Kevin Sun

This has been spreading on social media, and I thought I'd share it here with the transcription. Definitely worth hearing this man's opinion on things. Jimmy Heath: Advice to African Americans "I would say to young African Americans is to learn your history and to value that. “You must know where you’ve been to know where you’re going,” as my mentor Dizzy used to say. You have to have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. And that’s what you have to do: you have to study. It’s not just Martin Luther King; he wasn’t alone. We get hooked on these things—the media does that to us—and the youth is really the victims of the media because they go by what the media tells them: what to dress, what to listen to, what to wear, what to this—if you’re not, you’re not hip! But you have to be a person who searches and go out on your own and find out things for yourself. And, one thing for you to do as a young Afro-American is to study something abo...

A few days ago, the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, distributed its semesterly parody issue of the Harvard Crimson. Ordinarily, these parodies aren't of too much interest to myself other than being a mystifying attempt at satire, but I had to post this particular story: Pretty weird, huh? That seems to pretty much be the Lampoon's M.O., but this particular story came to my attention right when I finished Ben Ratliff's The Jazz Ear  (2008), collection of narrative interviews conducted between December 2004 and March 2007, which fittingly features its own set of some of the biggest names in jazz: Wayne Shorter (after I mentioned that my page views spiked from my last post, a friend joked that I should put "Fuck Wayne Shorter Alex Hoffman" at the beginning of every post, so here's that), Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, Maria Schneider...

(www.charliebanacos.com) A few weeks ago, I was sitting alone in Brooklyn without access to Internet and took a break from transcribing to read through documents I had saved on my computer to read at a future date: JSTOR articles, assorted PDFs, etc .. I came across an NEC doctoral dissertation by pianist Lefteris Kordis  on the pedagogy of Charlie Banacos , which I had originally come across while perusing David Valdez's blog . There's a great line by Jerry Bergonzi, close friend and colleague of Banacos with whom I studied freshman year, that's included in the dissertation: I graduated from Lowell State College with a minor in Banacos. Certain parts of the dissertation actually end up reading a little bit like an advertisement because of the wealth of testimonials, e.g. , Mike Stern: "He's like an encyclopedia," and Geni Skendo, who mentions how he realized he was playing worse  after taking lessons with Banacos because he was able to hear himself pl...