Kevin Sun

Depending on how you look at it, friends' and acquaintances' gig postings on Facebook can either be pleasantly informative or otherwise a nuisance. If you use Facebook primarily for professional matters—networking, publicity, etc.—then postings are fine. When I started using Facebook, though, I never thought that I'd be adding people as "friends" who I'd only met once at a jam session, or people who I hadn't actually met but had enough mutual contacts to warrant adding them online. At this point, Facebook for me is about 50% professional networking and 50% social diversion; adding Twitter into the equation muddies the waters of my relationship with social media even more. Earlier today, Steve Lehman posted a string of tweets regarding social media and self-promotion: Seriously considering starting a BLOG that replaces self-promotion masquerading as transparency with actual transparency. Sharing good & bad — Steve Lehman (@thestevelehman) July 3

A couple live recordings have been on my listening rotation for the past month, one of which is Live at the Half Note  (1959), a two disc-set that features Lennie Tristano's quintet (Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Jimmy Garrison, and Paul Motian) with Bill Evans subbed-in for Tristano. This set-up calls to mind other recordings where a quintessential band is missing an important figure or has a substitution ( Cannonball and Coltrane , which is basically the Kind of Blue  band without Miles, or To the Beat of a Different Drum , which is the classic Coltrane quartet with Roy Haynes instead of Elvin). Bill Evans's comping is noticeably subdued on this record; he seems to function in the group more as a horn voice than as a rhythm section voice, but this isn't a problem since Lee and Warne thrive in a more open rhythm section sound. It's not a stretch to claim that Lee and Warne had one of the tightest two-horn sounds in jazz history, and probably one of their most famous arran

One of the most helpful pedagogical devices I've been introduced to since coming to the New England Conservatory has been the playing lesson. Once a semester, Miguel Zenón asks his students to put together a rhythm section to play tunes with him (Donny McCaslin and John McNeil do this as well). Although Miguel is probably best known for his own compositions and arrangements, hearing him in a jam session-type situation like this where you're just calling tunes and blowing over changes is enlightening in its own way—you can tell he's really in his element here, with such a strong rhythmic gravity of his own that it pushes the rhythm section to swing harder as soon as he starts playing.  One of the tunes I called last semester in this lesson was "Isfahan," which we did in a medium tempo, rather than as a ballad. What really surprised me, though, was that instead of playing the melody with me, Miguel immediately started playing the saxophone background lines from th

The Tea Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn has a jam session every Wednesday night (9 to around midnight), co-run by trombonist Mike Fahie and trumpeter John McNeil , with whom I've been studying the past year at NEC. It's a relaxed and efficiently-run session that always ends with a rhythm changes that gives everyone who came out a chance to play. But there is a catch: you've only got one chorus, which is a beautifully conceived (and very practical) constraint, I think. The rhythm changes head is always the same, too: "Ow!" by Dizzy Gillespie. I had always forgotten to ask about this head in the past, but finally remembered to ask John about it this past week. As a sendoff for drum solos (rhythm section players switch on and off over the course of the last tune), they play the first eight bars of "Boppin' a Riff," another rhythm changes head by Fats Navarro: If you haven't checked out the session, it's definitely worth a trip fo

My first exposure to the music of Herbie Nichols was fittingly oblique: Elijah Shiffer , a brilliant peer of mine at the Manhattan School of Music Pre-college program, brought in a big band arrangement he had done of Nichols's "Applejackin'." I ended up taking a cursory listen to some tracks from The Complete Herbie Nichols on Blue Note  from MSM's library and forgot about it for a few years until I heard Vijay Iyer's rendition of "Wildflower" from Accelerando  (2012). I looked around on the Internet to learn about him and ended up reading A.B. Spellman's  Four Lives in the Bebop Business , which dedicates a quarter of the book to a profile of Nichols. I started noticing Herbie Nichols seemingly everywhere, and even came across him while reading Robin D.G. Kelley's excellent biography on Thelonious Monk (Nichols and Monk  often  tend be mentioned together by critics and reviewers who cite a couple broad aesthetic similarities. Interestingly,