Kevin Sun
Latest Articles
An Interview with Herbie Hancock
Settled in an armchair and mutely dressed in a grey fleece half-zip and black jeans, Herbert “Herbie” J. Hancock, the 2014 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, exuded pure calmness. The legendary jazz pianist, known for leading fearless, searching electric and acoustic projects (Head Hunters, Mwandishi, his Trio) as well as his tenure with Miles Davis’s seminal “Second Great Quintet” in the ’60s, was charmingly low-key but coolly energetic. Hancock, who turns 75 next month, showed absolutely no sign of his age, save for when he stood up and a slight paunch quietly emerged.
J-Term Journal: Kolkata
It was an outrageously funny but simultaneously frightening moment, which in retrospect seems to be the kind of thing you secretly hope for when you travel far away from home.
Jazz and Its Discontents
These lectures were meticulously designed to be a hit at Harvard: jam-packed with facts and anecdotes; sprinkled with jokes and clever turns of phrase; and interdisciplinary, using musical performance and analysis to teach American cultural history. But staff writer Kevin Sun has his doubts.
100 Years of Jazz Saxophone
I don’t presume to be anything more than a student of the jazz saxophone tradition, but in my few years of study I’ve benefited immensely from drawing my own map of the historical territory. Of course, ignorance and misinformation are par for the course, but it’s been an invaluable exercise to try to orient myself while navigating the unspeakably diverse collection of voices that define the legacy of the jazz saxophone.
Swing Meanings
Jazz musicians love puns. Here’s an example: “Just You, Just Me” was a song from a 1929 film called “Marianne,” which was adopted by musicians as a jazz standard and reinterpreted over the years. In the 1940s, pianist Thelonious Monk composed a song with harmonies adapted directly from “Just You, Just Me” but with a new melody, which he titled “Justice.”
Social Class at Harvard
For all that the College has accomplished to increase socioeconomic diversity over the past few years, the topic of class itself seems to still exist primarily as an intellectual topic more than an openly discussed social reality.
Play it Like You Mean it
If you believe Coltrane meant every rhythm and pitch that he played in a technical sense, then he’d be the undisputed master of the music with regards to control: a supreme technician expressive to the microlevels of rhythm and pitch. This is a pretty scary thought.
Musical Gluttony And How To Suppress It
I was a junior in high school when it started. Every Saturday morning, I would leave my house in suburban New Jersey and take a train into Manhattan, transfer to the subway, and make my way over to the Manhattan School of Music on the Upper West Side. It was there that I became a musical glutton.
A Brief History of Trolling in the Arts and Elsewhere
Harassment is bad, and trolling can be bad, but it needn’t be. At this point, sometimes I even enjoy getting trolled just a little bit, but as with drinking and as with art-making, we have to be responsible about it. Troll responsibly.
Xanthia A. Tucker
From the beginning, she anticipates the awkward politeness of the interview with the kind of friendliness that might come across either as youthful sincerity or self-conscious self-consciousness, depending on how cynical you are; but you can tell that when you’re talking, her attention is completely on you.
Latest Media
FM Learns Its Lines
The subway, the train, the T, the underground, the metro, the tube-whatever you call it, it's how we get around. Boston's happens to be the first, and when one has the world's most ancient subway system, it's easy to dismiss it as old news. But the MBTA has a big birthday this year, and it deserves its rightful centennial celebration. FM's editors took our Saturdays and Sundays and made our way to the far reaches of the lines. Some of us went for a walk. One of us went home. For some, inspiration struck in liquids of varying kinds. Oil and water, you could say. Or ink and gin. For others, it turns out the T is a deeply personal affair, even if it's one that's easily eavesdropped upon. Moral of the story? Go somewhere. If the T stops, don't groan. Find the end of the line. When you're reentering HarvardSquare, if you're going outbound, look out your right window; find the gnome, the abandoned station it marks, For the week, we played "I Spy." This is what we saw.
