On Kevin Sun

The tenor saxophonist and composer in Minneapolis

Occupying an 1885 building previously home to a modish clothier for photogenic campers, Berlin is an 85-seat nightclub in Minneapolis’s North Loop. The neighborhood’s once dormant warehouse district, whose revival took root in the nineties, is a thriving area for restaurants, bars, and upscale shopping. Romantically lit, Berlin has a welcoming stained-glass installation by Janelle Wilson, the requisite rack of LPs on the bar’s marble top, elegant and sound-dampening curtains, and vestiges of the neighborhood’s industrial past: brick walls, an exposed warehouse ceiling. It’s an attractive spot for dates and other meetups and draws a good number of folks I don’t yet recognize as devotees of local jazz and its overlapping scenes. The bar can be chatty. Mostly, though, audiences seem to appreciate the club’s often adventurous bookings, with electronic music and hard-to-classify instrumental groups joining a jazz foundation. Engineer Alex Proctor, who’s no longer with the club, did the the acoustic design, and it’s a good-sounding room. At last night’s sets by the Brookyn-based tenor saxophonist Kevin Sun, the crowd was attentive and approving but not hushed and reverent, a nice balance. In the Twin Cities, my informal survey suggests, Sun isn’t yet a household name even in every household sheltering a professional jazz musician, but his reputation steadily grows, and I ran into a handful of local players. Sun and his quartet—drummer Kayvon Gordon, bassist Walter Stinson, and pianist Christian Li—were nearing the end of a tour that had brought them to Austin, LA, the Bay Area, and Seattle, and would keep them in the Twin Cities for another day for a master class, a short recording session, and a downplayed Saturday gig at a bar with a speakeasy theme and attendant entrance theatrics.

At one point from the Berlin stage, Sun explained the group was “touring in support of” Quartet, his outstanding seventh and latest album, then apologized with a smile for the PR speak. Sun is wary around linguistic as well as musical cliches, though not to the point of withholding familiar pleasures. His music is often complicated but rarely prickly. In the digital realm, Quartet(s) is a two-part release drawn from different sessions. The version issued on CD and the necessarily shorter LP is Sun’s most concise and broadly appealing album. The group opened with Quartet’s “Homage Kondo,” a cleverly structured, heavily sweetened tune written not after the declutterer but the video-game composer Koji Kondo, whose work includes celebrated themes from The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Later, the group’s reading of a Shunsuke Kida piece from the game Demon’s Souls put joysticks in the hands of the Coltane quartet circa 1962. Drawing further from Quartet, the group played the joyfully herky-jerky miniature “Kierkegaardashian,” whose punning title points to its debt to Charlie Parker’s “Kim”; an elastc interpretation of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Yellow Magic” sparked by Stinson’s muscular bass solo; the circuitous “Outlawry,” which included a burnin’ sax-and-drum duo with Gordon; and “Rudderless Blues (or, Obscure Motions),” which starts bluesy and becomes the blues itself. Li, a force, sounded great on the club’s characterful restored Steinway, but his “Rudderless” solo on the studio recording is matchless, so smartly stripped down it’s a kind of erasure poetry. Among the evening’s unreleased material was new Sun composition written in tribute to Benny Golson.

Born in Canada in 1991, Sun was raised mainly in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, a fairly prosperous and diverse township near Princeton. His mother is a doctor, and his father, now retired, is a chemist by training who worked in research for Johnson & Johnson. Sun started piano lessons at age eight, spurred by parental encouragement more than innate early interest, and a few years later he joined the elementary-school band as an alto saxophonist. He wasn’t, he told me at a coffee shop yesterday, remarkably prodigious, but he had a knack for sight reading. His jazz epiphany, I first learned from Sun’s appearance on Larence Peryer’s Spotlight On podcast, happened on the cusp of adolescence. A friend gave him a mix CD of jazz, and Sun became enraptured with Stan Getz’s solo on “The Girl from Ipanema.” He soon switched to tenor. Getz’s sound—“so expressive and warm and tender,” Sun remembers over coffee—was a benchmark for Sun throughout his teens. His Getz listening was immersive and nearly exclusive for several years, though his jazz knowledge would eventually become wide and deep. He tells me he didn’t listen to much pop music growing up, but his interest in video-game music, as you’d guess, dates to childhood and in recent years has become an important part of his interpretative and compositional practice. You’ll sometimes hear rock touches in his music: one of the short pieces from “Circle, Time,” the second of three multi-part compositions from 2019’s The Sustain of Memory, mutates the eighth-note pulse of post–Pixies indie rock, and the one-page chart for “Homage Kondo” calls for “blasé rock,” but these influences might stem as much from this century’s jazz-rock as from rock itself.

As a Harvard undergrad, Sun’s concentration was in English, but he studied music as well, notably with Vijay Iyer, for whom he also worked as a TA. In 2012, he attended a pivotal BANFF workshop whose instructors included Miles Okazaki, Steve Lehman, Jonathan Finlayson, and Tyshawn Sorey, all enduring influences on Sun’s writing and playing. Earlier that same year, he started a jazz blog, A Horizontal Search, broadly in the vein of Ethan Iverson’s Do the Math. Sun’s precociously informed but humble posts were often driven or enriched by his careful transcriptions, and his blogging led to some more formal writing under editorial guidance. Most notable was “Every Single Tree in the Forest: Mark Turner as Seen by His Peers,” a blend of criticism and oral history published in the summer of 2015 by Music & Literature, a Humanities Journal. Drawn from interviews with the tenor saxophonist Turner’s colleagues and admirers, the essay is specifically about the markers of Turner’s magnetic sound and aura, more generally about the nature (and anxiety) of jazz influence. After getting a master’s degree in jazz performance from the New England Conservatory and moving to New York, in 2015, Sun became gradually less active as a practitioner-critic, but his website’s prose archive still grows from time to time, mostly through explications of his own compositions and recordings. Though he would obviously be an excellent teacher—my observation of part of the master class Sun and Li gave this morning confirmed that hunch—Sun isn’t in academia and instead works days as an accountant. That has so far left him enough time to pursue his music and helps cushion a few financially dicey propositions such as as this short run of dates.

Sun’s already large discography goes back nearly a decade. To stay on top of my other work, I’m forcing myself to post this as if being badgered by an impatient editor, and I haven’t spent as much time with Sun’s corpus as it deserves. That, I can tell, will be a rewarding ongoing project. His sideperson work includes sessions with Adam O’Farrill, Xiongguan Zhang, and Jacob Garchik, and his collaborative groups Great on Paper and Earprint started turning up in 2016 on Sun’s Endectomorph Records, also home to his albums as a leader. The first of those, 2018’s Trio, was made with Stinson on bass and Matt Honor on drums. For some players, leading a sax trio is seen or at least presented as a kind of labor of Hercules, and though Sun demonstrates the intellectual and physical stamina and harmonic know-how the format asks for, he never sounds uptight. You don’t picture gauntlets strewn about the studio floor. The album’s opener, “Transaccidentation,” shows off a lithe, rangy sound and very impressive altissimo. Sun was already an assured, inviting, and experienced player, though his tone has since grown more robust, his time more eccentric and swinging. Helping to establish a longstanding interest in odd and mixed meters, “Transaccidentation” is in 15/8 with overlapping rhythms. Sun sometimes dresses his written melodies in undercover clothes and will craftily fuzz the line between a theme and an improvisation, though you’ll start to recognize a tune such as “Transaccidentation” even if you won’t hum it at Costco. His solo moves from a drizzle to something requiring the second-fastest windshield-wiper setting, then gives way to Stinson and Honor. Sun is routinely in open dialogue with compositions by his heroes, and this piece built on a progression inverted from Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” Sun returns to “Confirmation” on “Greenlit,” the opener from 2021’s exciting >Bird, a set of tunes derived or inspired by Parker along with three bebop interpretations. “Greenlit” is another good example of how Sun works with meter. The tune’s procedures are best explained in a technical note Sun posted to his website. It starts in 11/8, and for a while an eighth note is added with each measure until, on reaching 15/8, the pattern is reversed and the meters grow shorter. This could, of course, sound clinical or merely impressive. But as with the bulk of the Sun music I’ve heard, its complexities, though not transparent, aren’t overwhelming. Throughout Trio, compositions are elliptical and can remind me in spirit of the Jimmy Giuffre 3, not only when Sun moves to clarinet. He’s a broad-minded student whose listening goes back to Frankie Trumbauer by way of Lester Young, and the debut album resurrects a C-melody sax for an unplanned and alive “All of Me,” a fun disruption in that the album is moody and a touch overlong. (On the new album, the standard is a gently grooving “On the Street Where You Live.”) Other pieces include two collective improvisations and an avant-funk excursion in “Announcements.”

The following year’s The Sustain of Memory has the scope and length, almost, of a cattle run. A two-CD set cut with trio, quartet, and quintet, the album has three compositions, each titled like a midlist literary novel and broken into short or long sections designated by Roman numerals. The quartet section, “The Middle of Tensions,” evokes at this moment a freshly sharpened pencil caressing the nape of a neck. The trio component, “Circle, Line,” is composed of a dozen notably heterogeneous sections, most the length of rockabilly singles. The “I” section of “Circle, Line” is humorouly mathematical and brings to to mind snowshoeing over a river of frozen tomatoes. The next piece is more like weaving by bicycle through broken glass. “The Rigors of Love,” which makes up the second disc, works with longer forms including tightly composed sections and long passages of free improvisation. For those pieces Sun is joined by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, pianist Dana Saul, bassist Simón Willson, and drummer Dayeon Seok. “Rigors” includes passages of meditative, rustling beauty and some of the more heated music released to that point under Sun’s name. Its third section denies an appealing postbop head for four and a half minutes and nods at Miles’s second great quintet. The Depths of Memory, from 2023, again offers three compositions with multipart forms and spreads them over two CDs. Sun’s music is composerly and places heavy demands on players but by and large it doesn’t sound rigidly page-bound. “I think of it as a balancing act in terms of creating enough concrete material for an improviser to relate without putting them in handcuffs,” Sun tells me. Recalling a metaphor he learned from Iyer, he talks about trying to be an architect, but of a playground.

For about three years starting in 2021, Sun held down a weekly gig at Lowlands Bar in Gowanus. (He still plays there frequently but not regularly.) From that house gig came The Fate of the Tenor, whose cheeky title and cover photo reference Joe Henderson’s triumphant two-volume Village Vanguard trio date, The State of the Tenor. The Sun album’s sprawling “Elden Steps,” among other aims, fuses “Giant Steps” and a 2022 video game, Elden Ring, unknown to me. Wonderful. Swapping fate for state in the title is wittily self-depreciating, but there’s also confidence in even considering the joke. It’s justified.