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| With "Quartets" Kevin Sun celebrates a decade of adventurous music-making Out October 18, 2024, the double album features two quartets of close collaborators and documents the adventurous rising saxophonist's most personal and distinctive visions for modern jazz to date. "The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety ... Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time." — Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times "Sun is greasy, at times even lurid ... The Fate of the Tenor makes a strong case for showing up and hearing the sounds in person sooner rather than later." — Ethan Iverson, Transitional Technology * * * * * Since moving to New York City nearly a decade ago, saxophonist Kevin Sun has spared no time pursuing his vision for modern jazz and improvised music. Following his 2018 debut, Trio, he recorded and released five more albums in as many years while performing extensively on the Brooklyn jazz and creative music scene. Quartets, his latest outing for his Endectomorph Music label, surveys a wide range of music from his early composing days to latter day inspirations ranging from video game music and electronic pop to mid-century auteur cinema. Side one features Sun's "secret" quartet, which includes longtime collaborators Dana Saul (piano), Walter Stinson (bass), and Matt Honor (drums), who feature prominently throughout Sun's discography in various configurations, but have only been featured together on record once before (side one, "The Middle of Tensions, " from 2019's The Sustain of Memory). During the pandemic, Sun continued to compose and workshop music with this core quartet, which had been preparing to debut a new book of music in March 2020 before being interrupted. With the beginning of his weekly residency at Lowlands Bar in Brooklyn in September 2021, Sun finally began performing this music regularly with the group. The music of side one reflects Sun's persistent curiosity with orchestration and compositional possibilities using the time-honored jazz quartet configuration: horn, chordal instrument, bass, and drums. Songs like Dance Notation and Melpomene willfully subvert expectations, turning the saxophone into a cog or rhythm part of a bigger musical machine while affording greater textural freedom for the rhythm section. Others explore the lesser-heard but no less affecting balladic side of Sun's musicianship, such as the tender Shadows Over the Sea and a time-stopping rendition of a late millennium N64 anthem, the title theme from The Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time). The musical chemistry of pianist Saul and drummer Honor is unmistakable, the two having grown up playing music together as kids in Plattsburgh, NY, and the overall ensemble sound is undeniably live and even reckless on cuts like Far East Western, inspired by Akira Kurosawa films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, and the hard swinging Storied History, which winks to Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are." In 2023, Sun decided to form a new band after feeling that he'd hit a wall musically. "I'd been playing my own music every week at Lowlands for almost two years and felt like I was stuck in a rut, " says Sun, "I thought it was time to change up the band and try to involve some other musical perspectives who could push me in other directions." His new quartet, with Christian Li on piano, Stinson on bass, and Kayvon Gordon on drums, explores a complementary side of Sun's musicianship, favoring a more tuneful and casual player's approach compared to the more composerly orientation of his previous quartet. That sound is heard to great effect across side two, which includes more so-called modern jazz tunes like Rudderless Blues and tbh as well as more covers, including a danceable, light version of On the Street Where You Live from My Fair Lady, the Bruno Martino hit Estate, and a surprising 12/8 rendition of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Yellow Magic (Tong Poo), forever associated with the pioneering '80s Japanese synth pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Despite the variation in personnel, certain strands of Sun's musical and creative DNA tie the second side to his earlier music: Homage Kondo is a blasé rock song that salutes the composer of music for The Legend of Zelda, Koji Kondo, and That Lights a Star winks to a different portion of "All the Things You Are" (this time, the introduction made famous by the beboppers). Outlawry is Sun's oldest piece on the album, dating from 2013, and revisits a song he first developed with Great On Paper, a co-led quartet from his time in music school. With QUARTETS, Sun offers an elegant summation of his musical interests to date, presenting thoughtful original compositions alongside inventive covers of personal favorites. Side One recorded October 30, 2022; additional saxophone recording May 8, 2023. Side Two recorded on May 1, 2023. Catalog Number: EMM-023 Available digitally under exclusive license to La Reserve Records. * * * * * Kevin Sun Kevin Sun is a saxophonist and composer living in New York City. His music has been called "...intense, harmonically virtuosic and compositionally complex" by DownBeat Magazine, and he has released six albums as a leader, most recently The Fate of the Tenor in March 2024. Sun has also released five albums with the cooperative bands Mute, Earprint, and Great On Paper, and he appears on recordings led by Adam O'Farrill, Jacob Garchik, Juanma Trujillo, Dana Saul, and Xiongguan Zhang, among others. In addition to performing in the U.S., Sun has performed extensively in China and served as the Artistic Director of the Blue Note China Jazz Orchestra from 2018 until 2020, leading performances at the Blue Note Beijing with guest artists such as Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kris Davis, and Ingrid Jensen. He performs regularly at Lowlands Bar in Brooklyn, where he has been in residence since September 2021 with support from Keyed Up!, a program of the nonprofit organization Jazz Generation. In 2021, Sun was a Finalist for the Jerome Hill Foundation Artist Fellowship, and he plays VENN reeds by D'Addario exclusively. write your comments about the article :: © 2024 Jazz News :: home page |