Kevin Sun

"Depths II," the fifth and final single for The Depths of Memory , is now streaming everywhere .  And for the first time, I'm also releasing a music video next Friday, September 29, 2023 to support the release, which was the creative product of my friend Emma. I can't take credit for any of the plot or creative direction here, but I'm really pleased with how it came out and am really grateful for the dedication, creative effort, and physical labor that Emma, Daniel Huang, Grace Tong , and the many others (listed in full below) involved contributed to make this possible. (Vaguely related: 10 years ago, I went to an exhibit at MoMI about music videos, blog post here ) A note from director Emma He: This is a faithful retelling of the time Kevin Sun got hit by a car, died, and woke up in the purgatory that is Lowlands Bar . Legend has it that he still haunts Lowlands to this day, every Tuesday at the witching hour. Credits Directed by Emma He Produced by Mad

single art for "Elliptical Blue" I wrote the six bar sequence of "Elliptical Blue" toward the end of the drafting process for From All This Stillness  in late May 2020. Referencing again the 9 pitch sequence that formed the basis of the material for the suite, I composed "Elliptical Blue" originally as the coda, as a kind of gradual fade-out circling on an almost resolution from F# to G (the last and first pitches of the sequence below): I added some additional voices above the bass, suggesting a movement from D7/F# to G major (with an unresolved 9th, and occasionally an interloping G# in the bass instead of G, changing the quality of the chord into diminished and unresolved): I noticed that I also sketched out the basic rhythm, with the second chord anticipating the downbeat of the next bar in a large "3" (or smaller 9/8). Looking at the original manuscript, I wrote it out more or less how we finally played it. Three 2-bar phrases, starting with

Various things (big and small) I learned while reading Aidan Levy's monumental biography of the saxophone giant: Bird's eclecticism may have inspired Sonny's Parker, like Ellington, was decidedly beyond category. He demonstrated to Sonny that anything was fair game—from Bartók and Beethoven to Byas and Ben Webster. Sonny, like Parker, recognized that the Great Man theory was a myth. There would be no Bird without Earl Bostic, Johnny Hodges, and Willie Smith, or Stravinsky for that matter—but it was Bird who pulled it all together. "He bought records of Kay Kyser's 'Slow Boat to China,' which he played often, and Mario Lanza singing 'Be My Love,' which he would imitate, singing in an exaggerated, fractured tenor," recalled Chan Parker, Bird's common-law wife, of his eclectic taste. "The only record he bought which was even close to being hot was Peggy Lee's 'Lover,' which he would play over and over until my mother would

single art for "Ghosts of Repetition" As I mentioned in the initial post on the start of From All This Stillness , a sequence of 9 pitches loosely suggesting a subdominant to tonic motion (the defining blues harmonic motion) forms one half of the backbone (or double helix, if you will) of the entire suite—the other half being the tonally ambiguous motif of an ascending spiral of stacked thirds in various sequences of major and minor thirds.  I alluded to some convoluted technical process to generate harmonic material from this line (basically taking groups of 3 sequential notes as triads, then harmonizing them): It's a bit too convoluted (and probably unhelpful) to fully explain here, but the triads are re-voiced from a harmonization of triads that are themselves generated different sequential three note groupings of the bass line (e.g. G-F-D, F-D-Ab, D-Ab-B, etc.) and the bass line's pitch inversion starting on C (subdominant) instead of G.  That process specificall

It's always a treat to encounter Stanley Crouch's voice in the form of physical liner notes, and with the convenience of smartphone-assisted OCR, it's easier than ever to share those writings, which otherwise remain uncollected (despite the excellent recent collection  Victory is Assured   assembled by  long-time Crouch editor and neighbor to me, Glenn Mott).  I picked up a copy of Clifford Jordan's final recording, Down Through the Years: The Clifford Jordan Big Band, Live at Condon's, New York , which features vintage Crouch on one of my favorite tenorists documented on location at 117 East 15th Street in Manhattan. It was too good not to share, and a quick search on the foremost online search engine didn't pull up any results for "very wily dragon of the blues," so presumably the text of the notes hasn't been indexed on the web yet in any form. Here we go, all the way back to 1992: * * * Clifford Jordan has long been a figure of saxophone lumine

single art for "Frozen in Profile" (accidental double exposure from my first film roll) To be honest, I could not exactly remember the concrete formal or emotional motivation at the time of writing the episode of music that's known as "Frozen in Profile" on my upcoming album . All I could recall offhand was that I did sketch out the material during the apex of the lockdown months of the pandemic in 2020, roughly mid-March through May and early June.  It was three years ago today (on Friday the 13th, 2020) that I texted my friend Walter and we decided not to go see a friend's show at a local bar out of an abundance of caution; that weekend, everything closed and everything shut down in the city more or less on Monday, if I remember correctly. All that to say that those few months moved by in a strange time-warped blur, which inevitably colors the musical material in a similar way. At the time, I remember the feeling of deep uncertainty about when I'd get