The Jazz Purveyor Presents: Helen Sung & the Monks Jazz Orchestra Celebrate Horace Silver

Join us for a live taping and listening-room concert for The Jazz Purveyor Presents: Helen Sung & the Monks Jazz Orchestra Celebrate Horace Silver!

Rhythm Section:

Helen Sung – Piano

Sam Pankey – Bass

Daniel Dufour – Drums

Full Personnel TBA

Undeniable… piano playing at a quite unbelievably jaw-dropping level."

– Sebastian Scotney, London Jazz News

“She will be a very important person to hear whenever you get a chance to hear her.”

– Ron Carter, quoted in JazzTimes

About Helen Sung:

Pianist and composer Helen Sung hails from Houston, Texas, and is an alumna of its celebrated High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. After a jazz epiphany during undergraduate studies in classical piano at the University of Texas at Austin, she went on to become part of the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) of Jazz Performance, win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition, and receive prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Claudette Sorel Award from the National Arts Club.

In addition to leading her own band, Helen has performed with such luminaries as Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. Now based in New York City, she is visiting faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an Associate Professor at Columbia University, where she also was the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at its Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute exploring analogies between jazz and neuroscience.

With ten leader albums to her credit, her latest release Oracles (Sunnyside Records, 2026) is a big band project featuring musical portraits of jazz legends who mentored her at the Monk Institute (one of her compositions “Wayne’s World,” won the 2022 BMI Charlie Parker Jazz Composition). Other activities of note including a digital streaming series “Re-Orientation: Asian American Artists Out Loud” (made possible by a Chamber Music America Digital Residency grant); and partnering with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Zuckerman Institute’s Public Programs Department, and Arts & Minds to present programs about the neuroscience behind making/hearing music to engage those living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Join us Monday November 30th at Monks as Helen Sung celebrates the music of Horace Silver alongside the Monks Jazz Orchestra.

“Sung plays with crisp swing and elegant invention, her rhythms drawing from the music’s deepest blues roots – and setting listeners’ heads bobbing – while she explores her own fresh ideas, often inspired from her classical training.” (New York Times)

About Horace Silver:

After playing tenor saxophone and piano at school in Connecticut, Horace Silver got his break on piano when his trio was recruited by Stan Getz in 1950. Silver soon moved to New York City, where he developed a reputation as a composer and for his bluesy playing. Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention. The Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album contained Silver's first hit, "The Preacher". After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums.

As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including "Doodlin'", "Peace", and "Sister Sadie", became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.

Presented by The Jazz Purveyor, with support from the Live Music Society.

Please Note: MONKS JAZZ IS NOW A FULL SERVICE BAR. As part of this transition, Monks Jazz is no longer a BYOB venue. We invite you to enjoy our thoughtfully curated beverage menu and roll with us through the changes! As always, this is a live-taping, so we'll be enforcing a whisper-policy! Free parking is available in the area.

Monks is open 6:30 PM for a new Happy Half Hour, featuring $2 off of our Classic and Signature Cocktails, $2 off Glasses of Wine, and $1 off of our Beer Menu between 6:30 PM and 7:00 PM. Join us for a drink, or come at your scheduled seating time! We'll have a wonderful evening planned ahead!

First Show: Doors at 7:00pm, Show at 7:30pm.

Second Show: Doors at 9:00pm, Show at 9:30pm.