Kevin Sun

A couple of people have asked me about my song " Kierkegaardashian , " which concludes my upcoming album Quartets , and its relation to the source material, which is Charlie Parker's " Kim ," so here goes: Back during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, I spent some time overlaying multiple takes of Charlie Parker's solos on a given tune, adjusting the timing to align them roughly, and then seeing how the phrasing overlapped or diverged for curiosity's sake. I wrote a bit about this in a  blog post I called "Synchronic Bird,"   but I took it a step further with "Kim" by trying to compose a new song using the overlapping material.  First, I laid out transcriptions of each take one above the other, then chose phrases between the two takes that would create a new, super-long linear melody: I did this process for the entire solo, which spans multiple choruses, but "Kierkegaardashian" was intended as a miniature composition, so I only...

single art for "Ghosts of Repetition" As I mentioned in the initial post on the start of From All This Stillness , a sequence of 9 pitches loosely suggesting a subdominant to tonic motion (the defining blues harmonic motion) forms one half of the backbone (or double helix, if you will) of the entire suite—the other half being the tonally ambiguous motif of an ascending spiral of stacked thirds in various sequences of major and minor thirds.  I alluded to some convoluted technical process to generate harmonic material from this line (basically taking groups of 3 sequential notes as triads, then harmonizing them): It's a bit too convoluted (and probably unhelpful) to fully explain here, but the triads are re-voiced from a harmonization of triads that are themselves generated different sequential three note groupings of the bass line (e.g. G-F-D, F-D-Ab, D-Ab-B, etc.) and the bass line's pitch inversion starting on C (subdominant) instead of G.  That process specificall...

Yawning blankness (Wikimedia Commons) A few days ago I visited a friend I hadn't seen in nearly a year at his studio apartment in Manhattan. I mentioned to him how I'd like to furnish a place of my own in the future like his: stacks of books, some CDs, a stereo, a desk, and a bed. He replied, "Yeah, most of this furniture is my mom's," which was when I realized we were talking about two different things: the functional, essential trappings of a place, and the contents of a place that you bring to it to define a space. In college, I remember having my mind mildly blown—puffed?—when a graduate English student shared this factoid, which I haven't verified but like to believe is true: that stanza  in the Italian means "room." It's one of those nice, evocative factoids that resonates on its own: that moving through a poem is like moving through a series of distinct but connected spaces. There are single-unit poems, like studio apartments, ...

Look, Mom: I performed with Vijay Iyer! — "What's Vijay Iyer?" Why write difficult music? A similar question came up in the first English class I took in college, which was amusingly titled "How to Scandalize Readers: Vladimir Nabokov's English Novels." In discussing novels like Lolita , Pnin , and Ada, or Ardor , the notion of hidden points of reference came up again and again—what Nabokov described in the afterward to Lolita as the " subliminal coordinates by which the novel is plotted.” For Nabokov, the subtle details that hold his novels together formally aren't necessarily the point of reading his novels, i.e. , our priority in reading his novels isn't to find these details. Instead, these subliminal coordinates provide a framework with which the novelist can operate with broad creative freedom to write works like Lolita —novels that are morally complex and layered with literary and cultural allusions, but read beautifully in them...

Jazz? Here? One of the many arts workshops offered at the Banff Centre in Alberta, CA is the " Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music ," which Vijay Iyer has called a " crucible of creativity ." He wasn't kidding—a regular day at the program entails two hours of morning ensemble rehearsal, lunch, and then three hours of masterclasses in the afternoon (plus jamming, rehearsing, hiking, etc. the rest of the time). Calling the program a "jazz workshop" might be misleading: if anything, the approaches to improvisation and composition might be best described with broader terms—sort of like how the New England Conservatory has separate departments for Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation. On the very first day, in fact, we were all encouraged by Vijay to engage in "critical practice," or to re-examine the fundamentals of what musicians do; we were encouraged to reflect on what music is, what purposes we believe it serves, a...