Kevin Sun

After a tumultuous weekend (and an even more extraordinary week), there's not much to do but to keep on with regular life as best as we can. Two weeks ago, I posted Herbie Hancock's solo on "Riot" from Speak Like a Child  (1968). At Miguel's urging, I've been working on another solo from the same record, "First Trip," a Ron Carter tune that was also recorded on Joe Henderson's Tetragon  (also released in 1968). Here's the solo: * * * * * Today marks the last installment of my Crimson Arts column "Flirting with Coherence,"  which is a brief attempt to diagram the births of major 20th-c. American jazz saxophonists  and summarize a few major strains of influence—all in 1300 words. A few friends of mine have already pointed out some contentious points, so I expect to update this and really give it the due diligence it deserves at some point in the future, although I'm satisfied to have a starting point fo

YAJP (Yet another jazz pun). Joshua Redman came to Harvard this past weekend to perform with the jazz band for the  spring concert, which was called "Playing It Forward" as a tribute to the very-recently retired director of bands, Tom Everett. I checked out an afternoon rehearsal on Friday with Josh and hung out at the obligatory guest artist meet-and-greet dinner event (last year's guest artists were Joe Lovano, and Greg Osby ). Hearing him play some of his older tunes from the '90s was particularly ear-catching: "Home Fries" and "Hide and Seek" are certainly not staples of my generation, which might be predisposed to categorize some of these tunes as corny, easily-satirized throwbacks from the previous century.  In middle school and high school, discussions about contemporary tenor players inevitably included Josh because of his prominence in the jazz sphere and his affiliation with numerous other big names of the past two decades. He'

An appropriately idiosyncratic tribute. Solo Monk (1965) was the very first Thelonious Monk recording I listened to. I remember seeing the album art, depicting Monk as an aviator figure presumably embarking on a solo expedition, and checking out the CD from my local library as a curiosity. With regards to this particular track, Vijay Iyer played the master take of "I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)" from this record at the beginning of a workshop at Banff last year. I was glad to recognize this recording as one of my favorites of the record for its naked, pure quality, but Vijay pointed out the solo break in particular.  At the end of Monk's delivery of the melody, he launches into a four-bar line that begins as a standard I-VI-ii-V turnaround, but at the very end seems to nearly stumble: the left hand misses the upbeat of the last Eb7 going into the top of the next chorus, and Monk's descending right hand line lays back beyond the expectation of an expre

A few weeks ago, I had two back-to-back lessons with Miguel and John McNeil. At the end of my lesson with Miguel, I was asked to transcribe Herbie's solo on "Riot," the opening track from Speak Like a Child  (1968); in my lesson with John, this same solo was recommended to me for study. When I told John how Miguel had just mentioned the same solo, he cracked a big grin and was visibly delighted to hear that other musicians were checking out the same music. He told me an anecdote about asking a saxophonist in the Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, 2007 (Wikimedia Commons) past to study the solo over winter break, and how his phrasing was transformed after studying the solo. At this point, there was no way I could not transcribe the solo, so I went ahead and checked it out for myself. This isn't the flashiest Herbie I've heard (compared to his solo on "No More Blues" from Double Rainbow , for instance), but it's certainly some of the most thoughtfu

Every Harvard undergraduate has a set of courses he or she is required to take to graduate, which are called General Education courses; it's pretty much like distribution requirements, which you find at most 4-year colleges. I elected to take a course this semester called "Why You Hear What You Hear: The Science of Sound and Music" to fulfill a requirement called "Science of the Physical Universe." The course is taught by Eric J. Heller , a professor of chemistry and physics who's best known for his work in quantum mechanics and quantum chaos but has also been interested in the science of sound (he's an amateur trumpet player and also creates digital art on the side).  The most recent material we've covered in class has been about wind instruments and the voice, and I was asked to demonstrate several sonic properties of the saxophone in class this past Monday. The results were analyzed briefly by Professor Heller, and I thought I'd share the le

As I began practicing along with the recording of Coleman Hawkin's canonical "Body and Soul" improvisation from 1939, I soon realized that my recording was about a quarter tone sharper than the original. Luckily, I was able to find a version on  YouTube  with the correct pitch, but it was a bit jarring to realize that I had been listening to a version with distorted pitch for the past couple of years. This solo, like Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" solo, is one of those standard watershed moments included in most jazz history books. The standard narrative is that this is a iconic example of the "vertical approach" to improvisation, which derives a solo fundamentally from the bar-to-bar harmonic progression and consequent outlining and acknowledgment of these harmonies. Usually, the vertical approach is contrasted with a so-called horizontal approach typified by Lester Young, which privileges the melodic direction of a line over the harmonic