ABOUT

HELEN SUNG

Helen Sung is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. A native of Houston, Texas, and alumna of its High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA), she eschewed her classical piano upbringing after a chance encounter with jazz during undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Helen went on to graduate from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute) and win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. Her albums have topped the jazz radio charts; in addition to her newest recording “Quartet+” (Sunnyside Records), a double quartet project with special guest Harlem Quartet, recent releases include “Sung With Words” (a collaboration with the celebrated poet Dana Gioia) and her vinyl debut “Everybody’s Waltz,” a duo recording with trumpeter Marquis Hill. Helen and her band have performed at major American festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, SFJAZZ, Newport, and Monterey. Internationally, her “NuGenerations” Project toured southern Africa as a U.S. State Department Jazz Ambassador, and recent engagements include debuts at Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, Blue Note Beijing, the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival, and the London Jazz Festival. She has worked with such luminaries as the late Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, MacArthur Fellow Regina Carter, and Grammy-winning artists including Terri Lyne Carrington and Cecile McLorin Salvant. She currently performs with such fine ensembles as the Mingus Big Band and McLorin Salvant’s “Ogresse”. Helen is a Steinway Artist, and has served on the jazz faculties at Berklee College of Music, the Juilliard School, and Columbia University, where she was the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at the prestigious Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.