Kevin Sun: Finding Art & Endectomorph

By Ted Panken I Nov. 5, 2024

“They are a huge part of our label’s recent success with streaming,” Kevin Sun said of partnering with La Reserve for Endectomorph’s digital efforts.
(Photo: Noah Philoipose)

Kevin Sun’s Quartets is the 32-year-old tenor saxophonist’s third leader album in a year on Endectomorph, the imprint label he’s run since 2016.

It features separate books of music for two quartets (one with pianist Dana Saul, bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor; the other with pianist Christian Li, Stinson and drummer Kayvon Gordon) that he’s developed during a weekly, three-year Tuesday night sinecure at Lowlands, a dive bar two blocks from his Gowanus apartment in Brooklyn.

Earlier this year, Endectomorph released Fate Of The Tenor, documenting Sun’s trio with Stinson and Honor, recorded live at Lowlands in June 2022, and After You’ve Gone, a conversational album by Mute, an all-Asian quartet with Li, drummer Dayeon Seok and bassist Jeonglim Yang in which Sun plays C-melody saxophone and clarinet.

Last year’s The Depths Of Memory contained three extended suites by Sun, chock-a-block with mixed meters and complex, intricate forms that spur high-level improvising within various ensembles that include Saul, trumpet virtuoso Adam O’Farrill, Stinson and Honor alternating with bassist Simón Willson and Seok.

During that 12-month span, Endectomorph also licensed five albums by various peers from the modern jazz/improvised music scene in which Sun has flourished during his decade in Brooklyn. On High Firmament and Firmament Below, tenor saxophonist Jacob Shulman — with pianist Hayoung Lyou, Stinson and Gordon — refracts bebop language with highbrow harmonic skills and conceptual savoir faire, occasionally layering multiple takes of the same piece atop each other to surreal effect. Howl is Venezuela-born guitarist Juanma Trujillo’s timbrally ambitious first acoustic album, in quartet with Sun, Honor and bassist Andrew Schiller, while Abiding Motion is an intricate nine-part chamber jazz suite for quintet by pianist Philip Golub, performed with telepathic intention and creative spirit.

Both Trujillo and Golub work with Sun — who has a day job doing the books for a privately owned science research firm — on the logistical minutiae of running and expanding Endectomorph’s brainy output.

“Labels are struggling to figure out how to develop an infrastructure that helps get our music out in the world and create a community around it,” said Golub, who, at esperanza spalding’s invitation, placed his organizational skills at the service of Wayne Shorter’s opera Iphigenia during its creation before he moved to New York. Golub experienced these difficulties first-hand while trying to find traction for “several records in various formations and projects” since 2021. He asked Sun — a friend since 2013, when both were matriculated in a dual-degree BA-Masters program offered by Harvard (they were English majors) and New England Conservatory — whether “he’d want to take the label up a notch, if I helped him a bit and could get some other Brooklyn-based musicians our age who play together to put out their music. We want great music that tries to do something unexpected, not arbitrarily difficult or avant-garde, but original, special stuff that’s been developed over the years in our community.”

Meanwhile, in summer 2023, Sun was pitching Fate Of The Tenor to labels for digital distribution. He heard back from La Reserve, a mostly mainstream streaming label that licenses Cellar Live, Bandstand Presents and Analog Tone Factory, whose own artist roster includes gifted post-millennial mainstreamers like vocalists Nicole Zuraitis, Lucy Yeghiazaryan, Caity Gyorgy, Martina DaSilva and Stella Cole, and singer-saxophonist Grace Kelly, as well as saxophonist Charles Owens and guitarists Nir Felder and Gilad Hekselman.

“I’d already finished The Sustain Of Memory, which I wanted to keep close to home,” Sun recalled. “They loved the music, and have worked with us on every subsequent release. They have good relationships with DSPs like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, and they’re extremely good at what they do. I’ve learned a lot from how they pitch music to curators for playlist adds. Now we have, essentially, an extended singles campaign, a prolonged release schedule, to try to get as much playlist exposure as possible. They are a huge part of our label’s recent success with streaming.”

La Reserve co-founder Matt Block is a trumpeter who grew up in Philadelphia, not far from Sun’s Princeton-adjacent hometown. “For a long time, I’d revered Kevin as an incredible player,” said Block, who holds a day job with Splice, the royalty-free sample megalith. “I thought this was a good opportunity to connect. Endectomorph leans into music with a different aesthetic and vibe than our catalog, a more creative improvisational space that people need to discover more. Our job is to help find that market from a digital perspective.

“There’s a reason why this music was popular in the 1940s and the 1950s, and great artists are rediscovering its power, creating a general resurgence of jazz within popular culture and connecting with a young fan base who are hungry to discover the source.”

Core to Sun’s musical production is his long-standing determination to research the roots and branches of jazz expression, especially the vocabulary and syntax of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, which he’s discussed in comprehensive detail in several dozen essays on his website, and presented on the exceptional 2021 album <3 BIRD with conceptually venturesome contrafacts and refractions of Parker’s compositions, and on The Depths Of Memory, which includes “Eponymous Cycle,” based on an extended Bird solo on “Fine And Dandy” from 1950.

Sun’s Lester Young investigations influenced his use of C-melody saxophone and clarinet with Mute. “Tenor is a very overpowered instrument with which you can steamroll a band, while C-melody is underpowered,” he said. “You can’t just play a low note loudly and make the band revolve around you. You have to finesse it more and think more like a pianist, getting inside the band’s texture to create drama, as opposed to being like an operatic star.”

Mute cohered soon after Sun moved to Brooklyn, and made several tours to Asia predicated on Seok’s and Yang’s family connections in Seoul and Sun’s and Li’s in Beijing. “We lived together, traveled together, had great conversations about not just music, but life things, sharing notes about playing in New York and being Asian-American musicians, forming a bond and trust that you only get in that kind of space,” Sun said.

Sun’s parents emigrated to Canada and then the U.S. from mainland China while in their 20s. Although Sun plays the indigenous double-reed suona in Mute, and served as artistic director of the Blue Note China Jazz Orchestra from 2018 until 2020, he said that “incorporating the Chinese musical tradition with jazz in a way that doesn’t feel hackneyed isn’t my orientation, even though I want to feel a connection to the culture when I go there. It’s more glancing and relational — my impressions, for better or worse. When I was in Beijing before COVID, the musicians wanted to know about New York jazz. I’m perceived here more as a creative improviser than a straightahead musician. But in Beijing, people just want to play tunes and swing. It’s kind of funny.” DB