Helen Sung's Live Wire Project

A live wire project featuring Helen Sung on piano, John Ellis on saxophone, Vicente Archer on bass, Kush Abadey on drums, and Wendel Patrick as DJ. The Live Wire Project (Jazz Plasticity) was supported by the Chamber Music Americas New Jazz Works program, funded through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Helen Sung is an award-winning jazz pianist and composer who received a Guggenheim Fellowship. After discovering jazz during her university studies at the University of Texas at Austin, she graduated from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) and won the Kennedy Centers Mary Lou Williams Piano Competition. She has collaborated with Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. Sung is currently on faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to explore connections between jazz and neuroscience. A Steinway Artist, her playing combines crisp swing with elegant invention, drawing rhythmic inspiration from blues traditions while developing fresh ideas often informed by her classical training.