Helen Sung

Helen Sung is an American jazz pianist. She is a native of Houston, Texas. Her musical life began with classical piano and violin. She attended Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and went on to receive undergraduate and master's degrees in classical piano performance at the University of Texas at Austin. She first heard jazz music during that time and eventually switched her focus. She went on to graduate from Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. Highlights of the two-year program include performing at the Kennedy Center and touring India and Thailand with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Now based in New York City, Sung won the 2007 Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition and was a semifinalist in the 1999 Monk Institute Piano Competition. She has five albums to her credit, including a 2011 debut CD on Steeplechase Records: (re)Conception and a 2nd CD (a live recording) on Sunnyside Records: Going Express. Her Sunnyside debut Sungbird After Albeniz was a jazz-classical project; Helenistique (her sophomore release on Fresh Sound Records) was praised by the JazzTimes as "one of the year's most exciting listens". Sung's latest album is her 2014 debut on Concord Records, entitled Anthem for a New Day. Sung appeared on Marian McPartland's NPR Piano Jazz program, and appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Detroit International Jazz Festival, the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival,[14] Seattle's Earshot Festival, the Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Festival. She has been featured at the Wigan International Jazz Festival, China's Jz Festival, India's "Jus' Jazz" Festival, Poland's Kalisz International Jazz Piano Festival, and her NuGenerations project toured southern Africa as a US State Department-Rhythm Road Jazz Ambassador. She has worked with notable jazz artists including Clark Terry, Slide Hampton, Ron Carter, Jon Faddis, Wayne Shorter,T.S.Monk, MacArthur Fellow Regina Carter, and Terri Lyne Carrington (Sung performed on Carrington's Grammy-winning Mosaic Project CD). Sung produced a jazz residency program for under-served students (through a Chamber Music America/Doris Duke Foundation grant), conducts workshops/master-classes, and joined the Berklee College of Music as an Associate Piano Professor in the Fall of 2011. She has completed composition commissions for the West Chester University Poetry Conference, arts organization JazzReach,[ the artisanal North Coast Brewing Company, and was selected as a 2010 NYC Spaces/Con Edison Composer-in-Residence at Flushing Town Hall. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.