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...

"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...