Kevin Sun

About a year ago I decided I'd start taking "extracts" or selected passages from books I read—passages or even sentences that I'd like to go back to for whatever reason. I came up with this idea of gathering choice lines and paragraphs for a few reasons: I had run into "taking extracts" as a means of self-education in a few 19th c. novels (Jane Austen, probably); a friend of mine had hipped me to the concept of keeping a "graveyard"—a word document with all the cuts and deletions from written submissions, in case I'd ever want to zombify something that didn't work in a past life but might in a new piece; and I thought keeping a garden of ideas on my desktop would be the textual equivalent of keeping a music noteboo k with all my ideas and acquired vocabulary. So, ever since winter break, I've had this document on my desktop called "The Garden," where I plant seeds and hope that something comes of it.  The last book I've ...

Cover art by Dave Heffernan - vaguely C.M. Coolidge-like? Stan Getz & Bill Evans (1964) was one of the first jazz CDs I ever bought—before I knew who Bill Evans was, and also before I knew who Ron Carter and Elvin Jones were and why they were so important in the 1960s. Although this particular session has generally received lukewarm reviews from critics in comparison to the other Getz/Evans recording available— But Beautiful a live date from 1974—I always thought this CD was a solid set of playing by Getz and unique all-star band assembled for the record. The two takes of "Night and Day" take an interesting arrangement: the band lays out for the #IV descending 8 bars at the end of every 16-bar section of the first chorus. Getz's solo over the regular take is available in Greg Fishman's first book of Stan Getz transcriptions. I was always personally more fond of the alternate take, though, primarily because of what Getz plays over the breaks (the climactic t...

My Banff buddy Sam Neufeld hipped me to this hour-long masterclass given by Ambrose Akinmusire. I thought more people should know about it: check it out! Ambrose Akinmusire - Master Class from Monterey Jazz Festival on Vimeo . ***At the time of this posting: Only 120 all-time plays?! Hard to believe —hundreds of dollars worth of masterclasses available on the Internet, but it's finding them that's the challenge. And some brief thoughts The Steve Coleman line is great: "You have to come up with your own concept." I'm more used to seeing "concept" used in a sarcastic or derisive manner, e.g. , "I'm sick of all these young guys who don't know the history constantly BSing about their 'concept,' or whatever." But, there's wisdom in that advice—why else would listening to somebody be enjoyable or stimulating if they only played generic or impersonal stuff?

While in Banff, I had the opportunity to learn from tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy about some of the more practical considerations regarding the saxophonic lifestyle: namely, issues of saxophone maintenance and equipment considerations. One of the more novel things he recommended to me was switching from a neckstrap with a plastic hook to one with a metal hook; the reason he gave was that making the switch would have a subtle impact on the quality of my sound—"It makes sense: metal on metal," he told me. I actually didn't believe him at first—as most people would, I'd think—but he immediately undid the plastic hook on the saxophone and put on his metal hook, asking me to play into the horn. I definitely heard a slight difference, and Greg added that replacing my plastic thumb hook with a metal one would also contribute to an improvement in my sound. His philosophy regarding horn maintenance and decisions about equipment can be summed up simply as, "It all adds up...

Along with Walter Smith III, Dayna Stephens is one of my favorite tenor players under 40 — his record The Timeless Now is excellent, and I'm planning to pick up his latest release soon. Dayna's also on Linda Oh's new record, Initial Here , which was released in May and features Fabian Almazan and Rudy Royston. One of my favorite tunes on the record is an original by Linda entitled "Deeper than Happy," which includes a duet of sorts between Dayna and Fabian—they play around each other over the form, sort of like trading, but it's much more serpentine and fluid than trading phrases usually ends up sounding. I'm still working on transcribing Dayna's lines over the tune, which are incredibly free and relaxed, but also internally complex with regards to rhythm and phrasing. Check out the transcription, and pick up a copy of Linda's record if you haven't already:    The way that Dayna incorporates alternative fingerings into his lines is real...

The first guest post for this blog! The inimitable conductor-composer-poet-librettist-rock-star Matthew Aucoin '12 offers up a couple excellent listening recommendations. Thanks to Kevin for inviting me to post. At the moment, I conduct and compose more than I play jazz piano (I played mostly jazz in high school), but I still consider myself a jazz musician at heart, and I’m excited to share some favorite “classical” composers (I’m not a fan of the term) that I think will appeal to jazz musicians and aficionados. What I gained from my years playing jazz is, above all, a deeper understanding of rhythm, a deeper connection to pulse, and a phobia of rhythmic laziness. The lack of attention to rhythm -- to the development of an inescapable inner pulse and a careful study of what feels good -- is, to my mind, the greatest failure of mainstream classical training. Rhythmic flexibility is one of good classical musicians’ strongest assets, but it must arise out of a de...

I t's been more than a week since I got home from Banff, and I've waiting since then to write the big "end-of-Banff" blog post, for various reasons: fatigue, procrastination, distraction, all the usual suspects. But, here it is, in all its disorganized glory: Early on during the 3-week session at Banff, Vijay Iyer posed this question to the participants at a program-wide assembly: "Why are you here?" I personally didn't raise a hand, mostly because I didn't really know why, or because I had reasons that I didn't think were worth sharing, e.g. , I heard about this place from a friend and the faculty from previous years looked amazing and because I could afford to go thanks to a generous college fellowship.  Jazz! Nothing noteworthy there, but later in the discussion, Vijay reminded everyone that they were in Banff, a sort of musicians' heaven in the Rockies, because they were privileged: privileged to have the ability to play music...

Early '80s graphic design. Yeah! Has anyone checked this book out? I found it one day while distractedly looking through my dad's book collection, a large part of which consists of self-help-type books like these.  At first glance, it looked pretty lame—one of the books central concepts is something called the "Verbal Violence Octagon: Propositions of Power," which has its own neat diagram in the book with the following cryptic instructions: Identify the Satir Mode being used Identify the presupposition(s) of the sequence. Respond in Computer Mode, with a neutral request for information about the presupposition or a remark about the presupposition. Maintain Computer Mode. So, it sounds really weird and probably useless. But , I did find something interesting:

Photograph of Sonny Stitt (Tom Marcello) Greg Osby and countless other great musicians have plenty of stories to tell about Sonny Stitt, who was known for being able to play just about everything and for not being shy about it. For many tenor players, he's one of several players who come to mind as primers of bebop playing (also Dexter, Sonny Rollins, and Bird, of course). On the topic of most-transcribed tenor saxophone solos , which I was thinking about the other day, here's a transcription of Stitt's timeless one-chorus solo on "On the Sunny of the Street," from Sonny Side Up (1957): ***Also, check out this video featuring drummer Charlie Persip , who tells the story of finding out about who the horn players were for the Sonny Side Up date. Can you imagine that? Incredible.

Among tenor players, Joe's 4-chorus improvisation on "Recordame" from Page One (1963) is probably one of the most-transcribed saxophone solos, ever. It's short, melodic, and is replete with Joe-isms that make it distinct and recognizable, like the fall at the end of the very first phrase. Although this solo's great for lifting some lines, it's also perfect for trying to pick up on Joe's phrasing because of the medium-slow tempo. Check it out (if you haven't already!): Mm. 23-26: I distinctly remember learning a similar idea from Bird's solo over "Ko-Ko," on the bridge.

I just picked up Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (1958) from Princeton Record Exchange today during a brief post-Banff splurge-fest, and on the car ride home noticed Tommy Flanagan playing a slick little voice-leading line behind Trane's last chorus. It had never occurred to me before that this kind of a symmetrical ascending-descending voice-leading line existed on a "bird blues," but it does, and it's pretty cool (although probably old news to a plenty of people)! Also the dominant in bar 2 is just the tritone substitution of the dominant in bar 6 — I never noticed that, either. Check it out: Also, Tommy Flanagan wrote "Freight Trane." Maybe that explains why he was aware of such a brilliant little detail—that, or because he was just really killing (I'll put my money on the latter).  

Stan Getz was the reason I became interested in studying jazz, and he's still one of my favorite saxophonists of all time. To put it conservatively, probably at least 50% of the melodic material I draw on when playing over standards has come from solos of his I've transcribed. To my knowledge, Getz didn't record very many rhythm changes tunes over his career, but here's one of them: his solo over "Wee," from For Musicians Only (1958), which is more or less a bebop-era meeting-of-giants-type jam session with Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie, and Getz. The rhythm section is great, too: Ray Brown, Stan Levey, John Lewis, and Herb Ellis. Here's the transcription:  

A theme of the past three weeks has been the value of concision in writing arrangements and compositions for improvisers—providing sufficient space for musicians to create something personal and unique to its moment of creation. Here's an anecdote I heard from Ab Baars, the great Dutch saxophonist, clarinetist, and shakuhachi-ist ( sic? ): A musician in Count Basie's band wanted to contribute an arrangement to the band book, so he spent a couple weeks preparing an arrangement. When he finished, he brought the score to the Count, who looked it over for a while and then tore it in half.  "It's good, but you can do better."

First things first: thanks, everybody, for reading! There's so much to read in print and online nowadays that it's hard to even justify writing something for others to read; for me personally, I couldn't get myself to start publishing things online for months because I didn't think I could justify my contributing to the ever-ballooning morass of blog posts, memes, and the like on the Interwebs. At a certain point, though, I thought I'd take the plunge, and, based on Google Analytics, it seems like there are other living, breathing humans—as well as the occasional web crawler—checking out the site and, I hope, feeling somewhat better after reading a post and not feeling like they've lost 30 sec.-1 min. of their lives to the Internet. So, enough of the mushy stuff: here's a transcription of Sonny Rollins's solo over "Come, Gone," based on "After You've Gone," from Way Out West . Miguel told me to transcribe this solo this semest...