Kevin Sun - From All This Stillness (2023) Hi Res

On this album we receive a future unobstructed by any goofy or heavy handed attempts to align with futurism™ or the glories of the past. The tones go on skipping and stammering with the bright optimism of a child, a cheerfulness that is hesitant to occupy itself and sometimes abandons itself for the pensive or macabre. The cognition between the notes and compositions is vivid and tangible, a nonlinear narrative about moving through territory you were told was dangerous but are compelled to witness and overcome for yourself...

...[Kevin] Sun has found the balance between the intellect, or improvisational music that teaches you how to think in new patterns, and the spirit, alighted by music that revokes your access to overthinking and forces you into a trance of the present moment. The frenzy that ensues is lighthearted and interrupted by soothe and swarm. Where I expect drama to be the driving energy of the compositions, I hear only delight, but an intense delight that I haven’t heard tonally since Clifford Jordan or Mingus. What I hear is triumph so obvious it probably frightens the composer into wondering if it’s a mirage. It is not.

This album is a secret world that any wise listener begins to feel beholden to by the final initiation as song. Great jazz music has always seduced its listeners by collapsing the distance between thought and feeling until a mood that can never be imitated outside of the universe of its players and their dynamic is formed. These worlds become ghost towns, the haunts that avid listeners tell had-to-be-there stories about to keep the circle unbroken. It is a privilege to be haunted by this exact music in this era that needs new ghosts.