Kevin Sun

Throwback to #tbt: the pre-2015 listicle A brief listening playlist I assembled was published in the November/December 2016 issue of JAZZed Magazine . Thanks to Ann Braithwaite for recommending me to the editor. The listicle is ostensibly in support of the recent Earprint  album release , but it was nice to have a chance to share some thoughts about music I've been checking out lately, particularly some inspiring contemporaries like saxophonist-composers  Anna Webber and Ben van Gelder , both of whom have recently released mesmerizing albums (buy them: Binary  and Among Verticals , respectively, although the latter is technically not yet officially out).  The PDF spread is available here ; full, searchable text below for particularly inquisitive readers and the algorithmic webcrawlers out there on SEO duty. * * * * * What's On Your Playlist? ( JAZZed , Nov/Dec 2016) Biographical sketch by Christian Wissmuller Kevin Sun is an accomplished saxophonist...

At eighty-five, setting records straight ( Pitchfork, April 2016, Hilton Als ): I read that one of the first experiences of music that you loved was a concert that Frank Sinatra gave when you were in high school where he spoke about racial tolerance. I’d like to address that. From the time I was a child my grandmother was an activist.  She was West Indian?   Oh yeah. My grandfather, her husband, was from Haiti, but my grandmother was from St. Thomas. Anyway, when I was a little boy I used to walk in parades up and down Lenox Ave. We would be marching for W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson. I grew up with that. Through “Free the Scottsboro Boys.” Now fast forward to 1946, when they bussed us from where we lived on 175th Street. There was a new school opening up down in Italian Harlem, on 116th Street, off of the river. This was a new high school. We were met with a lot of hostility from the neighborhood. The people in the area figured it was some black kids coming into their n...

I met and played with pianist Christian Li for the first time this spring after hearing a lot about his protean, Paul Bley-influenced pianism from friends. One of the youngest instructors on the piano faculty at Berklee , Christian was actually directly responsible for my spontaneously returning to Beijing for two months back in May (semi-long story, no need to digress here).  We ended up overlapping in Beijing for two weeks in June and got to play a number of gigs with local musicians ( links to videos at the end of this post), and we spoke about the possibility of reviving my blog's guest post series. Herewith, Christian shares some thoughts on incorporating Messiaen's harmonic vocabulary into improvisation. * * * * * Brief Notes on Messiaen's " Apparition du Christ glorieux" (from  Éclairs sur l'au-delà... ) By Christian Li Olivier Messiaen ca. 1930 (public domain) I’ve always been attracted to Messiaen’s harmony. I love the refractive c...

NB: Saxophone gearhead post ahead. Read at your potential boredom or enthrallment. Paul Dupré 3-Star Conservatoire Tenor Mouthpiece Saxophonists are serious about their gear in Beijing. I've had the pleasure of hanging out at my friend Mayong's shop, Sheng Lan, on Xin Jie Kou road, where both sides of the street are jam-packed with instrument stores; Mayong is widely recognized as the main go-to place for professional jazz saxophonists and woodwind players, and his shop is one of few here that focuses on carrying high-end vintage instruments. People sure love their Selmer Mark VIs here, although I've noticed that SBAs are starting to gain more traction as tastes move toward darker, more old-school sounds.  One of Mayong's employees, Liu Yang, is into vintage Martin altos and recently bought a Martin tenor that came with a number of obscure mouthpieces, including the above "Paul Dupré Conservatoire" white plastic mouthpiece, originally marked as a ...

The inscrutable gaze I started thinking about checking out more bass players after a casual conversation with bassist and friendly neighbor Walter Stinson on the topic of pianists with better or worse "bass hearing." Essentially, the conversation reminded me that my own bass hearing isn't particularly sharp or refined; as I semi-unashamedly admit, it took me an embarrassingly long time since I started to listen to jazz in my teens even to register the vague pitch content of the bass. Part of this I'd chalk up to relatively lame earbuds and the low end-obliterating rumble of subway trains and cars—the spaces where I most often listened to music—but another part of it was, of course, plain ignorance, inattentiveness, and fixation on the horn soloist, for obvious reasons. Returning to my conversation with Walt, he also said something that struck me as perceptive and sadly true, which is that bassists can sometimes get away with having a decent beat but plain borin...

It's been a pleasure working on and witnessing the Creative Music Convergences curated by Vijay Iyer at Harvard yesterday and today, April 7th and 8th, 2016. I put some program notes together for these two evenings of creative music, herewith: Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith Vijay Iyer’s introduction to Wadada Leo Smith’s music came in the early 1990s after Iyer read an interview with saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton, wherein he spoke of Smith “in the most superlative terms possible.” This led to Iyer’s picking up Th e Flam (1975, Black Saint) by saxophonist Frank Lowe, featuring Smith on trumpet in a chordless quintet setting alongside saxophone, trombone, bass, and drums. Smith’s playing, distinguished by his attention to space and silence and by his relational conception of ensemble sound, was revelatory. “I heard great silences, toneless columns of air, long tones that cut diagonally across the hubbub of the ensemble,” Iyer recalled in...