Visionary saxophonist and composer Kevin Sun releases a self-portrait in two parallel but distinctively bold new albums: Kevin Sun, I and Kevin Sun, II, out September 25, 2026 via Endectomorph Music, on which he strikes a balance between compositional rigour and improvisational immediacy, with a rare virtuosity… and plenty of unexpected twists…
“Sun is a protean force who displays relative ease in hurdling from majestic melodicism to seat-gripping improvisational intensity” — Brad Cohan, The New York City Jazz Record
Album Release Concert on Saturday, September 19 at Bar Bayeux, Brooklyn
A portrait in two facing mirrors or the jazz equivalent to the branching realities of a comic book multiverse – a pair of new self-titled releases by the saxophonist and sonic conceptualist Kevin Sun offer two parallel but enmeshed visions of modern jazz composition. Both out September 25, 2026 via Sun’s own Endectomorph Music imprint, Kevin Sun, I and Kevin Sun, II showcase one of New York’s most quietly distinctive saxophonist-composers: a musician who has spent twenty years learning to craft music that frees the improviser through compositional design.
As the saxophonist explains, these two albums are designed to be listened to in any sequence, each complete on its own terms but also illuminating the other. “This isn’t really a conventional double album,” says Sun. “It’s more like a pair of video games set in the same universe, each with its own style and cast of characters.”
To that end, each of the volumes showcases a different but equally perceptive quartet, both well versed in the potentialities and provocations of Sun’s singular music. Kevin Sun, I is a production-intensive studio session featuring guitarist Max Light, bassist Walter Stinson, and drummer Jon Starks. The second volume, Kevin Sun, II, documents the road-tested sound of a touring quartet in which Sun is joined again by Stinson on bass alongside pianist Christian Li and drummer Kayvon Gordon.
After ten releases over eight years that have gradually established his unique voice in contemporary jazz, Sun spent the years leading up to these twin releases working through a deceptively simple question: what makes for a good jazz composition?
“For me, the best compositions are at heart vehicles for improvisation,” says Sun,” but they’re designed to bring out the best in each individual musician. They raise the stakes for improvising and let everyone sound their best, or just more like themselves than anything else.”
Similar to his previous releases, Sun draws unapologetically from whatever direction his ear leads him: jazz icons John Coltrane and Benny Golson, video game creators FromSoftware and filmmaker David Lynch, Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s mesmerizing blend of electronic minimalism and Romantic-era lyricism.
“Eclecticism for its own sake isn’t the point, really,” he says. “I just like all of this music; every one of these songs means something to me personally, and I shaped them to give the band a strong jumping-off point.”
Kevin Sun, I is a studio artifact bearing the fingerprints of Sun’s meticulous post-production work. The band workshopped most of the music over the course of a year and a half of regular performances at Lowlands Bar in Brooklyn, where Sun began playing regularly after the pandemic. That residency led to a string of investigatory live recordings titled lofi at lowlands, which capture Sun’s sax trio with visceral immediacy.
Among the first volume’s highlights are “Go In,” the opening track and first single, where the saxophonist spirits through a labyrinth of cascading harmonies and shifting meters with uncommon ease. “It’s basically Coltrane’s ‘Countdown,’ which is already harmonically dense, but then I mixed it up with all sorts of shifting meters,” explains Sun. “I’d say it’s probably the most challenging leadsheet-type song I’ve written, but the band really makes it sound natural, which was the goal.”
As its name suggests, “Scrollwork” unfolds by giving each member of the band an equally important voice in four-part rhythmic counterpoint. “Hold Music,” inspired by Sun’s own experience of a real-life ninety-minute ordeal on hold with the IRS loops a spiky, seven-bar figure, building in textural density and playing with dynamics before dissolving into a single sustained tone as if the phone line itself has given up.
The second volume, Kevin Sun, II, was recorded the following spring in a single afternoon at the Terrarium recording studio in Minneapolis, at the conclusion of a brief but intense tour. “Since we’d been playing this music on the road for a week around the US, I wanted this record to sound like our live shows,” says Sun. “Basically no edits and just the sound of us playing together.”
Highlights include an uptempo-swing recasting of “Chanson,” Sakamoto’s quietly devastating waltz from his 1999 solo piano album BTTB; Sun flags Li’s piano solo as a masterclass in harmonic creativity and angular phrasing. “Unformed, Shrouded by Fog” opens the album with a feeling of suspended possibility; the piece is dedicated to Malaysian actress Pik-Sen Lim, who passed at age 85 shortly after this was recorded. The song is a direct transcription of her now-classic voice introduction to the 2011 video game Dark Souls, which Sun harmonized and adapted for his quartet.
In addition to “Chanson,” the album includes another cover: “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting song from the hit television series Twin Peaks directed by David Lynch.
“I actually did this arrangement over ten years ago, back when I was in music school,” says Sun. “But after David Lynch passed away [in January 2025], I wanted to bring it back out and pay homage, because he really influenced my own work a lot in his faithfulness to his personal vision and style—regardless of commercial or market forces.”
With these two albums, Sun returns to the musical values that first drew him to jazz: the beauty and emotional directness of melodic playing, and the sense that the tenor saxophone can say something that can’t be expressed in any other way. This past decade of music exploration has seen him pushing further into complex compositional forms, extended harmony, mixed meter, and rhythmic intricacy; Kevin Sun, I and II now bring him full circle, back toward his initial musical impulses, but with more evolved tools and more profound experiences to serve that vision.
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photo by Xavier Kim
Kevin Sun
Kevin Sun is a Chinese-American saxophonist and composer living in New York City. His music has been called “intense, harmonically virtuosic and compositionally complex” by DownBeat Magazine, and he has ten releases to date as a leader—most recently lofi at lowlands 四, in April 2026. He is the founder of Endectomorph Music, a Brooklyn-based label dedicated to creative improvised music that has released over 40 albums since 2015. His previous albums have been released to critical acclaim, including his 2021 tribute to Charlie Parker, <3 Bird, which landed on year-end best-of lists in the Boston Globe, PostGenre, and more. In 2025, Sun ranked third in the DownBeat Magazine Critics Poll in the Rising Star Tenor Saxophone category. Sun has also recorded five albums with the ensembles Mute, Earprint, and Great On Paper, and he appears on recordings led by Adam O’Farrill, Jacob Garchik, Dana Saul, Xiongguan Zhang, and Elijah Shiffer. In 2025, he joined drummer Jochen Rueckert’s New Quartet, with whom he toured Europe and recorded an as-yet unreleased album in spring 2026.
In addition to performing in the U.S., Sun has performed extensively in China and served as the Artistic Director of the Blue Note China Jazz Orchestra from 2018 until 2020, leading performances of the BNCJO at the Blue Note Beijing with guest artists such as Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kris Davis, and Ingrid Jensen. In fall 2021, Sun started a three-year weekly residency at Lowlands Bar in Brooklyn where he continues to perform there regularly, as do other local artists such as legendary saxophonist-composer Tim Berne. He plays VENN reeds by D’Addario exclusively and has been a D’Addario Artist since June 2024. Sun holds an M.M. in Jazz Performance from New England Conservatory and an A.B. in English from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude.
Kevin Sun – Kevin Sun, I & Kevin Sun, II
Endectomorph Music – EMM-054A & EMM-054B – Recorded November 2024 and April 2025
Release date September 25, 2026
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