Kevin Sun

On the fifth chorus of his solo on "Cheryl," Bird quotes a large portion of Louis Armstrong's famous cadenza from "West End Blues" (1928). The announcer (whom I believe to be Symphony Sid) immediately notes: "If you were listening closely there, maybe you noticed Charlie Parker's quotation from a famous Louis Armstrong introduction to 'West End Blues,' showing that sometimes the new school does  borrow from the old." Bird's known for quoting plenty of material from his diverse listenings, including the piccolo obbligato from 'High Society,' but it's rare to hear him quote another contemporaneous musician at length like this.  This particular recording is from a CD of a friend of mine's, called Early "Bird."  Unfortunately, I don't have any other information about when this was recorded, although based on some quick online research, it's likely that this live recording is from a Sunday afternoo

Yesterday, I took a break from transcribing to sit at the piano and noodle around. I plunked out a three note cluster in the right hand (D, Eb, G), which reminded me of something I had not listened to in a long time. I ended up transcribing part of the intro to "Now's the Time" right then and there: I thought at first that maybe it was Monk who came up with the intro, but it's actually Sadik Hakim, a pianist from Minnesota. These little quirky intros are underappreciated, I think—I didn't pay any attention to them until reading a bit about an intro to "Dewey Square" on Do the Math . Now that I think of it, the intros do add a lot: the slick line at the beginning of "Confirmation" always made me want to fast-forward to that track on the CD when I was younger, and sometimes, an intro is really all you need ("Ko-Ko"). I'll likely have a Bird transcription up here soon, but considering that Bird has been plenty enough di

"Does everybody have their cameraphones ready?" says Dave Chappelle before playing a respectably clean arrangement of "Round Midnight." Chappelle actually makes it close to the bridge, asking "Am I close?" when he's near, but he gets further than probably 99% of multi-millionaire comics. I came across this video after watching Dave Chappelle's Block Party  (2006) last night. It's a documentary directed by Michel Gondry about a massive concert-block party he helped organized in 2004 in Bed-Stuy. The concert featured an incredible line-up: Kanye, Mos Def, The Roots, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Black Star, Common, Lauryn Hill (with The Fugees), and more.  A majority of the film is concert footage, although there are segments of behind-the-scenes conversations with Dave, performers, and attendees travelling from Ohio (on Dave's "golden tickets" that he gave out to folks, providing transportation to and from the party). At one p

Margaret Atwood writes some tight, gritty lines in The Blind Assassin  (2000), which won the Booker Prize that year. I'm not familiar with her work outside of this novel, but I was really impressed by the quality of the prose (for the most part). Some lines are noir-ishly slick:  It’s the first time they’ve done this and it’s a risk, but as soon as she sees the hotel she knows that no one in it would expect them to be anything but unmarried; or if married, not to each other.  No need to describe the hotel here: the seediness of the place comes from an unexpected and fresh-sounding cliché (how does she do that!?). Another aspect of her writing that leaves a favorable impression on me is her tendency to aphorize, which others might find annoying or pretentious, but which I think is tasteful and authoritative in this sci-fi noir-like context. On the inherited rich: An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.    And from the perspective of advanced a

I've tried to get into Mark Turner a couple times, but I've failed each time. I can't help but be impressed, though, by his harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic sophistication; it seems that he's accomplished so much towards his aesthetic direction—one which simply isn't aligned with my own tastes enough for me to enjoy listening to his records for long periods of time (yet).  I remember arguing about my opinion of Mark Turner with a friend once, and we came to the conclusion that perhaps it's not so much Mark Turner himself that doesn't gel with me so much as the numerous Mark Turner-ites who try to get that coolly intense vibe in their playing but end up sounding like bland, line-spitting automatons.  Still, just because I don't necessarily like Mark Turner the way many other saxophonists and musicians do doesn't mean there isn't stuff I'd like to steal from him. I recently picked up Aaron Goldberg's first record, Turning Point  (1999),

My best friend and semi-professional humorist Conway Yao hipped me to this video of champion surfer Kelly Slater talking about his experiences as a kid learning how to surf. I've never surfed and I've never followed professional surfing, but something Slater said stood out to me (around 1:40).  He says: "I kind of liked the era I've grown up in because we didn't have the technology and the media we have now. Surfing could grow up in these little subcultures and there were very different styles and approaches, but now, if you see someone do a maneuver, you see it that day online." Standardization and the cataloguing of everything are two of the major trends affecting just about everything in the digital era, but Slater comments on these trends this way: "There's less of a mystery to it now. I think that idea of not having that was nice having growing up because it's nice to plant seeds and have your own thoughts about how it's go

According to Woody Shaw's website , Shaw had both perfect pitch and photographic memory. I've heard of a few other musicians who are or were reputed to have been born with both these talents: Stan Getz, who once memorized the entire Stan Kenton book and came to rehearsal with his stand turned backwards; Gary Smulyan, who I've heard has the entire Vanguard Band book memorized; and Miguel Zenón (not 100% sure; I never asked). I haven't transcribed too much Woody Shaw, but I'm always surprised by how relatively simple and logical his complex-sounding lines are: there's something about how he phrases them that makes them especially ear-catching. Here's his solo on "The Greene Street Caper," based on "On Green Dolphin Street" (no surprise there). Check out the solo break, especially: Take a listen: * * * * * Woody Shaw's official website also posted up an excellent live bootleg of Woody playing over "On Green

I'm sure Wayne Shorter gets complemented for his beautiful compositions all the time, but I don't think he gets enough credit for his gift for coming up with great titles. Seriously: just on  Speak No Evil  (1964), you have "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum," "Dance Cadaverous," "Infant Eyes," "Speak No Evil," "Witch Hunt," etc. . Others might argue that the reason we like the titles so much is partially because of the quality of his compositions, but I think Wayne's titles are pretty definitive and evocative on their own.  Anyway, to get back on point: it took me a long time to like Wayne (I've generally liked his music, but hadn't been a fan of his saxophone playing), and I think I get why he's lauded as he is. He plays with immense feeling. On "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum," he doesn't play anything that a first-year conservatory undergraduate wouldn't be able to execute, but he plays with an intensity in an un-notateabl

About a month ago, I bumped into a friend whom I hadn't seen in quite a while. We were at a jazz venue in the Village and stayed until 2 a.m., after which we split to get falafel and head home. Talking about what we had seen that night (it was a jam session), my friend said something I thought was really interesting. He said, "You know, I didn't really enjoy that. I really got the sense of a jazz nerd vibe in there." It was late so I didn't bother to ask what he meant by "jazz nerd vibe," but I kept thinking about those words. Jazz nerd? From what I gather, there was a bit of a controversy after this video was posted on YouTube two years ago: an explanation of what Jason Marsalis calls the "jazz nerd." This excellent LATimes blog post  clears up what Marsalis was getting at in the video. In Marsalis's own words, " JNA ['Jazz Nerds of America'] reduces music to as many complex notes as possible while ignoring the simple

The other night at Fat Cat, the trumpeter Josh Evans played "Dig" as a background (or maybe as a fill during a drum trade) over the bridge of "Caravan," which led me to check out the tune the next day. It's a contrafact over "Sweet Georgia Brown" that gets called from time to time, and was recorded a month after Sonny Rollins turned 21 (!), in 1951. It was also recorded shortly after Sonny got out of Rikers Island for armed robbery, according to Wikipedia—different times! Here's a transcription of the solo: * * * * * [ed. September 7, 2016] And a few words from Sonny from an interview earlier this year on early mishaps around this time: What about the times that you didn’t want to be part of the music business?  SR:   There are a couple of big hiatuses. But you played every day still. And you’re playing on that bridge.  Tell me what life was like for you then. SR: Well, I’ve taken several hiatuses in my life. Early on, of

Stan Getz and Chet Baker in 1983 — 40 years later! West Coast Live  (1953) is a lesser-known Stan Getz record that features Chet Baker and Getz playing over standards and bebop tunes like "Half Nelson" and "Move" in Los Angeles. During my heavy Stan Getz phase in middle school and high school, I was intensely curious as to how Getz negotiated bebop chord progressions. Of recordings of Getz playing over Bird tunes, I only know of a couple: "Confirmation," from Poetry (1983), a piano-saxophone duo record with Albert Dailey; "Scrapple from the Apple," from Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi  (1957); "Billie's Bounce" with J. J. Johnson on Live at the Opera House  (1957); and "Yardbird Suite" on this record.  There's been an endless amount of writing by critics on "Getz's melodicism" and that sort of jazz journalist-y stuff, so I'll stay off that point, except to point out that if there are major attribut

Having picked up a copy of Soultrane  (1958) the other day, I was listening casually today when I heard "Russian Lullaby." This track is on the same level, tempo-wise, as "Countdown" or "Limehouse Blues" or any of the other straight-ahead Coltrane burners from the late '50s and early '60s. The break at the very end was what got me, though. It's like the Olympic 100 m. dash: 90 notes in under 10 seconds. Usually, it's really not about the numbers in jazz, but in light of Usain Bolt's recent victory , I thought this might be appropriate. Check out the recording (the break happens around 4:57) and the transcription:

A few days ago, I made the mistake of trying to learn a tune—this time, George Shearing's "Conception"—from a Miles Davis recording. As I've experienced in the past, lifting the melody and changes from a Miles recording yields some often hip changes and phrasing, but not always the most reliable for playing with other people at sessions. The recording in question is Dig  (1951), which features a young Sonny Rollins, Mingus on bass, Art Blakey on  drums, and Walter Bishop, Jr. on piano.  Miles plays this one in C, whereas Shearing plays it in Db. The main discrepancy between how Miles and Shearing's arrangements is in the solo form: Shearing's version of the tune is AABA and each A is 12 bars long while each B is 8 bars long; Miles interpolates an 8-bar "interlude" or pedal-point variously in the tune, which is a holdover from "Deception," from Birth of the Cool (1949). Miles's version of "Conception" has a solo form that

Hemingway in a Red Cross Ambulance (1918) A new edition of A Farewell to Arms (1919) has recently been published that contains a bunch of alternate endings and drafts of passages from the novel . Alas, I don't have a copy of it, but I have reason to get one, having just finished it and found it very moving a story. There was much I liked about the novel: the descriptions of the Italian countryside and the mountains, the lean dialogue, and the understated, sometimes corny but unsentimental romance between Lieutenant Frederic, an ambulance driver for the Italian army during WWI, and British nurse Catherine Barkley. I'd say that the moments that stand out in Hemingway's writing are those that you don't realize at the moment of reading—they're little points in time that you keep thinking about after you've turned to the next page and are still thinking about in the back of your mind. There was one paragraph, though, I had to share—it's a tender moment b

Ambrose Akinmusire in 2011. There's no question: Ambrose plays some bad stuff. The question is: what is he playing that's so bad and how's he playing it?  A friend of mine passed this bootleg on to me—it's Ambrose playing over an F Blues at a show, with Walter Smith III and Roy Hargrove for sure and the other musicians unidentified (probably Justin Brown on drums and Sam Harris on piano). Check out this line over the first four bars. Ambrose leaves a few measures of rest before launching into the top of the next chorus; the rhythm section sets it up.   "Ah!" That's how I felt too when I heard it—so clear and so fresh. Here's the line: So, an ascending line that travels up an octave and a sixth in two measures, followed by a descending octave jump that unexpectedly travels up another octave and a third by way of stacked 5ths. In my eyes and to my ears, the operative note in the line is the concert Ab—the half-step approach to the third