Life and Times Of (Vintage Ed.)


Vintage Kevin, overlooking the harbor on Signal Hill
Born in St. John's, Newfoundland, which claims the title of the oldest English-founded city in North America—originally chartered in 1583 A.D.—and most easterly N.A. city as well, Kevin is not unaccustomed to people having no idea where he's really from. 

Raised first in Hillsborough, N.J. and then in Belle Mead, a "census-designated place" or CDP located in Montgomery Township about 10 minutes north of Princeton, Kevin began studying classical piano at age 8 and later picked up the saxophone, the accordion, violin (for a brief time), and flute and clarinet as well over the next few years. He discovered jazz after hearing Stan Getz's solo on "The Girl from Ipanema," and proceeded to purchase every Stan Getz record he could find and/or could convince his parents to let him purchase.

At University of Southern California's Bovard Auditorium
While attending Montgomery High School, Kevin swam varsity for four years, switching from breaststroke to butterfly and finally freestyle his senior year, and played in the school jazz band and marching band. He had the privilege of studying jazz harmony and improvisation with Laurie Altman, who was his mentor from middle school through high school (Laurie is now enjoying life in Switzerland, where he does everything you could wish to do—hiking, composing, and the like). Kevin was a member of the Princeton University Jazz Ensembles his junior and senior year, recording with the New Voices Collective and the Jazz Composers' Collective for their 2011 release, "Onwards," and also attended the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division those last two years. At MSM, he studied jazz saxophone and composition with Dr. Felipe Salles and was a member of the Manasia Combo, which won the Mingus High School Combo Competition in 2009 and 2010, as well as the 33rd Annual Downbeat Student Award for Outstanding Performing Arts High School Combo in 2010. That year, Kevin was also selected to play 1st tenor saxophone in the National GRAMMY Jazz Ensemble, with whom he performed at GRAMMY-related events around Los Angeles with James Moody, Kenny Burrell, and Chucho Valdés, among others.

Kevin is a 2014 graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude), where he studied English. He is currently enrolled in the Harvard-NEC Dual Degree program, which affords him the opportunity to continue his music studies while pursuing studies in the humanities and to work towards a M.M. in Jazz Performance at NEC during his undergraduate years. At NEC, Kevin has studied privately with Billy Hart, Cecil McBee, John McNeil, Jerry Bergonzi, Donny McCaslin, Miguel Zenón, Luis Bonilla, and Ken Schaphorst.

In 2012, Kevin received a generous Artist Development Fellowship from Harvard's Office for the Arts that allowed him to attend the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, where he performed with Vijay Iyer and studied with participants and visiting artists such as Steve Lehman, Miles Okazaki, Dave Douglas, and many others. Kevin was also selected as a 2012 Yamaha Young Performing Artist Competition Winner, and performed at the YYPA Concert at Ball State University (Indiana) in June. 

In January 2013, Kevin was awarded 1st place in the Vandoren Emerging Artists (VEA) Competition in the Jazz category and subsequently performed at the Music for All Festival as a guest soloist with the Jazz Band of America in March. In October that year, he traveled to Paris for a week as part of the VEA competition and performed at Sunside Jazz Club with a band of local professional musicians. 

In the fall of 2013, Kevin, along with NEC peers Isaac Wilson, Simón Willson, and Robin Baytas, founded Great on Paper (GOP), a quartet with traditional instrumentation dedicated to workshopping and performing original music that irreverently disregarded genre boundaries as old-fashioned voodoo. A faculty committee selected the ensemble to be the 2013-14 NEC Honors Jazz Ensemble, which meant performance opportunities around Boston, the privilege of having Ted Reichman on hand for weekly rehearsal coaching, and a recital in Jordan Hall in April 2014. Videos and audio from that concert are available now. 

Kevin will be performing in the 2015 Panama Jazz Festival with a quintet of peers from the New England Conservatory. They will be opening for the Brian Blade Fellowship band during the opening concert of the festival and will perform at various smaller venues over the course of the festival, including teaching masterclasses and hosting jam sessions.

Kevin began working as an intern for The Jazz Gallery in New York City in June 2013 and shortly thereafter became the editor of Jazz Speaks, the blog of The Jazz Gallery. As editor, he has solicited posts from guest writers, recruited regular staff writers, conducted interviews with artists such as Ben Wendel and Linda Oh, and edited numerous interviews, previews, and other blog posts.
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I've found that musicians' websites tend to be pretty static and repetitive, in the sense that many are laid out the same way with the same sort of content—that's not to say that mine's any better, but I'll do my best to update on at least a semi-regular basis.

Aside from music, I was also involved with journalism at Harvard: I'm a former associate editor of The Harvard Crimson's weekly magazine, Fifteen Minutes (FM), where I've written feature-length stories of all sorts of different topics, like a profile of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Louis Menand, a piece on radical activism on campus, a profile of jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman '91, and an interview with Herbie Hancock. With regards to English, the discipline that gets more confused looks from parents/non-humanities concentrators than any other discipline save for art history, some of my favorite writers include Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Roth.

Follow me elsewhere on the Internet:

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Kevin Sun Jazz Saxophone Biography 2.6.15

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About A Horizontal Search

"...A Horizontal Search is really one of the best jazz resources on the internet" – Ethan Iverson, pianist of The Bad Plus and author of Do The Math

"...a thoughtful blog from a jazz student named Kevin Sun that I swear I'm linking to not just because he interviewed me once" — Patrick Jarenwattananon, National Public Radio's A Blog Supreme

"...tanta roba da studiare!" — Italian saxophone web forum commenter

I started A Horizontal Search during the spring of my sophomore year, basically as a public practice log. I was busy doing schoolwork most of the time and wasn't practicing as much as I wanted to or thought I should, so I thought the guilt of not regularly updating the blog would provide just enough of a push to practice more regularly. Since then, it's gotten a bit more serious, but everything you see here is still basically a work of love. I tried to cash in a bit with banner advertising in the past, but realized it wasn't really worth it, so here it is in all its low-tech, Blogger glory. 

If you like what I do here, please consider checking out and/or supporting some of the projects I'm involved with (listed at the bottom of Upcoming). Thanks for reading. 

—KS

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