Helen Sung's Live Wire Project

Helen Sung's 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, is presented by Jazz Plasticity through the Helen Sung Group. This concert was supported by Chamber Music Americas New Jazz Works program funded via the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Sung, a Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning jazz pianist-composer, transformed from her classical training after discovering jazz at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated in the first class of the Thelonious Monk Institute (now Herbie Hancock Institute), won the Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Piano Competition, and 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. Currently teaching at San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute as its inaugural jazz artist-in-residence exploring jazz-neuroscience intersections, she is a Steinway Artist whose playing combines crisp swing with elegant invention, drawing rhythmic inspiration from blues roots while offering fresh musical ideas often informed by her classical background.