Kevin Sun

Tomorrow, I leave for India for three weeks on an English department fellowship to audit classes at Jadavpur University in Kolkata. I'll be taking a January hiatus from AHS on that account, but I wanted to take a moment to send off 2013 properly with the obligatory end-of-year, greatest-hits-collection-type post. As I had hoped, I did posted fewer transcriptions this year but had more to say about books I was reading, shows I'd seen, and records I'd been checking out.  I've picked out some of my favorite posts from the past year, in case you'd missed them, and also highlighted my Crimson Arts column from the spring plus some interviews I've done for Jazz Speaks , the blog of The Jazz Gallery . Have a sweet new year—I'll be back in just a few weeks. A Horizontal Search Musings on Mo-Jazz (October 15th) Solo Saxophone (June 28th) Joshua Redman at Harvard (April 16th) Ben Ratliff's "Coltrane" (February 28th) Early Getz and Bebop (J...

I purchased Miguel Zenón's relatively new Oye!!! (Live in Puerto Rico)  album a few months back and was surprised to hear a Joe Henderson lick jump out at me while listening to "Oye Como Va," the first full track on the record.  I knew that I'd heard something strongly similar recently, since I'd been checking out Joe a fair amount during that time, and brought it up to Miguel during a lesson. He was amused that I'd noticed this small easter egg, and I decided to go back and find a couple primary sources that this lick pointed to. Here are two excerpts from the late '60s: This small incident had me thinking more about how influence and the transmission of information works in transcribing and internalizing jazz language. During the semester, I'd been taking an introductory class on the history of literary criticism and theory, which included a reading taken from Harold Bloom's seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence: A History of P...

“Everything I’ve lived, I am. I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them—as Ellington did—as part of my life as an American Negro” - Cecil Taylor  I'd known for a while how certain streams of avant-garde jazz in the '60s were attacked by critics as being too "abstract" or too "European" in sensibility, but I hadn't realized that John Coltrane  (Wikimedia Commons) another attack made upon this music was that it wasn't "black enough." Barack Obama's election to the Presidency brought the conversation about essentiality and blackness onto the national stage, but it's fascinating to read about how this conversation was being had in the '60s about, of all people, African-American artists like John Coltrane who, in some ways, are seen as icons of blackness today. From Ingrid Monson's  Freedom Sounds  (2007) : ...the Muhammad Speaks  [Nation of Islam publication] reviewer saw Coltrane’s popularity as ...

My first post for this blog compared my first lesson with Miguel Zenón to reading Photo by Michael Hoefner (Wikimedia Commons) Descartes's Discourse on Method . At the time, I was reading Descartes for historical context in a class that focused on Milton's Paradise Lost  as a foundational work of the Early Modern period. I was astounded by Descartes's lack of pretentiousness and generally intuitive, practical approach to learning, which includes the following four rules: The first was never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such...   The second, to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them...   The third, to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those objects that are simplest and easiest to know, in order to ascend little by little, as by degrees, to the knowledge of the most composite things...   And the last, eve...