Kevin Sun

  Photo by Noah Philipose (May 2024 at Sear Sound) – graphic by me via the magic of Canva I have not booked a series of dates for my trio outside of NYC since 2019. The last time I traveled with my bandmates, it was to Beijing in May 2019 to play a string of dates and then record the trio and quartet music that would form The Sustain of Memory , which we managed to release that same November.  A major reason for not venturing beyond NYC these past few years is logistics: it's a lot of steps to book dates and coordinate travel and figure out remuneration, and having played weekly at Lowlands from September 2021 through this past July relieved me of the need to find playing opportunities elsewhere when I could just walk a few blocks and dive into music with my friends.  But I think there's still value in trying to get out of my immediate environs to play, which is to play live for people who might connect with what we're exploring musically and to make some sort of a creat

KS: It's been a month since the release of The Fate of the Tenor , and I've been really happy with the response from listeners and friends who had a chance to listen. On that note, I'd like to share a guest post that my dear friend Juanma Trujillo graciously put together for the occasion, which describes his approach and thought process regarding the live recording. Juanma and I have worked together for years not only as performers, but also on the actual recording, mixing, and production of a number of my releases.  * * * * * The Fate Of The Tenor – A Technical Addendum  By Juanma Trujillo By the time Kevin reached out to me to record this album, I had already sold and shipped out a lot of my gear as I was moving out of the US. I had my two nicest ribbon mics, and Kevin had a few mics of his own that we used. Some of the other mics were sourced among our community of musician friends and engineers (a detailed list is provided with the liner notes ). Everything was recorde

Artwork by Sharif Anthony for "Origin Story" I composed "Origin Story" in early February 2018 while deep in the throes of my Lester Young immersion period, which lasted for several years as I found myself magnetically drawn to the playing of Pres.  Originally, I envisioned writing an album's worth of music inspired by Lester Young (similar to what I ended up doing with <3 Bird  during the pandemic), but of the few pieces I did manage to write at that time (including "Bad Lady" and "Facsimilate"), I think "Origin Story" was perhaps the most literal and compositionally straightforward of those.  With an unstoppable conviction in the power of Lester Young's rhythmic line and casually elegant melodic sense, I figured: what would happen if I tried playing the solo backwards? Not literally backwards, but keeping the integrity of the original rhythmic phrasing (i.e. the melodic rhythms) and just reversing the sequence of pitches?  I

"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