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. The Live Wire Project (Jazz Plasticity) album was created with support from Chamber Music Americas New Jazz Works program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Helen Sung is an award-winning jazz pianist and composer who received a Guggenheim Fellowship. After experiencing jazz during her studies at the University of Texas at Austin, she left classical training to graduate in the first class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) and win the Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Piano Competition. Beyond leading her own band and projects, she has collaborated with artists including Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. She currently teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Columbia University, where she was also the first jazz artist-in-residence at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute studying connections between jazz and neuroscience. A Steinway Artist, Sung performs with crisp swing and elegant invention, her rhythms rooted in blues traditions while setting listeners' heads moving as she develops fresh musical ideas often inspired by her classical background.