Kevin Sun

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

The great Wayne Shorter left us this morning , and I thought I'd dig up an incomplete but treasured transcription from the late summer of 2015 to share with everybody. The provenance of this recording is still under debate; it seems like most internet sources suggest it's from the Village Vanguard in August '65 , but there's no evidence of this band playing there at that time. I think Chris McCarthy was the first person who shared this bootleg with me, and his source indicated the Jazz Gallery (the old one, in Greenwich Village) in April '65, but I don't find any other sources corroborating this. Needless to say, the band is on fire and Wayne is in his element playing burning acoustic jazz live in a small NYC club. The fluidity and casual virtuosity of his lines are in full display here over one of the most textbook set of changes (in Bb, no less), a marvelous showcase in constructing horizontal arcs of sound with swathes of harmonic color underpinned by meticu

 I'm thoroughly enjoying Adan Levy's immaculately detailed biography of Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus   (the extensive notes are available for download for free). One passage of many so far that caught my eye, ca. summer 1955 in Chicago: At night, Sonny would practice in the basement of the Y, where they had a piano . One night, he heard someone playing a Clifford Brown record on repeat who turned out to be trumpeter Booker Little. [possibly Clifford Brown with Strings , per author note, which released that spring] "I was playing it over and over again, and I guess I was driving him mad, because he was trying to practice himself," Little recalled. At the time, Little was a seventeen-year-old sophomore at the Chicago Conservatory who had come from Memphis and was also living at the Y. Finally, Sonny decided to approach him. "He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was trying to learn the melody," Little said. "He told me that it was probably b

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