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"...a compelling and encompassing account of Sun and his music" — Textura
Quartets by Kevin Sun
Out October 18, 2024 ~ available on Bandcamp // streaming
Personnel
(Side A) Kevin Sun - tenor saxophone Dana Saul - piano Walter Stinson - bass Matt Honor - drums (Side B) Kevin Sun - tenor saxophone Christian Li - piano Walter Stinson - bass Kayvon Gordon - drums Track Listing Side A:
Side B:
Endectomorph Music Catalog No. EMM-023 |
Listen on Bandcamp:Side A recorded and mixed by Michael Perez-Cisneros at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn, New York on October 30, 2022, with additional saxophone recording on May 8, 2023.
Side B recorded and mixed by David Stoller at the Samurai Hotel in Astoria, Queens on May 1, 2023. Mastered by Andreas Meyer at Swan Studios NYC. Produced by Kevin Sun ⋅ Cover photography by Kevin Sun ⋅ Design by Diane Zhou Composition Credits:
All songs composed by Kevin Sun (The Kevin Sun Music / ASCAP) except: “Title Theme: The Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time)” by Koji Kondo “On the Street Where You Live” with music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner “Yellow Magic (Tong Poo)” by Ryuichi Sakamoto “Estate” by Bruno Martino |
Thanks to: the musicians, Dana, Christian, Walter, Matt, and Kayvon, for imparting soulfulness and creative brilliance to this record; Michael and David for their fabulous recording and mixing work, and Andreas for immaculate mastering; John Niccoli and Lowlands Bar for giving us the space and opportunity to work out this music the past three years, as well as Keyed Up! and Jazz Generation for offering additional support; Rio Sakairi and The Jazz Gallery for many years of ongoing support; Arts at Duck Creek for providing one of my first performance opportunities coming out of the pandemic lockdown in 2020; Peter Watrous, who graciously returned to writing to pen a set of vivid and even soulslike liner notes; Emma He, for coming through with yet another mindblowing music video; Endectomorph Music, La Reserve, and Ann Braithwaite for continuing to fight the good fight on behalf of niche improvised instrumental music; and you all for continuing to listen.
"Heideggerdashian" Music Video (directed by Emma He):
Liner notes
After that winter, nation states fell apart. Their absence left only glimpses of light, broken shards of glass in an abandoned parking lot. Those who were lucky enough to survive the collapse affiliated themselves with small centers of learning: the local clubs that kept music going. If you had a connection you could stay alive. Barely, but it could work.
Those small centers were widely dispersed and often knew little about one another, and they weren’t really predisposed, given the situation, to help. Darkness was the default, with occasional outposts of warmth and light around which people huddled, talking about the past. Some people went into the monasteries of academia and survived, preserving a certain learning that way and getting regular small meals in exchange for copying the manuscripts, over and over. The monasteries had systems, a type of employment, but darkness remained the default.
So what was the smart, capable, learned musician to do? Become self-sufficient.
Take Kevin Sun, as an example. You became better and better, you learned, you absorbed as much information as possible. You played with everyone you could and, more importantly, kept a cohort of allies around you, allowing you to exercise your faculties, to experiment, to get better. To become unassailable. To draw out respect, grudging or otherwise. You waited.
And you started a record company, because without documentation there was no chance that your message could possibly get out (even if the label was called “Endectomorph,” which is admittedly hard to pronounce). But you get it done, working with a paradigm that functioned on the assumption that pushing forward was the only way, that eventually the larger system that had run the music would repair itself and, when so, you’d have the goods. Recordings, reviews, your dignity, and a scene worth keeping and celebrating. There was no other way.
Between 2016 and 2024, Endectomorph produced 25 recordings, seven of which are Sun’s. Dense, intellectual music, meant to be listened to, over and over, full of surprises. Music redolent of its time, produced out of sight of the limited power centers that still exist, produced by playing over and over with and in front of friends, knowing that the experience was all there was and that it would produce something vital and deadly honest—because nothing else could come of it. Exemplars, even in their differences, of a Brooklyn sensibility, of small places, and of scholarship, confident that eventually things would work out. Unheard except by a minority, but distinct, its own idiom. There is no higher praise.
Sun’s latest, Quartets, being a prime example of what happens in that situation: insulated, knowing, aware, fostered in the hot house of non-centrality with so much of the history of recorded music available. Two, not one, albums, sharing only the bassist Walter Stinson and referencing pretty much the majority of jazz activity over its life. Hints of free jazz in “Heideggerdashian,” but done in one minute and twenty seconds with a strict rhythmic pattern. The hocket-ish tune “Melpomene” or “Homage Kondo,” which references both the Reid Anderson tune “Hommage: Mahler” and the music of Koji Kondo, the famous composer for video games. Precise rhythmic calligraphy, blues ideas, a standard.
Two different, great bands, both made up of long-time collaborators of Sun’s; quartets working similar ground and sounding totally distinct. The pianists, Dana Saul and Christian Li, utterly different from each other, both virtuosic, both so knowing, so literate. Each tune with an idea, the two albums just bursting with possibilities, with the sound of the future. It’s all in there. Serious, heavy listening, so much accumulated information.
It’s what has to be done.
—Peter Watrous, late summer 2024
Those small centers were widely dispersed and often knew little about one another, and they weren’t really predisposed, given the situation, to help. Darkness was the default, with occasional outposts of warmth and light around which people huddled, talking about the past. Some people went into the monasteries of academia and survived, preserving a certain learning that way and getting regular small meals in exchange for copying the manuscripts, over and over. The monasteries had systems, a type of employment, but darkness remained the default.
So what was the smart, capable, learned musician to do? Become self-sufficient.
Take Kevin Sun, as an example. You became better and better, you learned, you absorbed as much information as possible. You played with everyone you could and, more importantly, kept a cohort of allies around you, allowing you to exercise your faculties, to experiment, to get better. To become unassailable. To draw out respect, grudging or otherwise. You waited.
And you started a record company, because without documentation there was no chance that your message could possibly get out (even if the label was called “Endectomorph,” which is admittedly hard to pronounce). But you get it done, working with a paradigm that functioned on the assumption that pushing forward was the only way, that eventually the larger system that had run the music would repair itself and, when so, you’d have the goods. Recordings, reviews, your dignity, and a scene worth keeping and celebrating. There was no other way.
Between 2016 and 2024, Endectomorph produced 25 recordings, seven of which are Sun’s. Dense, intellectual music, meant to be listened to, over and over, full of surprises. Music redolent of its time, produced out of sight of the limited power centers that still exist, produced by playing over and over with and in front of friends, knowing that the experience was all there was and that it would produce something vital and deadly honest—because nothing else could come of it. Exemplars, even in their differences, of a Brooklyn sensibility, of small places, and of scholarship, confident that eventually things would work out. Unheard except by a minority, but distinct, its own idiom. There is no higher praise.
Sun’s latest, Quartets, being a prime example of what happens in that situation: insulated, knowing, aware, fostered in the hot house of non-centrality with so much of the history of recorded music available. Two, not one, albums, sharing only the bassist Walter Stinson and referencing pretty much the majority of jazz activity over its life. Hints of free jazz in “Heideggerdashian,” but done in one minute and twenty seconds with a strict rhythmic pattern. The hocket-ish tune “Melpomene” or “Homage Kondo,” which references both the Reid Anderson tune “Hommage: Mahler” and the music of Koji Kondo, the famous composer for video games. Precise rhythmic calligraphy, blues ideas, a standard.
Two different, great bands, both made up of long-time collaborators of Sun’s; quartets working similar ground and sounding totally distinct. The pianists, Dana Saul and Christian Li, utterly different from each other, both virtuosic, both so knowing, so literate. Each tune with an idea, the two albums just bursting with possibilities, with the sound of the future. It’s all in there. Serious, heavy listening, so much accumulated information.
It’s what has to be done.
—Peter Watrous, late summer 2024
About the Songs
Side A:
Dance Notation – a synchronized dance for the quartet that orbits an unceasing backbeat, with a rhapsodic interior chorus that features Dana’s lyrical pianism.
Far East Western (Prelude) – cryptic murmurings à la black and white Kurosawa sets up the main tune.
Far East Western – cowboy scofflawry inspired by Toshiro Mifune’s waggish Yojimbo, with a cacophonous saxophone improvisation followed by a rapid denouement.
Shadows Over the Sea – a straightforward tone poem inspired by the play of sun and clouds at the Jersey Shore, composed in the early period of the pandemic when we felt an acute sensitivity to natural phenomena.
Melpomene – a rhythmic sister song to “Dance Notation,” I wrote this quirky hocketed tune on my first visit to New Orleans during a particularly quiet period in the winter; I wanted to capture the feeling of resident ghosts hanging about, neither malevolent nor benevolent.
And the Oscar Goes To – one of the <3 Bird pieces that didn’t make it onto the record, this is a brief chorale extracted from “An Oscar for Treadwell,” with an extended improvised coda that fades into icy abstraction.
Storied History - uptempo modern jazz, all arpeggios and teleporting harmony that dissolves into a saxophone/drum duet, with a nod to “All the Things You Are” in the concluding outro.
Title Theme: The Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time) - Walter sets this one up, and I originally intended to just use one chorus of the melody with a long fade, but the way the band improvises around the melody in the second and third go-through was too compelling to leave out.
Side B:
Heideggerdashian – an alternate take of “Kierkegaardashian” that closes the record; here, I’m playing 250% speed right out of the gate, with pockets of stillness that punctuate the action.
Homage Kondo – my version of Reid Anderson’s “Hommage Mahler,” with a similarly blasé rock feel, but with a melody and harmony that quotes directly from Koji Kondo, arguably the most influential video game composer alive.
On the Street Where You Live – quite a lot of people recognize this song from My Fair Lady, and I had wanted to do a more straightforward standard with a light jazz arrangement to balance the heavier original music in the band book, so here this is.
Rudderless Blues (or, Obscure Motions) – a quasi-rubato blues that gradually comes out of obscurity and into focus. I love Christian’s deliberately obtuse blues statement here, and I tried my hand at playing in a more vocal, pre-verbal style.
That Lights a Star – this song is the bebop-era introduction of “All the Things You Are,” but played sort of backwards; the focus is on developing the rhythmic churn of the vamp.
Outlawry – by far the oldest song on the record, I wrote this around 2013 as a circular breathing etude in music school, but never got around to recording it. We added another saxophone and drum duet here, which was quite scary at the time but seemed to work out fine.
tbh – another uptempo modern jazz tune with a long, involved sax/piano soli. This one also dates back to 2015 or so, but I added more formal details and the soli.
Pixelate – a feature for Walter at the beginning, with a simple syncopated piano cluster forming the thematic backbone of the entire composition. My most Anna Webber-ish composition to date.
Yellow Magic (Tong Poo) – I always wanted to cover this iconic YMO song, and the 3 chord blowing section is pretty much exactly from the original. Christian takes the band into outer space on this one–definitely a highlight of the album.
Estate – I played this with my first jazz teacher, Laurie Altman, as a teenager and never forgot the song (he turned me onto the smoky, glacial Shirley Horn version). I knew I wanted one saxophone and piano duet on the album, and this one always seemed to command the audience’s attention in live shows, so we did it for the record as well.
Kierkegaardashian – an octave-displaced mash-up of Charlie Parker’s improvisations on “Kim” (hence the title), this song was originally written for and performed solo piano by Andrew Boudreau during a <3 Bird precursor project during the pandemic, but I tried to learn the octave-leaping melody line as a challenge to myself for this recording.
Dance Notation – a synchronized dance for the quartet that orbits an unceasing backbeat, with a rhapsodic interior chorus that features Dana’s lyrical pianism.
Far East Western (Prelude) – cryptic murmurings à la black and white Kurosawa sets up the main tune.
Far East Western – cowboy scofflawry inspired by Toshiro Mifune’s waggish Yojimbo, with a cacophonous saxophone improvisation followed by a rapid denouement.
Shadows Over the Sea – a straightforward tone poem inspired by the play of sun and clouds at the Jersey Shore, composed in the early period of the pandemic when we felt an acute sensitivity to natural phenomena.
Melpomene – a rhythmic sister song to “Dance Notation,” I wrote this quirky hocketed tune on my first visit to New Orleans during a particularly quiet period in the winter; I wanted to capture the feeling of resident ghosts hanging about, neither malevolent nor benevolent.
And the Oscar Goes To – one of the <3 Bird pieces that didn’t make it onto the record, this is a brief chorale extracted from “An Oscar for Treadwell,” with an extended improvised coda that fades into icy abstraction.
Storied History - uptempo modern jazz, all arpeggios and teleporting harmony that dissolves into a saxophone/drum duet, with a nod to “All the Things You Are” in the concluding outro.
Title Theme: The Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time) - Walter sets this one up, and I originally intended to just use one chorus of the melody with a long fade, but the way the band improvises around the melody in the second and third go-through was too compelling to leave out.
Side B:
Heideggerdashian – an alternate take of “Kierkegaardashian” that closes the record; here, I’m playing 250% speed right out of the gate, with pockets of stillness that punctuate the action.
Homage Kondo – my version of Reid Anderson’s “Hommage Mahler,” with a similarly blasé rock feel, but with a melody and harmony that quotes directly from Koji Kondo, arguably the most influential video game composer alive.
On the Street Where You Live – quite a lot of people recognize this song from My Fair Lady, and I had wanted to do a more straightforward standard with a light jazz arrangement to balance the heavier original music in the band book, so here this is.
Rudderless Blues (or, Obscure Motions) – a quasi-rubato blues that gradually comes out of obscurity and into focus. I love Christian’s deliberately obtuse blues statement here, and I tried my hand at playing in a more vocal, pre-verbal style.
That Lights a Star – this song is the bebop-era introduction of “All the Things You Are,” but played sort of backwards; the focus is on developing the rhythmic churn of the vamp.
Outlawry – by far the oldest song on the record, I wrote this around 2013 as a circular breathing etude in music school, but never got around to recording it. We added another saxophone and drum duet here, which was quite scary at the time but seemed to work out fine.
tbh – another uptempo modern jazz tune with a long, involved sax/piano soli. This one also dates back to 2015 or so, but I added more formal details and the soli.
Pixelate – a feature for Walter at the beginning, with a simple syncopated piano cluster forming the thematic backbone of the entire composition. My most Anna Webber-ish composition to date.
Yellow Magic (Tong Poo) – I always wanted to cover this iconic YMO song, and the 3 chord blowing section is pretty much exactly from the original. Christian takes the band into outer space on this one–definitely a highlight of the album.
Estate – I played this with my first jazz teacher, Laurie Altman, as a teenager and never forgot the song (he turned me onto the smoky, glacial Shirley Horn version). I knew I wanted one saxophone and piano duet on the album, and this one always seemed to command the audience’s attention in live shows, so we did it for the record as well.
Kierkegaardashian – an octave-displaced mash-up of Charlie Parker’s improvisations on “Kim” (hence the title), this song was originally written for and performed solo piano by Andrew Boudreau during a <3 Bird precursor project during the pandemic, but I tried to learn the octave-leaping melody line as a challenge to myself for this recording.
Press
"...a compelling and encompassing account of Sun and his music" — Textura
"For fans of evolving contemporary jazz, this album is 'Indispensable.' Kevin Sun shifts the lines and then returns to more classic forms. It’s impossible to compare his style—he stands entirely on his own" — Paris Move
"...witty tenor saxophone playing and pensive compositions ... has some nonchalant, cooly tossed-off tenor wizardry" — NYC Jazz Record
- DownBeat Magazine (February 2025)
- Jazz Journal (January 2025)
- Fono Forum (December 2024, German)
- salt peanuts (November 2024, Norwegian)
- Saiten Kult (November 2024, German)
- All About Jazz (November 2024)
- NYC Jazz Record (November 2024)
- Marlbank (October 2024)
- ΔΙΣΚΟΡΥΧΕΙΟΝ / VINYLMINE (October 2024, Greek)
- Ivan Rod (October 2024, Danish)
- Exclusive Magazine by Anne Carlini (October 2024)
- Making a Scene (October 2024)
- NPR Music: New Music Friday (October 2024)
- The Tonearm (October 2024)
- Textura (October 2024)
- All About Jazz (October 2024)
- Paris Move (October 2024)
- The Art Music Lounge (October 2024)
- Musica Jazz (September 2024, Italian)
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