Art Music Lounge reviews QUARTETS

Lynn René Bayley has published the first English-language review of Kevin Sun's QUARTETS ​over at Art Music Lounge. Full text below:

Kevin Sun’s Jazz Quartets
by Lynn René Baylee
The Art Music Lounge
October 3, 2024
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KEVIN SUN’S QUARTETS / Dance Notation. Far East Western (Prelude).Far East Western. Shadows Over the Sea. Melpomene. And the Oscar Goes To. Storied History. Title Theme: The Legend of Zelda [Ocarina of Time] (Koji Kondo) / Kevin Sun, t-sax; Dana Saul, pno; Walter Stinson, bs; Matt Honor, dm / Heideggerdashian. Homage to Kondo. On the Street Where You Live (Lerner-Loewe). Rudderless Blues [or, Obscure Motions]. That Lights a Star. Outlawry. tbh. Pixelate. Yellow Magic [Tong Poo] (Ryuichi Sakamoto). Estate (Bruno Martino). Kierkegaardashian (all pieces by Kevin Sun unless noted) / Sun, t-sax; Christian Li, pno; Stinson, bs; Kayvon Gordon, dm. / Endectomorph Music, no number
Kevin Sun is a 33-year-old Chinese-American tenor saxist and jazz composer who works primarily in and around New York City. I’ve praised his work in the past, particularly on his album ≺3 Bird which features many of his compositions, but also on Dana Saul’s album Ceiling on which he played as a sideman. This is, however, only the second compilation of his own music I’ve had the chance to review.
Although Sun is clearly an excellent jazz composer whose work I really enjoy and appreciate, it is an exaggeration of his publicity machine that he is somehow “unique.” He simply joins a number of outstanding saxist-composers like Henry Threadgill, Rich Halley, Noah Preminger, Silke Eberhard and, more recently, Neta Raanan, who are all a bit different in their approaches but clearly in the same league as Sun. This is not meant to demean his accomplishments, merely to point out that we are living in an age of outstanding leader-composers who happen to be saxophonists.
This particularly album features two different approaches to jazz composition using two slightly different quartets in which Sun and bassist Walter Stinson are recurrent participants. Pianist Dana Saul plays in the first set, replaced by Christian Li in the second, while drummer Matt Honor is also replaced by Kayvon Gordon. The opener of the first set, Dance Notation, clearly shows Sun as a musician who tends to combine elements of his predecessors, particularly Halley and Threadgill, into his own unique style. Despite the heavy 4 beat of the drums, this piece seemed to me to pick up on Threadgill’s concept of one beat at a time, its principal theme being built around just such a concept with the exception of using compressed or expanded beat lengths as the piece continues. Saul’s piano solo, played sparsely with single notes in the right hand, is lyrical while adapting his concept to the one-beat-at-a-time rhythm laid down by Honor. Sun is thus able to balance two, and possibly three, different jazz concepts into one composition, an unusual but not entirely rare feat. Near the very end of the piece, Honor finally breaks up the rhythm in a brief but fascinating drum solo—then a restatement of theme, and out.
Far East Western is divided into two sections, the “prelude” and the piece proper, and here Sun goes a bit further in his subdivision and amorphic handling of rhythm, with the bass and drums each playing their own thing while he and Saul stick to a primarily straight 4 on top. Eventually, the rhythm section falls into line with their concept, as if conceding that this is the way to go, but then Sun suddenly leads his little band into a peculiar rhythm built around 3 rather than 4 (perhaps 6/8—without a score, it’s hard to tell), then moves into a more complex groove as we switch over from the prelude into the actual piece. Sun’s concept of melodic structure is in some ways typical of most modern jazz composers, being an olio of amorphic motifs strung together, yet somehow these make up a quite satisfactory theme in the listener’s mind. In these first three tracks, the one thing that I found rather surprising was that Sun himself only plays a few short solos, giving much more space to his pianist, but here he suddenly bursts out in a furious and quite modern solo built around  rapid 16ths with some “outside” high notes.
Shadows Over the Sea is a ballad, and a surprisingly lovely one—very pretty without being sappy or cheap in substance—which is led off by a Saul solo, later with bass and soft brushes. When Sun enters he maintains this feeling of calm. With Melpomene we return to Sun’s quirkier and more interesting compositional style, a piece that sounds like it’s in 8/8 (if such a time signature exists) with offbeat accents between the beats, but this, too morphs and changes as the piece evolves. Pianist Saul plays two entirely different rhythms simultaneously—one in his right hand, one in his left—as the bass decides to go along with the latter rather than the former. Then we seem to move back into Threadgill-land for a while as Sun moves from restating the there to developing it in his solo. It’s quite the interesting piece, but so is And the Oscar Goes To… which put me in mind not of Threadgill but of any number of those experimental 1950s cool jazz groups like Allyn Ferguson’s (anybody besides me remember Allyn Ferguson?), Fred Katz’ or Chico Hamilton’s, except that once one reaches Saul’s piano solo, recorded in an odd sort of echo chamber, we seem to have left the realm of jazz for something much closer to formal composition.
Compared to most of what preceded it, the opening of Storied History sounds somewhat normal, even more so once the tune proper begins, a real straightahead swinger in the old-school style, and Sun has fun with it. Title Theme: The Legend of Zelda [Ocarina of Time] is the one non-Sun original no the first disc, being credited to one Koji Kondo, and oddly, this piece has a more Eastern sound to its theme than Sun’s own pieces. In fact, it is quite a brilliant piece combining a sparse but tonal melodic line with soft piano figures and Honor again on brushes to sustain the wistful mood. Even the improvisations are rather minimal on this one, mostly by Saul, and this was a wise choice if not my favorite way to end an album.
Moving on to disc 2 with its different lineup, we can first of all clearly see that Sun despises the Kardashians since he uses their last name for two pun titles, Heideggerdashian and the closer, Kierkegaardashian. The first of these is the album’s opener, a very brief piece (1:20) which immediately establishes a different composition approach, more diversified rhythmically and more experimental melodically, with the bass and drums consistently paying their own thing against the rhythm but quietly and not aggressively. The aggression stems from Sun’s own tenor solo. Even the slower, almost (but not quite) ballad-like Homage to Kondo features this complex fracturing of rhythm, although here it coalesces for a while into a straight four. Stinson plays a good if not stunning bass solo while Christian Li feeds him chords. Drummer Gordon is, in his own way, just as subtle as Honor, so in that sense I don’t hear too much difference.
Next up is a rarity for Sun, his own arrangement of an established older tune, On the Street Where You Live. It’s quite good, don’t get me wrong—I enjoyed it for its novelty and very fine solos—but somehow it didn’t seem to fit the album’s concept. Rudderless Blues puts us back on track with another tempo-fractured piece which, like some of Ornette Coleman’s pieces, attracts the ear even as it basically leans on the theme more than the solos, which here are quite sparse. We get back to high creativity with the quasi-Latin-sounding That Lights a Star, but again it seemed to me that on these disc 2 compositions the solos are merely dressing for the compositions rather than a more democratic division of parts, if you know what I mean. Not that it isn’t interesting, particularly at the 4:30 mark where Sun suddenly shifts away from his initial complex beat into a straight 4. but to my ears it’s only a small shift in his approach to the music.
Outlawry, however, is considerably different, a piece built around repeated circular figures which are then fit into a straight 4 as the music evolves and changes. This is more like it. The next number, tbh, sounds like an older jazz tune in some ways, but isn’t. Here, too, I hear only a small shift in Sun’s compositional style from CD 1. This is not to say that these are poor pieces—most of them aren’t—only that I think he is not really as far apart from his old self as Charles Mingus was when he broke away from his Tristano-inspired cool jazz of the early 1950s to the powerful, Gospel-inspired style of his later self with Pithecanthropus Erectus and other such works. I especially liked Li’s quirky but interesting piano solo on this one.
We continue to hear interesting pieces on this second set, one of my personal favorites being the quirky, fragmented Pixelate with its highly abstract melodic line. This, too, is something of a departure from the music on the first set, becoming quite complex once Sun enters on tenor sax and the bass follows his hectic line while piano and drums go their own way. Yellow Magic is also in a somewhat different (but not to different, which is my point) vein from the music on the first disc, here melding a quasi-Latin vibe with quasi-Far East  harmonies filtered through Sun’s jazz ears. Li’s solo on this one is clearly flashier than the kind of playing that Saul did on CD 1, and it has substance, but it does not fit as well into the context of the surrounding material quite as well. Estate, on the other hand, did nothing for me. It’s just “there.” But Kierkegaardashian is a cool piece and a fitting conclusion to this set.
In short, an almost unanimous approval of the music on CD 1 but a few questionable works on CD 2, clearly not enough to dissuade the curious buyer of this set which is certainly worth hearing, at least a couple of times.