Kevin Sun

Mark Turner in full "jackhammer" at The Jazz Gallery (YouTube screen-capture via Radhika Philip ) Drummer Johnathan Blake leads a powerhouse chordless quartet featuring tenor saxophonists Mark Turner and Chris Potter, with Ben Street on bass. The band has released one album, Gone, But Not Forgotten  (Criss Cross, 2014), and most recently performed last weekend at Newport. I caught the band live at the Jazz Standard back in May, but unfortunately missed them when they performed at The Jazz Gallery at the very start of my senior year of college. Radhika Philip , author of the invaluable Being Here , a collection of recent interviews with leading creative improvisors on the New York scene, captured this video from the show, which has since been watched over 25,000, a pretty respectable number of eyeballs for the jazz web. Through the shadowy jazz bootleg network, I managed to get a rendition of "Along Came Betty," whose richly chromatic harmonic scheme is a mor...

BHQ at the Jazz Standard, mid-aughts (also the cover of "Quartet," 2006). As far as I know, the Billy Hart Quartet's first release, Quartet  (2006, HighNote), isn't available anywhere yet as a digital download, so if you want to get your hands on this music, you'll have to actually get your hands on physical copy (I bought mine on Amazon ).  I heard about this record and this particular solo on "Moment's Notice" from Ethan Heyenga, a young altoist and fellow Bostonian whom I informally interviewed early on during preparation for The Mark Turner Essay . He told me that when he first heard it, he started cracking up, thinking it was a joke or something, but then realized that Mark was deadly serious as the solo developed toward its chromatic, fourth-octave climax in the final chorus.  After I heard it, I had to learn more about the circumstances of this solo, which at first seems uncharacteristic of Mark's other recorded work: a big,...

The quarter note plays a big role in the Mark Turner sound, I think. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but there's something intensely pointed and focused about these lines of quarter notes, and they're in full display on this burning "The Man I Love," from Warner Jams, Vol. 2: The Two Tenors (also easily identifiable on other solos from the same record, like "The Plain But The Simple Truth" ).  I remember being mesmerized as a teenager by Stan Getz's use of long, two-repeated-eighth-note melodies (the intro to "S-H-I-N-E" from West Coast Jazz  might be the most obvious example), but aside from the technical aspect of its execution, I remember being able to hear the melodic improvised line more clearly—basically because there were half as many pitches in the same amount of time as an eighth note line. Mark's quarter note lines end up having a similar effect: aside from giving him and listener a break from the dense, substitution a...

I first wrote about "Head Trip," Aaron Goldberg's contrafact on "One Finger Snap"  from his début release, Turning Point  (1999) , almost three years ago. Listening to this, it's revealing how much of the language Mark plays on this up-tempo, dominant-chord dominated tune is bebop (in particular what he plays over the concert Ab7 of each chorus right before the descending minor ii-Vs). Some of the other now-trademark Mark-isms are present in varying degrees— e.g. , the almost ostentatious use of quarter motifs (first chorus), accordion-fold arpeggios (top of fifth chorus)—but there's notably minimal altissimo on this particular take.  Aaron has played with Mark since the early '90s, and was very generous in sharing his perceptions on Mark and the scenes they came up in. I ultimately only slipped in a brief quote in the finished piece in order to keep the length manageable and give everyone interviewed a chance to have their say, but here's mo...

In preparation for the two-part essay on Mark Turner that I wrote for Music & Literature  (accessible here: Part One , Part Two ), I decided to transcribe some Mark.  Prior to researching and writing this piece, I had consciously avoided listening to Mark for the past couple years. Like Steve Coleman or Bird or Trane, Mark's stylistic gravity is immense; I knew that if I got too close too early, it'd be hard to extricate myself later on. But I thought it was time for me finally to confront this singular saxophonic voice. This nine-chorus solo over a G blues is worth comparing to Mark's solo on "Hesitation Blues" on 1997's The Two Tenors , the Warner Bros. release that paired a younger Mark with James Moody. That blues is also in G, also fairly medium-slow, and distinctively Turnerian in its delivery and intervallic-melodic vocabulary, but 16 years later, it's clear that Mark has refined his language while gaining more rhythmic intensity, whi...

"Coltrane-Coltrane," Jean-Max Albert ( Wikimedia Commons ) Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music  first came out in 1998, and, as far as I know, it's still the definitive, go-to critical overview of Coltrane's musical career. The research that went into this book is staggering, and the voices of Coltrane's predecessors, peers, friends, and admirers are generously heard throughout the book.  The awesome, inevitable movement of history makes itself known in the small, revealing details—for instance, that Miles Davis first heard Coltrane as early as '46, when Coltrane was still in the navy and recorded with drummer Joe Theimer, whom Theimer mentioned thusly in a letter: "This session was inspired by John Coltrane [ sic ], a Bird discipline, whom 2 weeks after this session cut out of this 'land of fools' to go home and make his way in life..." The misspelling of the Coltrane family name, a Scottish inheritance, is a motif th...

Nested brackets and jazz tune titles — vestiges of jazz camp I spent all of last week at Ravinia's Steans (pronounced 'STAINS') Music Institute for their annual summer jazz program . Ravinia is a wooded, Shire-like area about 40 minutes north of Chicago by car, and the festival there hosts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra each year (someone explained Ravinia to me as "Chicago's Tanglewood"). The Steans Institute hosts several residencies each year for jazz and classical musicians to come together and produce or refine work intensely. Dr. David Baker's long been at the helm of the program for jazz, which grants the lucky participants access to the hall of baby grand pianos and rehearsal spaces at the building, but this year the faculty included pianist Billy Childs, saxophonist Nathan Davis, and bassist Rufus Reid.  The ages ranged from 17 (!) to 30s, although the median age I'd guess would be somewhere around early-mid 20s, and I was amused to fin...