Kevin Sun

From the end of one of the assigned readings this week for Vijay Iyer's "Creative Music: Critical Practice Studio" class: a list of recommended listening by George E. Lewis, from "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives" (available via JSTOR). Most of this music is foreign to me, although the artists and their situatedness via historical texts are more familiar to me, sad to say. I'm posting it up here partly to share for those who are like me and haven't explored this music, and also partly to keep myself accountable for checking it out once my thesis is in a week from today: I posted about  something similar a while back from the School of Improvised Music's webpage. It looks like their site's been nicely redesigned, and the recommendations are still available here . * * * * * In other news, my senior thesis, tentatively titled "Making the Hang: and Other Essays on Being a Young Improvisor,"

View from famously uncomfortable seats In case you didn't know, Herbie Hancock is this year's Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry , which is a fancy designation at Harvard that allows the university to bring one distinguished artist each year to give a series of free lectures in the school's biggest lecture hall, Sanders Theater. The term "poetry" is interpreted broadly here—similar to how "sports" are interpreted broadly for Rhodes Scholar applicants—and past Norton lecturers have included Igor Stravinsky, e.e. cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Leonard Bernstein (whose lectures are up on YouTube !). Homi Bhabha introduced Herbie for the first lecture, and his opening remarks were notable for two primary reasons: (1) Bhabha pointed out that Herbie was the first African-American Norton lecturer, which was received with moderate applause (kind of shocking, considering that the Norton Professorship was endowed in 1925), and (2) Bhabh

I returned from Kolkata a little over a week ago. There's far too much for me to mention to do justice to the sights and sounds of the city, but I will say that seeing live North Indian classical music for the first time was among the most memorable experiences of my trip. The winter is prime festival season, as I learned, which means day-long performances that sometimes stretch through the night into the early hours of the morning. For those who complain about certain classical works or    improvised solos  being excessively lengthy or Hour 6/10 at a classical music festival even self-indulgent, I'd advise against attending these festivals; many of the sets that I saw were an hour or longer in length, and might feature uninterrupted music for over half an hour at a time.  I first realized that expectations for the audience at these performances differed from those in the US when I arrived late to the first night of a festival: the music began at 2, but I didn't end