Kevin Sun

Photo by Michael McCauslin (Wikimedia Commons) Lately I've been into taking notes  during shows. Not exactly reviewer-on-assignment type notes, but more like ideas that pop into my head over the course of a performance: things that I notice that I'd like to steal, things that I notice I really don't like and wouldn't want in my own playing, and other general miscellanea. My best thoughts reveal themselves to me at performances that are particularly novel or creative, which was the case tonight.  Chris Thile, mandolinist and MacArthur genius, played a two-hour show (no intermission) at Sanders Theater on campus, which was where I saw Wynton play a couple weeks back and where I've taken intro computer science and classical Chinese philosophy, among other things. I had heard Chris play with Brad Mehldau in April at the Berklee Performance Center (they played "I Cover the Waterfront" as an encore, which was tremendous and made that a must-know tune for m

Last year, a friend of mine introduced me to the term "mo-jazz," a.k.a. , modern jazz. We were playing an uptempo tune he'd transcribed called "Time to Spare," which was written by saxophonist Brice Winston who's most recently been playing with Terence Blanchard's band. He included a little thumbnail of Justin Brown's face in the corner of the leadsheet as a joke; it was supposed to inspire us and remind us of the unabashedly youthful and contemporary vibe that "mo-jazz," either as a pejorative or as a sincere descriptor, embodied.  Even though "mo-jazz" was just a joke, there was something to it—the idea of a shared aesthetic that's been spreading through jazz schools and also through regional scenes in general. I noticed it in the records my friends were listening to, many of whom had overlapping personnel: Ambrose, Gerald Clayton, Walter Smith III, Taylor Eigsti, Aaron Parks, Mike Moreno, and so forth. I also heard it in

Back in March, I had the pleasure of heading over to Indianapolis for a few days to play as a guest soloist at a music convention, along with two brilliant classical musicians, Wonki Lee , a saxophonist based in NYC, and Sam Almaguer , a clarinetist currently in the Masters program at Rice University. Last week, Vandoren sponsored another trip for the three of us—this time, to travel to Paris to visit the Vandoren offices at 56 Rue Lepic in Montmartre, as well as to visit the Selmer and Buffet factories in Mantes la Jolie (they're right down the street from one another). I also had the distinct pleasure of playing my first gig outside of the US; I performed at Sunside Jazz Club as part of an "Hommage à John Coltrane," which was a nice excuse to learn some lesser-played repertoire and get some Trane out of my system, which I thought of as a necessary form of jazz catharsis. It was astonishing to me how many people—of all ages, with a fairly balanced gender ratio—came ou