Helen Sung (photo by Joseph Bogges)
It’s been too long—seven years, if you’re counting—since we’ve heard Helen Sung leading a band of her own. Born and raised in Houston, Sung was drawn to music from childhood, devoting herself to classical piano until she’d nearly finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Two years later, after a radical change of course, she was accepted into the inaugural cohort of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, studying with legends like Ron Carter, Clark Terry, and Jackie McLean. Since then, her twenty-plus-year career has comprised countless tours, nine records under her own name, and hundreds of recordings and performances as a supporting pianist. (Two years ago, she played a key role in Scott Robinson’s “Tenormore” at the Arcata Playhouse.)
Her latest album, Quartet+, co-produced with violinist Regina Carter, was conceived as a pandemic project, originally with the Harlem String Quartet, under a grant from the NYC Women’s Fund. But that’s not all Sung has been up to recently: in 2021 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship to compose a suite of big band pieces dedicated to her teachers; last year it was a Chamber Music America award to create a “digital residency” responding to the post-pandemic rise in anti-Asian-American/Pacific Islander hate crime (that project, “Re-Orientation: Asian Americans Out Loud,” was done in collaboration with visual artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, poet Serena Yang, and hip-hop artist Heesun Lee); and with dancer and neuro-rehabilitation scholar Miriam King she is extending her work as artist-in-residence at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute (which focuses on brain research and behavior), developing a program aimed at dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.
With Quartet+, Sung augments her own group (John Ellis, woodwinds; Yasushi Nakamura, bass; Adam Cruz, drums) with strings, and—as she’s done in previous projects, like the Albeniz-inspired Sungbird—suffuses her backgrounds in different modes of music-making with what Nate Chinen identifies as “the radiant spirit that Sung brings to any bandstand.” On a mix of original tunes and new arrangements of works by Toshiko Akiyoshi, Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Marian McPartland, and Mary Lou Williams, the two units “code-switch fluently and synchronously,” as Ted Panken puts it, “between hardcore jazz, the classical Euro tradition, and pan-Latin dialects, each idiom addressed on its own terms of engagement.”
For this performance, Helen and her quartet will be joined by the Arcata Bay String Quartet, who have performed on past RJA concerts with Fabian Almazan and Camila Meza. The ABSQ is Cindy Moyer, violin; Karen Davy, viola; Garrick Woods, cello; and—for this concert—Jenny Scheinman, violin.
helen sung | bandcamp | npr’s jazz night in america | jazziz
Quartet+ is made possible by the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts; with additional support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. and the Jazz Coalition Commission Fund.
This performance is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Arcata Playhouse is a mask-optional venue, and proof of vaccination status is not required for admission. HOWEVER: with the recent rise in cases of COVID-19 and the continued vulnerability of over-60s and the immunocompromised in mind, the RJA endorses continued masking in indoor spaces, and asks that you please stay home if you are experiencing cold or flu symptoms.
Sponsors
Our 17th year of programming couldn’t happen without the steadfast support of RJA members & sponsors, not to mention the collaborative spirit of our venue partner, Playhouse Arts. Special thanks to Bug Press, the most steadfast of jazz allies, for its abiding generosity.
Additional support for this show comes from Cafe Brio, Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate, Bob and Amy Doran, Josh Meisel and Mary Virnoche, North Coast Co-Op, Wrangletown Cider & North Story Wines, and dozens of RJA members.