Kevin Sun: Quartets

Saxophonist Kevin Sun goes big again. Sustain Of Memory (2020) and 2023's Depth of Memory, both on his Endectomorph label, were two-disc offerings. And now we have Quartets, another two CD set. He is an artist with a lot to say.

Each disc features Sun on tenor sax accompanied by bassist Walter Stinson. The piano and drum chairs are taken on the first CD by Dana Saul and Matt Honor, respectively. CD 2 finds Kayvon Gordon doing the drum work, with Christian Li sitting in on the piano.

It takes some work to nail Sun down with a label. Is he a free player or a mainstream guy? As on the previously mentioned releases, he rambles, style-wise, all over the place. The fact that he maintains a cohesive mood is to his credit. The first sound to thump out of the speakers on CD 1, "Dance Notation," is driven by Matt Honor's deep, dark drums that seem like they might take the tune into Michael Jackson's 1983 radio hit "Billie Jean." But that does not happen. Rather it turns into an ominous jazz groove, sounding like the Nazis marching in Berlin, with interludes of striking loveliness as Saul slips into a piano solo. "Far East Western" verges on the schizoid, with Sun's anguished, John Coltrane-ian sax, leading into the pensive, gently expressed " Shadows Over The Sea."

CD 2 has a different flavor. It is more tuneful, closer to the mainstream—though it does circle out into some interesting eddies as it veers near the shore. "One The Street Where You Live," penned by Lerner and Loewe, for 1956's My Fair Lady, is played straight with a bounce in its step, the quartet leaning to the sunny side of that street. They follow it up with "Rudderless Blues (or, Obscure Motions)," which sounds like a warning of danger to come, while Bruno Martino's "Estate" has the feel of scattered raindrops falling on an open field, coaxing green sprouts up out of the dark soil, in search of the sun.

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