Kevin Sun - Quartets (2024) [Hi-Res]

INTRODUCTION

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.

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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

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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.

(Tracks 1-8)
Kevin Sun - tenor saxophone
Dana Saul - piano
Walter Stinson - Bass
Matt Honor - Drums

(Tracks 9-19)
Kevin Sun - tenor saxophone
Christian Li - piano
Walter Stinson - Bass
Kayvon Gordon - Drums