From Gayageum to “Golden,” KYCC’s 25th Benefit Concert Lives Up to Rooted & Rising

A benefit concert can sometimes feel like a fundraiser first and a concert second. KYCC’s 25th Annual Benefit Concert rarely did.

Held Aug. 20 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Rooted & Rising brought together artists who, on paper, did not necessarily seem like they belonged on the same bill. Korean ballad singer Baek Ji-young shared the program with Grammy-winning Los Angeles band La Santa Cecilia, singer-songwriter Arlissa, gayageum master Yang Seung-Hee and a large orchestra made up of musicians from the Korean American Music Foundation’s KYCC Festival Orchestra, Seocho Philharmonia and ARKO Ensemble. The concert raised support for KYCC’s programs serving families throughout Koreatown.

What made the night work was that those differences were the point.

The concert began about as traditionally as Walt Disney Concert Hall allows, with the orchestra taking on the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But that was only one definition of tradition. Soon after, the focus shifted from a Western orchestral standard to the gayageum and Korean traditional music.

Yang Seung-Hee performed “Soul of Korea” before joining Min Eui-sik, Kim Hyung-sub and Lee Moon-hee for “East Meets West,” a Hwang Byeong-gi composition arranged with orchestra by Ye-seung Oh. Hearing the gayageum in this setting did not feel like a historical demonstration inserted into a pop concert. The instruments remained at the center while the orchestra expanded what was happening around them.

Yang is particularly important to that history. A longtime student and successor of Kim Juk-pa, she is a holder of Korea’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage for gayageum sanjo and has spent decades preserving the musical lineage that traces back to Kim Chang-jo, one of the foundational figures in modern sanjo.

The orchestra itself also carried some of the concert’s “rising” half. ARKO Ensemble, a Korea Arts Council project designed to give emerging Korean classical musicians international performance experience, joined the KYCC Festival Orchestra and Seocho Philharmonia for the Los Angeles performance. The Aug. 20 concert marked ARKO Ensemble’s first U.S. appearance after performances in Europe earlier this year.

From there, the show began moving more freely between genres.

Arlissa followed with “Turn My World to Color” and a cover of Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.” The Germany-born, London-raised and now Los Angeles-based singer has spent 2026 preparing her STARLET HARLOT project after first gaining attention with “Hard to Love Somebody” and her inclusion on the BBC’s Sound of 2013 list.

Her section also made something about the concert clearer: the orchestra was not there simply to sit behind each vocalist and make the songs sound more expensive. The arrangements became the common language of the night. The artists changed, the genres changed and even the cultural traditions changed, but the orchestra remained.

After intermission, that idea became a little more playful.

The musicians opened the second half with “Golden,” the HUNTR/X song from KPop Demon Hunters. By this summer, putting “Golden” into a Korean American community concert hardly needed an explanation. The song spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first K-pop song to win a Grammy, while KPop Demon Hunters itself grew into Netflix’s most-watched original film.

Still, hearing it arranged for orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall was a reminder of how quickly something very current can find its way into a completely different musical setting.

La Santa Cecilia pushed the concert in another direction with “Amar y Vivir,” “Hojas en el Aire” and “Como Dios Manda.”

The Los Angeles group has always been difficult to reduce to one genre. Its music draws from cumbia, bolero, rumba, jazz, rock and other Latin American traditions, and the band won the 2014 Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album for Treinta Días.

Of the three songs, “Hojas en el Aire” felt especially appropriate here. Released in 2025, the song is centered on roots, memory, belonging and carrying those things with you even as you move elsewhere.

At a concert called Rooted & Rising, performed by a Mexican American band from Los Angeles alongside an orchestra connecting musicians from Korea and Southern California, the choice almost explained itself.

Then came Baek Ji-young.

Her closing set moved through “I Won’t Love,” “That Woman,” “Like Being Shot by a Bullet” and “Don’t Forget,” essentially compressing two decades of the music that made her known as Korea’s “Queen of Ballads and OSTs” into four songs. Since debuting in 1999, Baek has built a career around exactly the kind of music that benefits from a room like Disney Hall: songs where the voice matters more than spectacle and where an orchestral arrangement can make an already dramatic ballad feel even larger.

It was also a fitting place for the concert to end. Baek represented one side of the Korean popular music that has traveled internationally long before the current K-pop boom, while “Golden” earlier in the second half represented what that global reach looks like now.

But Rooted & Rising was ultimately about more than putting different types of music next to each other.

KYCC began in 1975 as the Korean Youth Center, created to address the needs of Korean American youth in Los Angeles. Fifty years later, the organization works across education, mental health, housing, financial empowerment and family services for the broader multiethnic Koreatown community. In 2025 alone, KYCC reported serving more than 23,700 youth and families, half of whom were Latino or Hispanic and 36 percent Asian American.

That makes a night involving Korean traditional musicians, a Mexican American band from Los Angeles, a Korean ballad singer, a Black British singer-songwriter and young classical musicians from both sides of the Pacific feel less like an eclectic booking decision and more like a reflection of the community the concert was raising money to support.

“Rooted & Rising” could have just been a theme printed on the program.

By the end of the night, it had basically become the structure of the show