By Cory-LaNeave Jones

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” — Robert Frost, from The Secret Sits (1942)

Robert Frost’s couplet from The Secret Sits (1942) suggests that humans spend their entire lives speculating and searching for truth but the ultimate truth (the Secret) remains hidden and therefore becomes the center of existence. Jazz has always understood this better than most religions, and certainly better than astrology. Jazz circles. It returns. It improvises around a center too mysterious to name directly. On a warm April evening at the Cygnet Theatre, presented by KSDS Jazz 88.3, world-renowned pianist Helen Sung stepped into that Secret center by way of Mary Lou Williams‘ monumental, elusive, and still-radical Zodiac Suite.

The Zodiac Suite is one of the marvels of American music. It is a work so visionary that it still feels like a prophecy. Written between 1942 and 1945, Mary Lou‘s Zodiac Suite arrived before jazz had decided what it would become next. Before cool, before modal, before the academy, before the market turned improvisation into curriculum. It stood there, audacious and immaculate, halfway between Kansas City and Carnegie Hall, between Ellington and Bartók, between the nightclub and the conservatory. It was, in every sense, future music.

And on this particular Tuesday night, the future returned.

Mary Lou’s Constellation

To speak of Mary Lou Williams merely as a pioneer is to understate the matter. Pioneers arrive somewhere first. Mary Lou built the road, surveyed the stars above it, and then taught everyone else how to travel across the skies. She arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and of course, started it off with Andy Kirk and His Twelve Couds of Joy. Twelve Clouds of Joy, say I wonder if that was a premonition?

She mentored Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. She crossed swing, bebop, sacred music, and what would later be called Third Stream before critics had found names for any of it.

The Zodiac Suite may be her most crystalline achievement: twelve musical portraits, each inspired not merely by astrological signs, but by the temperaments of artists she knew and loved. Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Lena Horne—the heavens, for Mary Lou, were crowded with musicians.

As Helen Sung reminded the audience, these were not fixed portraits but constellations—clusters of personality, possibility, and sound. “Each sign really wasn’t a particular one person she had in mind,” Sung explained. “It was a conglomerate.”

That distinction matters. Jazz itself is a conglomerate—of traditions, revisions, thefts, gifts, accidents, and revelations.

Helen Sung: The Right Interpreter

There are pianists who can play Mary Lou Williams. There are fewer who can converse with her.

Helen Sung, a Guggenheim Fellow, former Thelonious Monk Institute fellow, and winner of the Mary Lou Williams Piano Competition, belongs decisively to the latter camp. Her touch contains both rigor and elasticity. She can articulate a line with classical exactitude, then bend it until it begins to testify.

When asked after the performance what drew her to the project, Sung laughed at the serendipity of it all.

“Ken Poston of KSDS called me out of the blue… and asked me if I wanted to do this, and I said, ‘Yeah.'”

It was her first full performance of the Zodiac Suite. One could scarcely tell. Her authority was complete, but never authoritarian. She played as though rediscovering the piece in real time—which, really, is the only honest way to play jazz.

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Democracy on the Bandstand

Sung has often spoken about jazz as a communal art. Jimmy Heath once told her that the bandstand represents true democracy: everyone has a voice, everyone has a role, and together they create something larger than themselves.

That ideal was made audible throughout the evening.

Bassist Emiliano Lasansky and drummer Anthony Fung—both fellow alumni of the Monk Institute lineage—were more than accompanists. They were interlocutors, conspirators, fellow cartographers. Fung’s cymbal work could whisper or ignite. Lasansky’s bass alternated between muscular propulsion and lyrical tenderness.

Behind them, conductor Chaz Cabrera marshaled the KSDS Orchestra with precision and generosity, allowing Williams’s orchestrations to bloom while leaving space for Sung’s improvisational flights.

This was not repertory. It was resurrection.

The Signs, Reborn

Each piece represents a different zodiac sign. “Aries” burst forth with combustible swagger, boogie-woogie colliding with modernist angles. “Taurus” settled into a muscular elegance worthy of Ellington himself. “Gemini” danced in witty bifurcations, ideas splitting and rejoining before one could fully grasp them.

Then came “Virgo,” Sung’s own sign.

“I do,” she said later, when asked whether she identified with it. “It’s a complex piece… very bluesy… a lot of twists and turns, very finely intricate details.”

The description fit both composition and performer.

Her solo in “Virgo” unfolded like an essay written in moonlight—analytical, searching, restless, and finally exultant.

Elsewhere, “Scorpio” smoldered, “Aquarius” dreamed in daring asymmetries, and “Pisces” dissolved into liquid abstraction. Throughout, one heard Mary Lou’s original architecture and Sung’s contemporary imagination interpenetrating each other.

As Sung herself put it:

“I like to be part of illuminating what that piece is. And then in that illuminating, it can take you to unexpected places.”

Exactly.

The Importance of Swing

Modern jazz often risks forgetting that swing is not merely a rhythmic feel; it is an ethic. It is tension yielding to release. It is conversation without domination. It is freedom disciplined by form.

Mary Lou Williams knew this instinctively. Helen Sung knows it too.

Even at the suite’s most harmonically adventurous, the music never abandoned the body. Heads nodded. Feet tapped. (At least, I know mine did.) Spirits rose. The audience, that rare San Diego hybrid of scholars, collectors, casual listeners, and true believers, leaned forward as if proximity might improve understanding.

It did.

KSDS has long understood that jazz survives only when heard live, in rooms where sound becomes social. This concert was not simply programming; it was stewardship.

A Conversation Across Time

Earlier in the evening, Sung had told the audience:

“I stand on her shoulders.”

The phrase carried more than gratitude. It carried lineage.

Jazz is a music of inheritance. Mary Lou inherited stride, ragtime, blues. Monk inherited Mary Lou. Helen inherited all of them. And on this night, the inheritance passed again—from stage to audience, from past to present, from memory to possibility.

That may be the deepest meaning of the Zodiac Suite: not astrology, but ancestry.

D. C. al Coda

Mary Oliver once wrote, in “Summer Day” (1992):

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Jazz has always known this too.

Mary Lou Williams knew it when she composed twelve signs into one suite. Helen Sung knew it when she sat down at the piano (and sometimes stood up to tune-down the piano during one song) at Cygnet Theater in Liberty Station. KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM knew it when they brought this extraordinary event to San Diego.

The stars, after all, are only useful when they help us navigate one another.

And for one luminous April evening, they did exactly that.

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Stay tuned for more events put together by KSDS by visiting their website at: https://www.jazz88.org and stay tuned for future jazz concerts at their website or tune in to 88.3 on your FM radio dial.

Holly Hofmann’s jazz series continues this month at Tio Leo’s Restaurant and Lounge at 5302 Napa St. at Morena Blvd. Jazz at Tio Leo’s is happening every Sunday evening from 5-7pm and features Southern California’s finest jazz musicians in a quiet, spacious setting with full bar and Mexican cuisine. There is also plenty of free parking.

Leonard Patton always has a great line up at The Jazz Lounge at 6818 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego, CA 92115.

La Jolla Music Society also has their famous Summerfest lineup from July 31 to August 29 including stellar performances by Shenel Johns performing on May 16, Chucho Vales & Arturo Sandoval Legacy Quintet on June 9, and the Sullivan Forner Trio on August 13.

Special Thanks to Chuck Apostolas, KSDS Membership Director, for assisting me with setting up a short interview with Ms. Sung after the show.