Kevin Sun

Photo by Steve Mundinger Congratulations to Melissa Aldana, Tivon Pennicott, Godwin Louis, and the other saxophonists who performed Sunday and Monday as part of the 2013 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition! I caught most of the semi-finals on Sunday, including a couple minutes of Godwin's much-Facebooked-about set on my phone as I sat on a bus to the New England Conservatory. I missed the finals on Monday, but heard great things. Now that it's over, the post-competition discussion can begin; as James English argues in The Economy of Prestige , the real purpose of cultural competitions might be their value as a perpetual locus of discussion around which people can air their thoughts about the real stuff: the value of art, its relationship (or complete separation from) the market, etc . Jacob Garchik started up a brief Twitter discussion yesterday with the hashtag #monkcompetitionbonusrounds , which is also probably one of the longest hashtags to have trended on Twitter in

Happy birthday, Sonny! The greatest living tenor saxophonist turns 83 today, so I thought I'd share one of my favorite solos: "Sumphin'," a slow F blues from Duets  (1957), which features the same band that's heard on the more famous Sonny Side Up  (1957).  I will say that musical notation is especially inadequate for this incredibly nuanced solo, so bear that in mind when you check out the transcription: Bb C Eb * * * * * Nextbop contributor Ben Gray referred to my transcriptions of Monk and Charlie Rouse's solos on "Green Chimneys" from Underground  (1968) in a recent blog post . Also, I was informed last week that a feature story of mine from the spring, "Social Class at Harvard," is a finalist for an Associated Collegiate Press story of the year award; 'twas a pleasant surprise.

Back in January, I took a look at a couple of early Stan Getz recordings  to try to get a sense of how he fit into the swing-bebop continuum, i.e. , the stylistic divide which most younger, East Coast-based players of the '40s found themselves negotiating. I ended up concluding this: If I were to identify any weaknesses or limitations of Getz's bebop playing, it'd probably be that he tends to repeat himself—he's less like Sonny Rollins, who takes small melodic ideas and creates variations upon them rhythmically and motifically, and more like Bird, who to me does repeat himself often but in surprising ways.     What I mean is that he works with a broad set of vocabulary that he feels comfortable with, and builds solos with these pieces of melodic material, while also changing them rhythmically and phrasing them differently to fit the context of the solo, but not enough that these fragments aren't recognizable. I noticed in a couple early recordings how plainly