Kevin Sun

When I was kicking around ideas for a final project in my acoustics class last semester, I toyed with the idea of comparing sonic profiles of different saxophonists in a solo saxophone context. The project was pretty quickly shot down after my professor pointed out the obvious problem of dealing with the slew of variables beyond my control: different mics, mic placements, recording environments, etc ., which I'd only be able to isolate if I did my own recordings (definitely not interested in checking that out).  Although the project ended up being a nonstarter, it ended up as an excuse for me to dig through my library to find instances of extended a capella  performances. I found plenty of lengthy cadenzas, but far fewer solo tracks from records. One of the first that came to mind was Joe Henderson's "Lush Life"  from Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (1991). There are plenty of transcriptions of this solo floating around the Internet, and I've found my

Ben Webster, ca. 1947 (William P. Gottlieb) Ben Webster is one of the many great swing-era tenor players whom I've yet to check out to  any serious degree—some others include Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, and Chu Berry, as well as the legacy of husky-toned tenor players who came after (Stanley Turrentine, Ike Quebec, etc .). The monolithic Coleman Hawkins-Lester Young dipole of influence is daunting enough to engage with as it is, but in terms of pure sonic diversity, these sometimes overshadowed tenor players of the earlier chapters in jazz history present some fascinating alternatives to the couple of dominant mainstream tenor sound influences that seem to be everywhere these days. I honestly haven't checked out enough of Ben Webster's discography to tell how Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson  (1959) measures up to the critically agreed upon high points of his output, but I had this record lying around in my collection and thought it might make a fine point of entry as any

The Museum of the Moving Image , located conveniently a stone's throw away from where I'm living this summer, has had an ongoing exhibit about the fascinating genre of the music video. I had a chance to spend some time there on the last day of the exhibit, where I saw an inspiring range of videos that ran the gamut from art house surrealism to traditional linear narrative to interactive audiovisual installation. One of the highlights was seeing Bj ö rk's "Wanderlust" video for the first time, which is meant to be viewed in 3-D: Unsurprisingly, jazz was scarcely represented; considering the financial means needed to produce music videos pre-YouTube, not to mention the challenge of coordinating visuals with music that's generally far less repetitive than most pop music (at least within a given song), I didn't come to the exhibit expecting to see any music from this tradition. I did, however, see one swinging video: Nina Simone performing "My Baby J

In keeping with the recent series of piano transcriptions, I've been working on Bud Powell's solo on "Cherokee" from Jazz Giant  (1949). I first heard this arrangement during my senior year of high school; my friend Luke Celenza recorded a version of Powell's arrangement that used the chromatic voice leading in the A sections and a slower waltz during the bridge (a nod to Ahmad Jamal's arrangement).  I've found that Bud Powell tunes are surprisingly popular at sessions, especially as an alternative to the more popular Bird heads: "Wail," "Celia," "Dance of the Infidels," "Bouncing with Bud," etc . are all great melodies, and like most great bebop tunes have a certain anthemic quality to them, if that means anything to anyone other than me ("Reets and I" especially, for some reason [ ed. note, 12.27.14: I realized my mistake here—"Reets and I" was composed by Benny Harris, not Bud! Harris was

I spent some time learning "Nobody Else But Me," a standard written by Jerome Kern for the revival of Showboat  in the '40s. I heard it for the first time in a while earlier this week at Smalls, and made a note to check it out. The tune isn't played too often, to my knowledge, although it might be getting more popular: Gerald Clayton recorded a solo version of it on Bond: The Paris Sessions , and it's a more novel alternative to the countless other standards in Eb (It Could Happen to You, My Shining Hour, There Will Never Be Another You, etc .). The version I'm most familiar with is on Nobody Else But Me,  which features Stan Getz's quartet with Gary Burton in the '60s. Browsing through my iTunes library, though, I came across another Getz version from 1953, with Jimmy Rowles on piano, Bob Whitlock on bass (?), and Max Roach on drums. Incredibly swinging, and the piano intro is just perfect.  Getz, as a rule, just about always had outstanding piani

Wikimedia Commons After some initial difficulties with a truant Q train yesterday afternoon, I made it to Steve Coleman's workshop at SEEDS::Brooklyn . When I walked in, a group of participants were in the midst of working with a clavé rhythm over "Indiana," which was the focus for most of the 3-hour workshop. I don't feel at liberty to talk in any technical capacity about the concepts discussed, especially considering my unfamiliarity with them, but I was really impressed by how casual but focused the workshop was. These workshops have been going on since late May and will be happening every Tuesday for the rest of this month; if you're around New York and are free/can get off work on Tuesday between 1-4 p.m., I highly recommend attending if you haven't had much exposure to Coleman's music. The $15 cover for 3 hours is a steal, and when I went, the workshop was moderately attended—a surprise to me, considering what a musical force he's been over

It's been a couple inertial weeks since the end of the semester, but now that I'm relatively settled in Queens for the summer, I'll have no excuse not to be more productive with my time.  I posted my tentative summer reading plans earlier, and I managed to sneak in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in between Dubliners and Murphy . First, a few words about Joyce's Dubliners : Slick drawing of James Joyce (1922) - Djuna Barnes Having read Joyce in reverse order ( Ulysses , Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , but no Finnegan's Wake —at least not yet), I was pleased to find that Dubliners  was just as readable as his later works, if primarily different in style and form. The writing is noticeably more tame, i.e. , more conventional in its close-third person narrative style and without the same spatial and temporal flexibility of his later works, but, on the whole, the prose is distinctively Joycean. There were a couple moments