Kevin Sun

Lee in Aarhus, Denmark, fall 2014 (Wikimedia Commons) Last week I enjoyed what I currently expect to be my final university-sanctioned spring break, spending most of it in New York and seeing a couple great shows: Seamus Blake & Ethan Iverson duo at Mezzrow (my first time at the spot), Lee Konitz with Dave Douglas at Jazz Standard, and finally Steve Lehman's Octet at the Brooklyn Conservatory.  At the suggestion of a certain pianist-blogger whose name appears on this blog rather often, I thought I'd just post a few of my notes from seeing Lee with Dave's band, which included Matt Mitchell on piano, Linda Oh on bass, and Ches Smith on drums.  I caught the late ("late" meaning 10 p.m.) set on the first night and walked in as they were finishing their first tune, "All The Things You Are" (or was it a contrafact?), which Lee introduced afterwards. I don't know how much if at all Lee had rehearsed with the band, but throughout the second set

I continue to maintain the resolute "no reviews" policy on this blog, which stands for a variety of reasons: the desire not to be pegged as a jazz critic/journalist/writer, to not surrender my prideful, beleaguered defense against Conflict Of Interest, to not burn bridges in a digitized jazz community where a smolder easily finds plentiful accelerant, and so on. However, I think it's important to use whatever platform I have to highlight work by friends, colleagues, and elders that should get more attention. With that said, I submit to you: Dialectics , Curtis Nowosad (March 17, 2015) With Jimmy Greene, Derrick Gardner, Steve Kirby & Will Bonness I wrote the liner notes to Curtis's record because the music on the album emblematizes a trend I'd been thinking about at the time: the idea of "neo-hard bop," an obnoxiously clunky coinage I'd heard from another friend and couldn't get out of my ear. But why couldn't I get it ou

Is this the future of jazz on the internet? A professor once gave me an invaluable piece of advice about how to approach online writing. He said, "Just write as though you're writing an email to a friend."  This email mentality reminded me that I didn't have to treat blogging and other online writing in any special way. Instead, all I had to do was adapt another register of writing I was already familiar with: the personal email, a.k.a., business email's  chattier cousin   and the distant, less pretentious relation of the academic essay. Simply being aware that someone else was reading at the other end of the screen—someone I was trying not to bore—made a huge difference.  Looking back on my conversations with the professor, though, one comment now seems questionable:  "In general, people like making lists more than they like reading them." He must have  at the time  been referring to the old-fashioned list, a series of items separated by comma