In the spring of 2006, Ray Seol was a 31-year-old jazz student in New York, at a time when Asian musicians were still a rarity in the jazz scene. Four years earlier, he had stunned his family in Korea by announcing that he was traveling halfway across the world to pursue a career in music, all because of a chance encounter with guitarist Wes Montgomery’s spellbinding rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” “I experience music through images,” Seol recalled. “When I heard this piece, I couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended. It felt completely unbound, like this dazzling image with no sense of logic.” Then, during finals week, an unexpected international phone call came. His mother had taken her own life. “I’m 51 now,” he said quietly, “the same age my mother was when she died.” Seol, now a jazz bassist and professor at Berklee College of Music, spent the next decade carrying a grief that never seemed to loosen its grip. In many ways, it felt like part of him remained imprisoned by the day she died. But like many bereaved ones, his family retreated into sil