Kevin Sun

A grainy rendering of Trane (Wilbur Harden & John Coltrane) I've always been a big fan of liner notes and the highly specific pleasures they afford: there's always a history lesson or two before digging into a record. Here, a few pre-Thanksgiving treats: From The Complete Savoy Sessions: Wilbur Harden & John Coltrane  (Savoy Jazz Originals, 2010): Bassist Peter Washington, one of the most in-demand bassists of the 90s, has listened well and thought a lot about [Doug] Watkins: "He was different from everybody else playing at the time. When he came on the scene in the mid-50s, nobody really had the length of note he had. Bass players had heavy attack and a shorter ring to the note with the exception of Percy Heath, who was Doug's big idol. He took what Percy had done, and by softening the attack and lengthening the note gave the beat a more supple quality. It's a much more flexible way of playing, which allowed him to play in many more situations tha

It's taken weeks, but I've almost memorized the entire 20+ choruses of this Trane solo on "Straight, No Chaser," a live take from '58 Sessions (originally released on Jazz At the Plaza  in 1973). For the uninitiated, '58 Sessions  is a real treasure: it's the Kind of Blue  band recorded playing standards one year earlier. Two years ago ( ed. note:  kind of hard to believe), I posted Cannonball's outrageous solo from "On Green Dolphin Street" from the same album, and at Miguel's urging, I've been working on "Straight, No Chaser" to work on my uptempo playing.  All the classic late '50s Trane-isms are here in full effect: the palm key wails, the sequencing of ii-V patterns in surprising ways, and the unwavering faucet-spilling of notes that seems basically indestructible. I understood more why Miguel asked me to learn this particular solo after beginning to play it on the horn: keeping the steady flow of brisk but s

I counted: Stevie made three jokes about blindness at Tuesday's show. I won't proceed to make one here. It's been a fine week to hear music in Boston. On Tuesday night, Stevie Wonder graced the crowd that flocked to TD Garden with his presence, performing the entirety of Songs in the Key of Life , plus the obligatory "Superstition" encore. I had already heard about the show from friends in New York and Washington D.C.; as one friend memorably noted, "How is it possible for someone to sound as good at age 64 as they did at 24?" The answer is, of course, to be Stevie Wonder. And it's true: Stevie brought the house down. Generations of Americans were dancing in the aisles to "Sir Duke" like they were hearing it for the first time, and to hear that voice ... oh, man.  During the show, though, I couldn't help but think about the readings we'd discussed in Vijay Iyer's graduate seminar earlier that day. The week's readings

Ed. note (12.8.14): I realized after posting this that somehow my track listings were slightly off for the Benedetti recordings; it's "Dizzy Atmosphere (#217), not #216." Also, I've appended the analysis I wrote for class to the end of this post. I finally got around to perusing The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker  (Mosaic) after a stray comment from John McNeil reminded me that there were treasures beyond treasures waiting in this boxset. Steve Coleman analyzes a number of these tracks (the "52nd Street Theme" performances), so I thought that I'd take a look elsewhere at what Phil Schaap describes as one of the best Bird sets, period, for my midterm assignment in my Bird & Bud class: the March 31st, 1948 sets from the Three Deuces, formerly at 72 West 52nd Street in NYC.  Schaap talks at length about what makes this particularly date so special on his Bird Flight  41st Anniversary broadcast from February, 2011, but essen