By Danny R. Johnson
NEW YORK – The great jazz pianist and composer Keith Jarrett was quoted as stating these profound words: “Whenever you listen to the great jazz pianists Bud Powell, Erroll Garner, or the countless other pianists’ live recordings, you will hear grunts, squeal or moans, this is mostly the result of the efforts to move the piano to get it to translate a feeling not essentially pianistic, and phrasing not intrinsically piano-like.”
Jarrett’s eloquent statement can best describe Helen Sung’s newly released Concord Jazz label album, Anthem For A New Day. In this 10 tracks CD we have Sung stirring emotions inside and out with her superb renditions of Thelonious Monk’s Epistrophy, and she comes out swinging with her original composition Brother Thelonious, which is by the way – one of a total of five original compositions she composed and produced.
Some of that confidence evident on Anthem for a New Day comes not just from Sung’s own diverse experience but from the talented crew backing her on this project: saxophonist Seamus Blake, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, bassist Reuben Rogers, drummer Obed Calvaire, and percussionist Samuel Torres (saxophonist John Ellis also lends his bass clarinet on a tune). In addition, guest artists Regina Carter (violin) and Paquito D’Rivera (clarinet) make outstanding appearances.
Fundamentally Helen Sung’s improvisations on this album is driven by a kind of dispassionate analysis of passion, a search for how form and space can produce something – beauty, insight – from nothing. For example, take Chick Corea’s Armando’s Rhumba track, a selection from the My Spanish Heart album recorded by Chick Corea and released in 1976. The album combined jazz fusion pieces and more traditional Latin music pieces. Sung rearranged the classic to feature just the piano and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera. Sung brilliantly used the silences between notes to speak as persuasively as notes themselves, by offering mute views into the act of creation.
Because of her emphasis on “subtle openness”, Sung was the ideal side woman to have for an adventurous musician such as two-time GRAMMY® winning composer and producer, Terri Lyne Carrington. Carrington featured Sung on her 2012 all women GRAMMY® winning album The Mosaic Project, in which Sung’s musical intelligence allowed her to develop a deeper understanding of improvisation and to subsequently put those lessons learned into Anthem For A New Day.
A native of Houston, Texas, Sung attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She initially aspired to be a classical pianist but was bitten by the jazz bug (specifically by Tommy Flanagan ’s solo on Charlie Parker ’s composition Confirmation) while studying at the University of Texas at Austin. Going against both her musical and cultural upbringing, she switched to jazz and was soon after accepted into the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (then at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music ). After graduating in 1997, Sung briefly joined the Boston area jazz scene before moving to New York City, where she currently resides.
As bandleader, Sung has performed on the late Marian McPartland ’s acclaimed Piano Jazz show, NPR ’s JazzSet w/DeeDee Bridgewater , and XM Radio ’s In the Swing Seat w/Wynton Marsalis. Sung has feature print pieces in such publications as Down Beat, JazzTimes, Keyboard, Jazz Iz , and All About Jazz . Her band has headlined at the Fontana Chamber Arts Summer Festival, Kalisz International Jazz Piano Festival, the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, Vermont Mozart Festival, Jazz Lucca Donna Festival (Italy), Tri-C Jazz Festival (Cleveland), Jazz Festival Bern, the American Jazz Museum’s ‘Blue Room,’ The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and New York City’s finest jazz venues.
As Sung admirably has demonstrated, she has been quite busy since coming onto the jazz scene in 1997. “Having come to jazz later in life after seriously studying classical music up through college, I have since spent the years chasing the swing and practicing up to becoming a competent jazz artist, wanting to be an authentic player having something to say,” She stated.
She went on say that “…this album really represents the next chapter in my artistic journey, and I am thrilled to get the opportunity to release it on Concord Records. That this comes at a time when I am more confident and happy about the kind of artist I am becoming is a great blessing, and I’m excited to share it with the world: it’s a new chapter, a new day, and I invite you to join me in the celebration of this album and music!”
When not working with space and sustain, Sung tends to splatter, rather than dash, across the keys. Just as often she fixates on figures that might have been drawn from the primers of beginning piano students, with sing soft motifs. Her performance of Hope Springs Eternally track, an original composition she wrote, arranged and produced, actually scatters bits of familiar chant – the dreamy and amorousness rhythm rains endlessly and the melodiously flows of bass clarinetist John Ellis’ strong bluesy inflected sounds pours into a disturbing soundscape, at one moment as innocent as the tinkle of a music box, then suddenly as ominous as one abandon in a storm. Sung’s performance is rhythmically elusive, with repeated notes, chords, and edgy intervals randomly articulated over ragged left hand pulses before knotting into a delightfully messy contrapuntal tangle.
Anthem For A New Day is Helen Sung’s formal rites of passage to modern jazz as a mature pianist, composer, producer and arranger. She is modernistic, avant-garde and listenable, distant and intimate, and settled in her ways yet driven by ceaseless curiosity.
Danny R. Johnson is San Diego County News’ Jazz and Pop Music Critic.
