Kevin Sun

  As of October 2021, there is music weekly at  Lowlands Bar  (543 3rd Ave.) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Sets are at  8 & 9:30 PM  each Tuesday, and my friend Dierk Peters is curating Wednesdays at 8 PM ( Our Borough Series ). All shows are suggested donation ($10 strongly encouraged, if you can), and we hope you'll join us or spread the word so that this series can continue as a part of the Brooklyn jazz scene ca. fall 2021 and beyond. Many thanks to  KEYED UP !, a program of Jazz Generation, whose  financial support allows us to compensate performers fairly for their work and for us to sustain weekly programming at Lowlands Bar.   May 3, 2022: Kevin Sun Quartet Kevin Sun - saxophone Dana Saul - keyboard Simón Willson - bass Matt Honor - drums I wrote a substantial amount of music throughout the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Much of it was performed only during my streaming live shows, but I brought some of the music back out in public once the Tuesdays at Lowlands series got started i

  As of October 2021, there is music weekly at  Lowlands Bar  (543 3rd Ave.) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Sets are at 8 & 9:30 PM  each Tuesday, and my friend Dierk Peters is curating Wednesdays at 8 PM ( Our Borough Series ). All shows are suggested donation ($10 strongly encouraged, if you can), and we hope you'll join us or spread the word so that this series can continue as a part of the Brooklyn jazz scene ca. fall 2021 and beyond. Many thanks to  KEYED UP !, a program of Jazz Generation, whose  financial support allows us to compensate performers fairly for their work and for us to sustain weekly programming at Lowlands Bar.   April 5 + 12, 2022: Kevin Sun Trio Kevin Sun - saxophone Walter Stinson - bass Matt Honor - drums I started playing regularly with Matt and Walter sometime in the spring of 2016, and once I returned from a summer in China, we began playing gigs as a band that fall. It's been about 6 years since then (minus 1.5 for the pandemic, although we kept playing

  As of October 2021, there is music weekly at  Lowlands Bar  (543 3rd Ave.) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Sets are at  7:30 & 9 PM  each Tuesday, and my friend Dierk Peters is curating Wednesdays at 8 PM ( Our Borough Series ). All shows are suggested donation ($10 strongly encouraged, if you can), and we hope you'll join us or spread the word so that this series can continue as a part of the Brooklyn jazz scene ca. fall 2021 and beyond. Many thanks to  KEYED UP !, a program of Jazz Generation, whose  financial support allows us to compensate performers fairly for their work and for us to sustain weekly programming at Lowlands Bar.   March 1, 2022: Dana Saul Sextet Dana Saul - piano, compositions Adam O'Farrill - trumpet Kevin Sun - saxophone Patricia Brennan - vibraphone Walter Stinson - bass Matt Honor - drums Dana Saul is a tremendous composer, pianist, and musical thinker. Playing in his sextet has been a highlight of my time in New York, and I'm thrilled to be a part of t

I've only found two instances of Bird quoting the 1934 Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow tune "Cocktails for Two," and they both were recorded within two weeks of each other at the end of 1945. The song appears in Murder of the Vanities  (1934), released the year after the end of Prohibition with the repeal of the 18th Amendment as a result of the ratification of the 18th Amendment on December 5, 1933. The78prof on YouTube has provided an invaluable service in collecting the charted hits of American popular music in the early and mid-20th century, and a significant percentage of Bird's quotes can be identified as hit songs from the 1930s, which coincides with his formative adolescent years .  Duke Ellington's instrumental version from '34 was a hit and inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 2007; the only other version that received the same treatment was Spike Jones's from '45, which was recorded later and inducted earlier (1995, over a decade before E

The Rufous-collared Sparrow, or "tico-tico" On March 12, 1951, Charlie Parker recorded the 1917 Zequinha de Abreu piece "Tico Tico" for a Norman Granz-produced session for Mercury, but he's on record quoting the tune at least three times in the years preceding. Once The earliest version comes from a set-closing version of "52nd Second Theme" from Billy Berg's Club in Hollywood, recorded just a few weeks after Bird's legendary "Ko Ko" session in New York. Bird slips it in at the top of the last A section of his solo , after which Dizzy comes in with a favorite quote of his own, "Rain on the Roof," and Billy Berg comes on the mic to announce the end of the set. In pop culture, the song was a major hit for Ethel Smith, who is featured playing "Tico Tico" in the 1944 musical movie Bathing Beauty , which is available on YouTube: It was also recorded by the Andrews Sisters , which includes English lyrics that make ex

I only know of two instances in Bird's recorded discography where he quotes from the 1919 Irving Berlin tune "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." The first one I learned of (via Chasin' the Bird ) is the January 22, 1949 performance of "Jumpin' with Symphony Sid" live from the Royal Roost in midtown Manhattan.  (While preparing this blog post, I realized that this brief, half-minute outro from the broadcast is actually left off of the misleadingly titled The Complete Live Performances on Savoy , and isn't streamable on YouTube or online anywhere to my knowledge—but fortunately I have an LP copy of  Bird At The Roost, The Savoy Years - The Complete Royal Roost Performances, Volume Two , produced by the late great Phil Schaap, so here it is, ripped from my LP copy). Quote begins at 0:08 and runs until about 0:15 (last 4 bars of first chorus into the next chorus): The lyrics of this phrase go: "A pretty girl is like a melody /  That haunts you nig

As of October 2021, there is music weekly at  Lowlands Bar  (543 3rd Ave.) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Sets are at  7:30 & 9 PM  each Tuesday, and my friend Dierk Peters is curating Wednesdays at 8 PM ( Our Borough Series ). All shows are suggested donation only ($10 if you can), and we hope you'll join us or spread the word so that this series can continue as a part of the Brooklyn jazz scene ca. fall 2021 and beyond. Many thanks to  KEYED UP !, a program of Jazz Generation, whose  financial support allows us to compensate performers fairly for their work and for us to sustain weekly programming at Lowlands Bar.   Tuesday, February 1, 2022: Sunlight Kevin Sun - saxophone Max Light - guitar Walter Stinson - bass Matt Honor - drums Max Light and I team up to cover each others' original music, plus some arrangements of favorite pieces of music from in and outside of the jazz canon. --- Tuesday, February 8, 2022: Kevin Sun Quartet Kevin Sun - saxophone Dana Saul - keyboard Walter St