<3 BIRD is Kevin Sun’s love letter to the towering father of modern jazz, Charlie Parker. In a concise but wide-ranging program of 12 original compositions and three arrangements, Sun draws electrifying and futuristic conclusions from Parker’s musical innovations.
With <3 BIRD, Sun proves himself a formidable contributor to the continuing legacy of Parker’s music in this new century. In doing so, he also shares his vision for future directions in jazz and even more creative work to come.
"An outstanding recording...The album acknowledges the past, lives in the present and looks to the future... The spirit of Charlie Parker is very much alive on this one, an album that seems to bring new discoveries with every listen. Highly recommended.”
– Miguel Zenón, saxophonist/composer
★★★★☆
— DownBeat Magazine (December 2021)
"...an engaging, delightful excursion into Birdology"
– Hot House Jazz Guide
"Of all the centennial tributes to Charlie Parker that did or did not happen, I can’t think of one that honors the protean and soaring spirit of Charlie Parker more appropriately than Kevin Sun’s does here"
— Let's Call This
"...tremendous compositional acuity and flawless execution."
— JazzTrail
“...radically inventive original compositions inspired by Charlie Parker.”
— Jazziz
"..utterly brilliant."
– Art Music Lounge
"...Birding it up all so ingeniously."
— Marlbank
"Finally, a jazz tribute album that doesn't try to put arms on the Venus de Milo."
– Jay Harvey Upstage
"It is clear Sun has spent some serious time thinking about his approach to Parker’s work."
— London Jazz News
"...Sun captures the spirit of Charlie Parker so much so that young hipsters won't know the originals from the covers."
– Midwest Record
"However you categorize it, though, this is classy music."
– Music Street Journal
"...ένα πολύ μελετημένο άλμπουμ σύγχρονης και απαιτητικής jazz"
– Vinyl Mine
"...alle Bebop-beschlagen, eloquent und mit einer modernen, ebenmässig glatten Coolness."
– Jazz'N'More
"...det tok kun kort tid å skjønne at Sun hadde gått inn i Charlie Parkers univers på et helt spesielt vis og tatt det videre slik utvilsomt Bird ville satt pris på."
Christian Li ⋅ piano & Fender Rhodes (2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13)
Walter Stinson ⋅ double bass
Matt Honor ⋅ drums
*sheng on “Du Yi’s Choir” only
Recorded by Aaron Nevezie at The Bunker Studio, Brooklyn, NY on February 26 & 27, 2021 ⋅ Mixed by Juanma Trujillo ⋅ Mastered by Eivind Opsvik at Greenwood Underground ⋅ Produced by Kevin Sun ⋅ Art direction and photography by Kevin Sun ⋅ Layout and additional photography by Diane Zhou
All songs composed by Kevin Sun (The Kevin Sun Music / ASCAP) except the following, arranged by Sun:
“Big Foot” and “Klacto-veereds-tene,” composed by Charlie Parker
“Salt Peanuts,” co-composed by Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke
"Visions Of Your Other" is the third album by Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days, one that takes the band back to its roots in original compositions after their Mexican folk music-inspired release, El Maquech. Adam and two of his bandmates, Walter Stinson on bass and Zack O'Farrill on drums, return along with the arrival of Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone.
The album takes its title from a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's post-WWII psychological portrait, "The Master", in which the main character, a veteran suffering PTSD, is interrogated about supposed visions he had of his mother.
In the vein of this theme of dueling realities, the album functions a study of conflict and contrast. The opening track, "stakra", takes Ryuichi Sakamoto's chromatic fantasy of the same name and extracts just a fragment of it, allowing the band to enter a deeper sonic meditation. Walter Stinson's "Kurosawa at Berghain" finds the meeting place between the rigidity of electronic house music and the spontaneity of acoustic, chord-less quartet. Adam wrote both "Inner War" and "Ducks" while staying and working at Morning Glory Farm in Bethel, ME in the summer of 2017, the former of which is a reflection of inner turmoil he felt when bringing chickens to be slaughtered. "Hopeful Heart" is a pseudo-lullaby inspired by the story of two lovers torn apart by circumstance, yet their uncertainty is lightly tinged with optimism. And the closing track, "Blackening Skies", was written from a climate change-induced anxiety, having experienced a scorching heatwave in NY within days of a summer monsoon in LA.
<3 BIRD is Kevin Sun’s love letter to the towering father of modern jazz, Charlie Parker. In a concise but wide-ranging program of 12 original compositions and three arrangements, Sun draws electrifying and futuristic conclusions from Parker’s musical innovations.
With <3 BIRD, Sun proves himself a formidable contributor to the continuing legacy of Parker’s music in this new century. In doing so, he also shares his vision for future directions in jazz and even more creative work to come.
Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill pivots away from his family’s musical legacy toward dazzling postbop sounds
Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill is just 23, but there’s already plenty of weight attached to his name. His father is the acclaimed, innovative Latin jazz bandleader and pianist Arturo O’Farrill, and his grandfather was the great Afro-Cuban bandleader Chico. He began to forge his own path early on in his career, making waves playing alongside saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa on the latter’s 2015 album Bird Calls (ACT) and establishing himself as an improviser of protean strength and melodic clarity.
On his debut as a bandleader, 2016’s Stranger Days (Sunnyside), Adam eschews any connection to the lineage carved out by his forebears, pursuing a limber but sharply articulated strain of free bop that sparkles with erudition, soul, and precision. Leading a quartet with tenor saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, bassist Walter Stinson, and his older brother Zach O’Farrill on drums, Adam proffers a vanguard postbop sound with rhythmic, elastic structures and harmonic thickets that support his sneaky, snaking melodies. A year ago I saw the group play a fiery but measured set in New York, and that performance, along with the group’s forthcoming second full-length, El Maquech (due in June from Biophilia), has completely convinced me that his band is the real deal. The album, which was recorded in the midst of a tour, captures the band playing with serious heat and interactive brio. This time out Adam explicitly draws upon nonjazz sources, opening with a thrilling adaptation of a northern Mexican folk tune called “Siiva Moiiva” and ending with a smoldering rendition of “Pour Maman,” an electro-soul song by New York singer-songwriter Gabriel Gárzon-Montano. While it’s early in 2018, I haven’t heard a better jazz record yet this year. By Peter Margasak / www.chicagoreader.com
Due out Feb. 2, 2018, Trio features bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor on a set of Sun's thrillingly complex compositions, devised from close study of the jazz tradition
Kevin Sun - Trio
"[Kevin] Sun is... clearly a player who sees the big picture and his evolving place within it."
-David R. Adler, The New York City Jazz Record
"Kevin Sun is a full-throated, rapturous tenor man."-Jerome Wilson, All About Jazz
It's something of a cliché - though no less true for it - for gifted musicians to proclaim themselves to be perpetual students, their accomplishments achieved in part through a lifelong appetite for learning and new experiences. While still in the early stages of an incredibly promising, already impressive career, saxophonist Kevin Sun has more then taken that idea to heart. A tireless student of the jazz tradition, Sun has dedicated himself to dissecting the music of his forebears with a scientific precision, only to reassemble the pieces in new ways as only the most instinctual of artists can do.
On his first album under his own name, Trio, Sun puts the results of his intensive studies into thrilling practice, crafting era-spanning compositions that are as propulsive and swinging as they are intricate and challenging. The titular trio teams Sun, on tenor as well as clarinet and the rarely-seen C-melody saxophone, with bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor, two peers from the contemporary New York City jazz scene.
Trio, set for release February 2, 2018 on Sun's own Endectomorph Music, follows equally adventurous releases by two collective quartets, Great on Paper (with drummer Robin Baytas, bassist Simón Willson and pianist Isaac Wilson) and Earprint (with Simón Willson, trumpeter Tree Palmedo and drummer Dor Herskovits). Here, though, the vision is entirely Sun's, though his complex writing leaves Stinson and Honor ample opportunity to show off their estimable skills.
"Composing for three voices, I feel like I can really challenge myself," Sun says. "There's plenty of room to make something happen when you have three musicians interacting with each other. I picture it as a triangle versus a square: it's still very sturdy, but you have to give it a point."
There's no lack of sharp edges on Trio's dozen jaw-dropping compositions (supplemented by a pair of fiery free improvisations captured in the wee hours of an all-day recording session). While to the listener these songs offer knotty melodic lines and shape-shifting rhythms that are tricky but enticing to navigate, for Sun, each one posed a unique challenge. Captivated by the higher-order writing of modern jazz innovators like Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, Sun conceived of the music on Trio as a way of summoning similarly advanced music from his own pen. The trio itself, with Stinson and Honor, was originally assembled to workshop that music - it was only when they realized the chemistry they shared together that it evolved into a working group.
"I was thinking of people who I thought would be willing to get together a lot and really dig into the music,"Sun says. He had shared bandstands in the past with both Stinson and Honor, and soon found that both shared his own enthusiasm for plumbing the depths of his compositions.
That scholarly approach has served Sun well, both in his education at Harvard College and New England Conservatory, in his studies with master composers Miguel Zenón and John Hollenbeck, and beyond, in his own research. He's been noted for his solo transcriptions, having published more than 120 on his blog by the likes of John Coltrane, Steve Coleman, Joe Henderson, Clifford Brown, and Vijay Iyer.
"I work on inhabiting the sound, the beat, and the vibe of the musicians I transcribe,"Sun says, a practice he learned from Zenón as well as tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. "Coming from an oral tradition like jazz, you want to be able to communicate the details that convey the feeling that comes out of the great playing of those musicians. Ideally you'd get that in person, but when many of them are no longer around, the next best thing is to listen to, say, Lester Young recordings and try to generate the same excitement." Beyond simply striving for the sound of such masters, Sun has recently begun to delve into emulating their gear. He recorded Trio with an instrument almost identical to that played by Lester Young on his classic recordings with Count Basie - a gold-plated Conn New Wonder sax and an early metal Otto Link mouthpiece. He began to experiment with the C-melody for a similar reason, as the instrument as played by virtuoso Frankie Trumbauer was a not insignificant influence on Young's sound. Though the ensuing sound links him to a tradition that weaves circuitously from Young through more modernist players like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, Sun's voice is wholly his own. That's evident from the breathy, insistent notes that open "Transaccidentation," a piece that takes fragments of harmonic ideas from Charlie Parker's "Confirmation." Bird is also an inspiration behind the drum chant of "Find Your Pose" as well as "Air Purifier," a play on Parker's "Air Conditioning" that also pays homage to the modern appliance crucial to living in Beijing, China, where Sun spends time each year when not in his Brooklyn home. Sun's supple clarinet can be heard on the mysterious "Loading Screen" and the elegiac "Deliver the Keys." The C-melody comes to the fore on the album's sole standard, "All of Me," which most clearly shows how Sun has reimagined Lester Young's sound in a 21st-century context, and on the first of the two completely improvised tracks - "One Never Knows Now" and "Does One, Now Does One, Now Does" - which take their curious titles from a story by the late David Foster Wallace. The taut, wiry "Three Ravens" was originally written as an etude, while "Bittergreen" is a negative reharmonization of "Sweet Georgia Brown." The waltz is abstracted on "Ballroom Dancing," the brutal "Misanthrope" delivers heavy metal intensity, and "Announcements" offers an unconventional setting for every concert's obligatory band introductions. Finally, "Thunder" ends the album on a starkly expressive note.
1. Transaccidentation
2. Loading Screen
3. Three Ravens
4. One Never Knows Now
5. Does One, Now Does One, Now Does
6. Find Your Pose
7. Air Purifier
8. Bittergreen
9. Deliver the Keys
10. Ballroom Dancing
11. Misanthrope
12. Announcements
13. Thunder
Kevin Sun – tenor saxophone, c-melody saxophone, clarinet
A saxophonist, improviser, composer, and blogger, Kevin Sun has studied composition with Miguel Zenón and John Hollenbeck, and cites contemporary composers such as Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, Miles Okazaki, Henry Threadgill, Steve Lehman, and Mark Turner as key influences. Currently based out of Brooklyn, New York, Sun performs with the collective quartets Great On Paper and Earprint and has shared the stage with Vijay Iyer, James Moody, Kenny Burrell, Dave Liebman, and Rich Perry, among others. He is an active contributor to Jazz Speaks, the official blog of The Jazz Gallery, where he has conducted interviews with artists such as Herbie Hancock and Joshua Redman. His blog on jazz and literature, A Horizontal Search, has been recognized by National Public Radio's A Blog Supreme and Ethan Iverson's Do the Math.
