# CD review: Helen Sung – Quartet+ 2021: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/09/19/cd-review-helen-sung-quartet-2021-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2021-09-19T00:16:11+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Pianist/composer and 2021 Guggenheim Fellow Helen Sung celebrates the work of 
influential women composers on her latest album Quartet+, crafting new arrangements
of tunes by Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland and Toshiko
Akiyoshi while carrying the tradition forward with her own stunning new works. Co-
produced by violin master Regina Carter, the album pairs Sung’s quartet with the
strings of the GRAMMY® Award-winning Harlem Quartet in an inventive meld of jazz
and classical influences.**

Available September 17, 2021, on Sunnyside Records, Quartet+ was conceived and produced
during the Covid-19 pandemic and made possible by a grant from the NYC Women’s Fund
for Media, Music and Theatre with additional support from the Aaron Copland Fund
for Music. It allows Sung, who also studied classical violin, to realize a long-
held dream of writing for strings while maintaining the improvisatory spark of her
stellar quartet, featuring saxophonist and flutist John Ellis, bassist David Wong,
and drummer Kendrick Scott.

The double quartet format is the latest evolution of Sung’s career-long search for
inspiration beyond the boundaries of jazz. Her classical background emerged before
on 2007’s Sungbird (After Albéniz) – the title track of which is reprised for Quartet
+ – a thrilling dialogue between modern jazz and 19th century Romanticism. Her most
recent album, Sung With Words, incorporated the words of poet Dana Gioia, while 
upcoming projects delve into the pianist’s Asian-American heritage and the intersection
of jazz and neuroscience.

While the Houston native veered away from her classical training after undergraduate
studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Sung admits that the early influence
has maintained a strong pull on her musical thinking. “I guess I can’t escape my
classical heritage,” she says with a laugh. “It’s definitely part of how I hear 
and how I write.”

It also gives her a connoisseur’s ear for the many ways in which jazz and classical
music have converged, not always successfully. “Since I also studied violin, I’m
really picky about how I want it to sound in a jazz setting,” she explains. “When
I first heard Regina Carter she was playing with Kenny Barron at the Blue Note, 
and I remember thinking, ‘That’s how I would want to play jazz violin.’ When I heard
the Harlem Quartet I had that same feeling.”

Sung crossed paths with the acclaimed quartet during a cross-genre performance with
clarinetist Eddie Daniels at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2018. She immediately approached
the musicians after the show to suggest a collaboration. The opportunity came with
the NYC Women’s Fund grant, which also gave the project a direction Sung had not
previously ventured into with her own music, following on work undertaken with Terri
Lyne Carrington’s Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and Roxy Coss’ Women
In Jazz Organization.

“In the past I tried to avoid the whole ‘women in jazz’ thing because I felt music
should speak for itself,” she says. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to feel
that’s not the most complete way to deal with it. So I’m starting to grapple with
the issues, and will do my best to approach things with honesty and candor.”

It’s hardly the first time she’s explored the work of the composers represented 
on Quartet+, however. In 2007 she won the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz
Piano Competition and has since paid tribute to the history-spanning pianist at 
Harlem Stage and on NPR. She was a guest on Marian McPartland’s revered Piano Jazz
in 2006 and has performed in tributes to Geri Allen in the wake of Allen’s untimely
death in 2017.

Allen’s “Feed the Fire” begins the album in dramatic fashion, with a striking new
counter melody added to the original’s blistering rhythms. Williams’ “Mary’s Waltz”
is refashioned in a way that draws from the classical tradition as well as the blues,
a multi-faceted approach that the history-spanning composer would surely have appreciated.
Sung heard a symphonic element to Akiyoshi’s “Long Yellow Road” which she elaborated
on in her arrangement, while “Wrong Key Donkey” vividly captures the originality
and eccentricity of Carla Bley’s complex whimsy.

Sung’s homage to McPartland fuses a string quartet rewrite of “Melancholy Mood” 
with a group improvisation on “Kaleidoscope,” the theme from her iconic radio show.
These pieces are interspersed with snippets of Dr. Billy Taylor’s “A Grand Night
for Swinging.” Sung discovered the piece from a Mary Lou Williams’ recording, and
decided to add it to honor Taylor’s early championing of female jazz musicians, 
which included founding the Mary Lou Williams Women In Jazz Festival.

In addition, Sung’s original composition “Coquette” was inspired by one of German
composer Clara Schumann’s “Romance” pieces, with Ellis’ playful, lilting flute flirting
with the elegant strings. “Lament for Kalief Browder,” dedicated to the Bronx teenager
who committed suicide following his arduous three-year imprisonment without trial
at Rikers Island, was previously recorded on Sung With Words. Sung had long envisioned
the piece with strings, realized here in a breathtaking rendition. “Sungbird,” meanwhile,
is reimagined from the original’s Latin-inflected jazz quintet version as a passionate
dance sans drums.

While the entire album was created during the pandemic, the two-movement “Temporality,”
a Jazz Coalition commission, directly addresses the strange year (and counting) 
we’ve all just come through. “The way I experienced time became very elastic during
the pandemic,” Sung says. “Each day felt interminably long, one blurring into the
next, and then suddenly an entire month had passed! ‘Time Loops’ is about that, 
while ‘Elegy for the City’ is my lament for the terrible human loss suffered by 
New York and other cities.”

Despite the stresses of the pandemic, Sung is enjoying a particularly fruitful period,
with several fascinating projects in the works aside from the release of Quartet
+. She’ll apply her 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship to a multi-movement piece for big
band slated for completion in 2022. With a Chamber Music America Digital Residency
grant, she’s producing a series of events this year using the tragic recent attacks
on the AAPI community as a catalyst for interdisciplinary events with her quartet
and a poet, a DJ and an installation artist. Sung also received a New Music USA 
2021 Music Creator Development Fund grant for a collaborative project with dancer
and neuro-rehabilitation researcher Miriam King to create a dance program with original
music for dementia/Alzheimer’s patients. Sung remarks, “If I’ve learned anything
this past year and a half, it’s to not take anything for granted, be it people, 
relationships, opportunities…so I’m jumping in with arms wide open. I want to swallow
life whole!”

01. Feed the Fire (4:27)
 02. Mary’s Waltz (6:44) 03. Coquette (6:10) 04. Elegy 
for the City (8:18) 05. Time Loops (7:29) 06. A Grand Night for Swinging (1:09) 
07. Long Yellow Road (6:59) 08. Wrong Key Donkey (4:37) 09. Melancholy Mood (2:18)
10. Kaleidoscope (3:48) 11. Lament for Kalief Browder (5:23) 12. Sungbird (6:34)
13. A Grand Night for Swinging (1:59)

**Helen Sung – piano**
 **John Ellis – tenor sax (1, 5, 6, 7, 8), soprano sax (11,
13) & flute (2, 3, 4)** **David Wong – bass** **Kendrick Scott – drums**

**Harlem Quartet:**
 **Ilmar Gavilan – violin I** **Melissa White – violin II** **
Jaime Amador – viola** **Felix Umansky – cello**

![Album: Helen Sung – Quartet+](https://i0.wp.com/theartsdesk.com/sites/default/
files/styles/mast_image_landscape/public/mastimages/Quartet%20Plus_Album%20Cover.
jpeg?w=640&ssl=1)

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