) is following in his father’s footsteps, a bit reluctantly. Se Heon’s passion is not with classical music, however, but with jazz. And so, in his spare time and by himself, he practices jazz music.
Se Heon has returned to school after being homeschooled for a year and finds an old music room to practice playing jazz on a run-down piano. One day, outside, who hears him playing is Han Tae Yi (Ji Ho Guen). He reacts to Se Heon violently and threatens him with harm if he plays that piano again. Tae Yi is a pensive, withdrawn, and obviously depressed young man mourning the loss of his brother who committed suicide. His brother also had an affinity and was also drawn towards jazz which made Tae Yi’s emotions resurface once again.
The story is an orchestrated saga between these two. They become drawn to each other with reasons not fully understood by either. Partly physical attraction but mostly by something within each other that individually touched the other that they were incapable of feeling by themselves. They discovered love and passion. Each needed the other to grow and frankly to survive. Both were facing toxic outcomes – Tae Yi from internal forces while Se Heon from external forces from his abusive father.
Tae Yi had only one close friend who became Se Heon’s mentor. Seo Do Yoon (Song Han Gyeom) is really the only one that can reach Tae Yi and understand him. He becomes a protector for both Tae Yi and Se Heon as he begins to figure out how the two of them feel about each other. He too has strong feelings for another individual who is by all standards not a very likeable individual. He is a bully and difficult to get along with. Yet there is something about Song Joo Ha (Kim Jung Ha) that draws Do Yoon to him. He is deeply in love with him, even if Joo Ha sees him only as a ‘friend’.
Who really S.T.O.L.E. this series? I became obsessed with Tae Yi’s almost mystical brother, played stunningly by Byun Sung Tae. Han Tae Joon is such a complex figure showing no outward signs of instabilities. In an ironic twist, he was in love with Se Heon’s older brother and composed a song, written along with Yoon Se Jin, called “Jazz for Two”. We get to know Tae Joon through his music and the dream-like interludes he had with his brother. Softly, gently. Often misunderstood. Thinking only in the moment and never beyond that. Being overwhelmed by the pain of rejection but knowing that it is you alone that is responsible for your own actions. A deeply reflective role done with great sensitivity to the nature of the subject matter. Never diminishing it and yet never overplaying it. Making it part of the reality of his life and ending it with tragedy.
Admittedly, I was intrigued by this series’ theme. Jazz is a favorite of mine. Jazz has its origin in the African-American community of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA around the late 19th to early 20th Centuries. It was a refreshing, unique, and certainly different to take a genre of music obviously not perhaps well-known to Korea and make it a theme. I found that quite an interesting story and to center such an imaginative and creative love story around it made it all the more so. For that it deserves applause.
The story drifts into all kinds of negative emotions; almost too many to mention. There is suicide, physical abuse, emotional and psychological abuse, bullying, parental intimidation, attempted sexual abuse, and rejection galore. The bullying in this series is intense. The coincidences of connection between the main characters are almost too much to accept. In a weird and ironic twist, I do wish they would have added a supernatural twist to the story to make the tie-in a more esoteric one. That would also have highlighted the story more.
Instead, they made the ending cliché and very disappointing. With all the strong emotional overtones and intensities, suddenly, it turns into a love fest of standard, tropey scenes. The end number of the band was very disappointing to me as it was not jazz at all. If you are going to make a series about jazz and pay homage to it, then it should have ended with a clear example of jazz, not a hybridization of it. I hated that end number simply to showcase the talents of the performers rather than the theme of the series.
This series should have been so much better than what it was. It reflected a lot of wasted potential. You had several people internally hurting and in dark places with sad lives where jazz could have lifted them out of their doldrums. But instead, the series went for cliches and formulaic endings. You also had a completely unresolved relationship between Seo Do Yoon and Song Joo Ha, which interestingly was full of intense emotional pain. It teased that there could be more, yet perhaps never will be. And that would be reasonable, provided you did not leave the audience hanging with no indication of if that relationship would develop or not. One of the more disappointing aspects of this series to be sure. Their relationship was so much more raw and organic and way more interesting. I wish they had been the main couple.
An even larger problem with this series is its lack of focus in telling a moral story. It uses deleterious means to get its point across. Bullying, abuse, intimidation. Granted I understand that certain characters were emotionally ‘hurting’ but that is not a legitimate excuse to use violence as a means to express your emotional anguishes.
That seems to be a standard method of conveying to the world how gay people deal with their emotional disconnects. This theme is becoming almost canonical in BLs but it is getting exasperating to see. It cheapens the whole notion of what BLs are supposed to be and gives the impression that one must go through some sort of negative phase of development before you can develop a relationship with another guy. In addition, you have the usual standard cliché mystic of falling in love with a ‘bad boy’ as being a good thing, which it is not, especially one who is physically and sexually abusive. That is a wrong message to send.
I also found their love making ridiculously contrived with camera angles to make it look like something was happening when in reality nothing was. I am so tired of that technique. You know we can see that, right! If actors do not want to play gay parts and/or if directors do not want to show honest lovemaking and/or casting directors or mangers do not want their actors ‘labeled’, and/or any other of a myriad of reasons why you will not show amorousness, then stay out of doing Bls. Please stop being insulting to those of us who are gay and can see right through this façade.
This is another very disappointing series that looked good but has little redemptive qualities. You missed the whole point of jazz. Jazz is celebrating the darker side of life. You only showed toxicity and little in its life-affirming qualities. The theme was there; its execution was not. It is right in front of your eyes, and you just did not see it.
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