Kevin Sun

Shortly after finishing up Ben Ratliff's excellent The Jazz Ear , my friend Kevin Laskey came up from NJ for a graduate school audition in Boston. While we were hanging, I mentioned to him that I had just borrowed another one of Ratliff's books, Coltrane , from the library. Kevin immediately started singing the book's praises, noting that this book in particular led him to realize the potential of great music writing to yield helpful insights and also synthesize multiple interests (history, ethnomusicology, theory, etc .) into a single work. From the outset, Ratliff makes his mission clear: to write a collection of essays that analyze the development of Coltrane's musical persona over the course of his career and to then make sense of Coltrane's legacy, all while contextualizing his meteoric career with regards to social, political, and cultural histories. This is explicitly not a biography, although the first half of the book moves chronologically through the

About a month ago I posted a few thoughts about Rich Perry's playing along with a transcription of his solo over "Wee." I thought it was about time for more Perry, so here's his solo from the opening track of Oatts & Perry  (2005), a contemporary two-saxophone pairing that's pretty much up there with any other classic two-horn pairings, in my opinion. This might have been the particular track I heard the first time somebody played Rich Perry for me, back in high school at Manhattan School of Music Pre-college (thanks, Joe Peri !) Most of the classic Perry-isms are present in this solo: diverse attacks and articulations (slur-tongue and staccato are of particular interest), inward bending lines that weave around target notes in surprising ways, bending seamlessly from a held note down to another, and Rich's inimitable way of both playing completely in agreement with the pulse yet somehow floating above it, too. The only thing that's missing is the &quo

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

Sonny Meets Hawk!  (1963) was too far from my expectations for me to appreciate it when I first checked it out a couple years ago. I picked up the record to hear Sonny, rather than Coleman Hawkins, but the Sonny on this record doesn't play the elegant, more easily vocabularized lines found on  Saxophone Colossus  (1956) or Way Out West  (1957). Pat Metheny, in Ben Ratliff's excellent The Jazz Ear , has an interesting take on Sonny's playing on this record: "He was a young guy at the time," Metheny marveled, listening to Rollins's emphatic, darting lines in "All the Things You Are," harmonically at odds with Hawkins's, on the opening chorus. "That feeling is such a great feeling—like 'I can play anything , and it's all good.' Not to analyze it, but Hawk was kind of like his father. And it's like Sonny's saying, 'yeah, but ...'" I'd also add that Sonny's playing on this record is as far from 'acad

This solo doesn't need much of an introduction: it's an iconic, pared-down Coltrane statement from 1959's Kind of Blue  which is one of the most well-recorded examples of his sound from the Atlantic Giant Steps -era earlier in his career. I learned this solo originally to play along with for the saxophone sound content above all else; warming up with this and Stan Getz's "Soul Eyes" from Soul Eyes  (1989) was part of my regular routine in high school, but posting this solo reminded me that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to keep doing it at the beginning of my practice sessions now. One interesting side-note: the harmonic motion of the tune is doubled from the head in and the head out, which I never noticed until I wrote down the transcription and tried to notate it. So, I suppose you could say that it's a two-chorus solo, although it's still only a 40-second statement. Here's the transcription:

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

Photo by Mattia Luigi Nappi Wayne Shorter's solo over "Eighty-One" f rom  E.S.P.  (1965) surprised me the first time I heard it: raw, direct, and completely unaffected expression, which probably applies to most instances of Wayne's playing over the 50 or so years. As I've written previously, it took me a long time to accept Wayne's style of playing for what it is, which to my ears rejects certain conventional contemporary notions of great saxophone playing in favor of stylistic choices that might initially come across as a lack of technical control, but actually reveal a deep sense of wisdom and attention to detail.  A writing analogy comes to mind, i.e. , perhaps counterintuitively, it's harder to write a sentence that breaks grammatical and stylistic norms but functions effectively in its purpose than a sentence that fulfills the basic, received rules of grammar and style and succeeds. When I think of my favorite prose writers (Joan Didion, DFW),