Kevin Sun

The first thing you notice about Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus  Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is its heft: over 700 pages long, with over 400 distinct characters, it's a heavyweight. The next thing you notice, once you've cracked it open and started reading, is the hyperdensity of detail. Plenty of people think Ulysses  is the greatest novel of the 20th century (maybe even the greatest of all time), but in terms of detail and encyclopedic scope , Gravity's Rainbow  might be  Ulysses 's equal in that regard.  Music comes up a great deal in Pynchon's novel, often in the form of randomly interpolated songs and dance breaks, but there's also a surprising amount of specialized technical knowledge; at one point, Pynchon actually notes after a particular lyric "(down a third)"—and you can hear it! Set during WWII, the novel includes a brief nod to bebop, which I had to share. This is during an analepsis to the Roseland Ballroom on Mass. Ave. in Boston

I wrote down a few thoughts on jam sessions yesterday, which reminded me of an album that made clear to me how some world class musicians approach these kinds of situations. The record is called Sittin' In (1957) and is under Dizzy Gillespie's name, although it also features Stan Getz, Paul Gonsalves, and Coleman Hawkins; the rhythm section includes Wynton Kelly on piano, J.C. Heard on drums, and Wendell Marshall on bass.  I bought this record when I first started checking out jazz and was trying to get my hands on anything that had Getz playing on it. I distinctly remember being at first confused at why this CD only had four tracks, but I soon realized that each track was over 10 minutes long: "Dizzy Atmosphere," two ballad medleys back-to-back*, and "The Way You Look Tonight." One particular episode I'd like to point out: in "The Way You Look Tonight," the solo order in the horns is Coleman Hawkins, Paul Gonsalves, Stan Getz, and

In the past few weeks, I've heard some pretty long tunes: one version of "On Green Dolphin Street" that went for about 40 minutes at Smalls (incidentally also the last tune of the night); 25 minutes of "Bye, Bye Blackbird," with 6 saxophones and multiple vocalists; etc .. By the time you're up to play, the rhythm section's worn out—they'd thank you for not playing  at this point, but you've waited and waited and waited and heard more variations on Coltrane and Bird and Brecker licks than you likely would have ever voluntarily agreed to sit through. And now, what are you going to play? Last semester, Miguel Zenón was firm about my getting out more to jam sessions around Boston, i.e. , the sessions at Wally's. One reason to go to jam sessions is to learn tunes and figure out how they're played by pros, semi-pros, and rising pros. What Miguel impressed on me, though, was the importance of being able to deliver under pressure. That's

Sonny Rollins in 2011 I must make a confession: I've never seriously checked out Sonny Rollins — in particular, I haven't given Saxophone Colossus  (1956) or A Night at the Village Vanguard  (1957) their due in my listening rotation. I actually used to have a very hard time listening to Sonny. His sound seemed extraordinarily harsh and unrefined; to my ears now, though, I hear his sound as being raw and muscular, which has a certain appeal in some contexts. If Dexter is the compactly built Olympic powerlifter, then Sonny might be the Strongman competing in the World's Strongest Man contest (anybody out that new New Yorker article ? Wild stuff).  I did check out "Moritat" on Saxophone Colossus  last semester, though, just for the time feel—particularly on the head in. I ended up transcribing the solo, too, but playing along with the head was very instructive. Here's the solo on "Mack the Knife": Triplets and turns make the lines so surprisin

What follows is a final assignment for a seminar on contemporary English language novels that I took last semester. New Jersey's been on my mind lately, so I thought I'd share this for any fellow Jerseyites (-ians) or even non-Jerseyites (-ians) who might be interested. State flag—who knew? (Wikimedia Commons) Garden State Blues “I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say— I enjoy living here, too” —Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon in a 2001 interview * * *             Of the fifteen most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction c. 2012, one out of every five was set in New Jersey, tying it with New York City as the most popular setting for recent P.P.-winning works of fiction. [1] These three New Jersey novels were Independence Day (1996), by Richard Ford; American Pastoral (1998), by Philip Roth; and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), by Junot Díaz. Of course, it’s not because these nov

A couple of years back, I had the chance to hang out a bit with trumpeter Brian Lynch at the Brubeck Summer Jazz Colony. Brian was generous with his time and was gracious enough to teach me about the fundamentals of bebop—much of which was missing in my playing. Of the concepts we discussed, one particular point has been on my mind more and more as of recently: the use of octave displacement in creating lines and melodic shapes, which Brian called "the pivot."  In a bebop context, octave displacement serves a practical purpose by enabling lines to fit in the range constraints of a given instrument, e.g. , saxophone or trumpet. A simple example is dropping the end of a line down an octave when nearing a note that's above an instrument's comfortable range. To illustrate, here's a generic ii-V-I line without O.D., followed by one with O.D.: Without octave displacement With octave displacement From what I can remember from speaking with Brian, horn player

Here's a guest post by composer, percussionist, writer, and resident music omnivore Kevin Laskey (Princeton '12). Enjoy the recommendations and check out his other writings on music at his website ! People like to talk about how “crossover” is the big new thing in jazz right now. But in reality, “crossover” – especially with European classical music – has been part of the jazz vocabulary since, well, the term jazz was invented. Scott Joplin was classically trained and notated all his music. Then there was George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody and Blue” written for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Then Duke Ellington made the Nutcracker and Peer Gynt swing. Then there was all of that Third Stream mumbo-jumbo in the ’,50s and ’60s with Gunther Schuller and George Russell… Well, it’s pretty clear that jazz-classical crossover music is hardly a new phenomenon. But I will say that there hasn’t been such a conducive environment for it as there is now. With more and players versed in both

Lush Life  (1992) is a tribute/concept album by Joe Henderson that was on Verve during Joe Henderson's post-80s "Renaissance" period, when the Young Lion phenomenon was in full swing and Joe put out some commercially successful records with Verve. Some other records from this period are So Near, So Far , a Miles Davis tribute, Double Rainbow , an Antonio Carlos Jobim tribute (Jobim was originally scheduled to play on the date, but passed away shortly before it was to happen), and Porgy and Bess . Joe's playing on this record is great, but maybe a touch less raw then his 60s Blue Note records; it's also generally more understated than his playing on the late 60s and 70s Milestone records, but his sense of time and melodic tastefulness on this record is so together. For me, Joe's later records are a model of sophisticated phrasing and sound. Check out this duet on "Isfahan" with a then-19-year-old Christian McBride—the notation, of course, is inadequat

George Lewis, Moers Festival 2009 A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music , by George E. Lewis, describes the formation and evolution of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The book came highly recommended by Vijay Iyer at Banff 2012, alongside other historical works like the autobiography of Horace Tapscott ; picking it up earlier this week, I had never listened purchased or checked out recordings by any of the AACM guys, but reading it has been a more-than-persuasive experience. 

The alien I met didn't quite look like this Strange things tend to happen between the hours of 2 AM and 5 AM in the New York subway. Returning from a friend's birthday in Brooklyn last night, I was uneventfully listening to some music until a scruffy, old alto saxophonist stomped onto the train. "Greetings!" he declared. "My name is _____-man and I am an alien from outer space." Uh-oh. Aside from a metallic rod taped onto baseball cap he was wearing, the fellow seemed pretty normal: he wore black converses, black jeans, and a rainbow tie-dyed tank top bearing the name of some rock band or music festival. But, then he started to play.

Gary Shteyngart  at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan  has been recommended to me many, many times, and after hearing an interview with him on the Leonard Lopate Show back in January, I decided I would read it, eventually. Comedy is promised ("Profoundly funny" says the Time  front-cover blurb), and comedy is delivered. Much of the humor in the novel emerges, unsurprisingly, out of absurd situations or actions: in the very first chapter, a spontaneous gangster rap between the 325-lb. Russian protagonist Misha Vainberg and his friend Alyosha-Bob—this is not the Brothers K  Russia—sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Interestingly, Shteyngart has said that his favorite writer is Vladimir Nabokov and that his favorite of Nabokov's works is Pnin , a humorous but moving novel about a Russian immigrant trying and failing to assimilate into middle-upper class Western society. Absurdistan  is filled with farce, but it's not

In continuing the series of "most-transcribed tenor solos of all time," here's Dexter Gordon's solo on "Love for Sale" from Go (1962). Billy Higgins's drum groove that sets up the tune and Sonny Clark's light comping are incredible; actually, Billy Higgins's sounds incredible on this entire record, especially the cymbals at the beginning of "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry." Cymbals have rarely ever sounded as good. And, of course, Dexter is in great shape on this record. For saxophiles out there, I've heard that this recording was made when Dexter was still playing a Conn tenor. If you listen to Our Man in Paris (1963), he's playing a Selmer Mark VI, which is also a fine saxophone, but his tone is slightly different—it's missing some of the fat Conn sound. Enjoy!

Saul Bellow at the 1990 Miami Book Fair International A friend from work last summer recommended that I read Saul Bellow, citing his humor and intelligence. It took me a year, but I got around to reading Humboldt's Gift (1973) and found that Bellow is both incredibly funny and deeply, humanistically conscious of the world.  Charles Citrine, an aging, divorced intellectual, writer, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and playwright, struggles over the course of the novel to make sense of his relationship with a meteorically successful and idealistic poet, Von Humboldt Fleisher, who dies destitute and estranged from Citrine. In the meantime, Citrine has plenty of other business to attend to: the vampiric divorce proceedings working against him, an intrusion by a inexperienced gangster-buffoon named Ron Cantabile, and a budding relationship with Renata, a much younger lady who he is continually on the fence about marrying. 

Happy July 4th! Such holidays should be accompanied by similarly joyous music, and Cannonball's solo over "On Green Dolphin Street" from Miles Davis's '58 Sessions is music that fits the bill, I think. This is one of my favorite Miles records of all time—I only recently discovered it, but it's essentially the Kind of Blue band playing standards from the same time period in the late '50s. Check it out!

Prior to yesterday, I never knew that "lush" was a slang term, e.g. ,  "On any ordinary day I would have described these people as barflies and lushes but now their eyes all seemed to me as big as portholes and shed a moral light" — Humboldt's Gift (1973), Saul Bellow According to Merriam-Webster Online : Lush , noun - a person who makes a habit of getting drunk <she accused him of being a lush and a spendthrift>   Billy Strayhorn looking contemplative or sleepy. I've never heard anyone use "lush" in this way in conversation; maybe it's a regional thing, or maybe it's an older term that's gone out of style. If so, I could imagine that Billy Strayhorn, in considering his reputation for sophistication and worldliness, would have had this double-meaning for "lush" in mind when writing "Lush Life." I'm sure some jazz historian has written about this already, but such a little added shade of meani

Since Sta n Getz was the first saxophonist I ever studied in a serious way, it wasn't too long before I started checking out Lester Young. The first Lester record I picked up was Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952), released on Verve (as were most of Stan Getz's major records). I've heard people say that the best Lester Young recordings to check out are his earlier recordings prior to World War II, since those were many of the same records that Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Charlie Parker, Joe Henderson, and others checked out. The thing is, though, that most of those recordings are either found in compilations, box sets, or some form that isn't the original studio session, as most post-WWII jazz albums are released. So, I still haven't seriously investigated those recordings, but I plan to eventually. When I first checked out Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio , I actually had trouble listening to it: Lester plays pretty sharp at times (check out