Kevin Sun

Is this the future of jazz on the internet? A professor once gave me an invaluable piece of advice about how to approach online writing. He said, "Just write as though you're writing an email to a friend."  This email mentality reminded me that I didn't have to treat blogging and other online writing in any special way. Instead, all I had to do was adapt another register of writing I was already familiar with: the personal email, a.k.a., business email's  chattier cousin   and the distant, less pretentious relation of the academic essay. Simply being aware that someone else was reading at the other end of the screen—someone I was trying not to bore—made a huge difference.  Looking back on my conversations with the professor, though, one comment now seems questionable:  "In general, people like making lists more than they like reading them." He must have  at the time  been referring to the old-fashioned list, a series of items separated by com...

With digital technology comes the luxury of easily being able to listen without interruption to a series of interpretations of the same standard. This was a feature of iTunes that I'd been aware of but had never really exploited until fairly recently. Aside from learning tunes and checking out what changes different players used, I hadn't done it strictly for the pleasure of listening—for the pleasure of hearing the same song being worked through in different keys, tempi, etc .  Two solos on "Star Eyes" stood out especially when I was playing this game once: young Miles's with Bird from 1951, and a Bill Evans trio version with Eddie Gomez and Shelly Manne from the mid-'60s. Like the "Now's the Time" solo that Red Garland quotes in block chords on "Straight, No Chaser" on Milestones, Miles's "Star Eyes" solo has an eminently singable quality that makes it a real earworm; Bill's solo is more ornate and features tho...

Donald Barthelme (Wikimedia Commons) After a friend lent me his copy of Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories  a few weeks ago, I've been hooked. I'd known about Barthelme for some time, having read "The Balloon" after David Foster Wallace mentioned it in an interview as the first piece of fiction that really "rang his cherries." That was the only piece of Barthelme's I'd read and, at the time, I was relatively unimpressed. As a long-time fan of Thomas Pynchon, I'd also known about Barthelme as a kind of American postmodernist counterweight to Pynchon's urban sprawl: Barthelme as the enigmatic purveyor of fragments and pocket-sized fictions, polished to an extreme and sharing the same compact muscularity as Hemingway's writing.  A native Texan and son of a famous architect (in whose shadow the younger Donald Barthelme would bide for years), Barthelme was enthralled by jazz at a young age. In a superb 1981 interview for The Paris R...

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, ...

When I first heard about the Live at the Plugged Nickel  (1965) recordings in high school, I had only ever listened to the 'First Great Quintet.' Based on the track listing for these recordings, I was expecting to hear some moderately updated takes of existing repertoire, but I had no way to process what was happening. Where was the harmony? Where was the form? Where was 'one'?  A few years later, I came back to these recordings while feeling in a slump about playing over standards—the hopelessness of breaking free from 32-bar forms that began to feel like prison cells—and they instantaneously opened my ears to the possibilities of creating vibrant, living music within old forms. It wasn't about making the most pristine or slick melodic/harmonic/rhythmic statement within the form; it was about exploding these forms, overspilling their boundaries with the momentum of the music.  The opening tune from the first set of the second night, "If I Were a B...