Twenty-second of a series
It was a night unlike many others in the city’s jazz haven at Tago. Headlining the Valentine weekend was a visiting Korean American pianist—a slight gentlewoman who brimmed more with the energy of a college senior than a mother of six.
The Lisa Sung Trio—featuring Lisa on keys, Andrew Bishop on saxophone, and Tom Knific on bass—arrived in Metro Manila on Feb. 10, marking the final leg of an extensive Asian tour through Vietnam and Indonesia sponsored by the John Stites Jazz Award (JSJA), a prestigious grant program established to support the professional growth of emerging and established jazz musicians. Linking up with composer, arranger, and writer Krina Cayabyab, the trio embarked on a whirlwind residency of masterclasses at the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, and Centro Escolar University, punctuated by intimate sets at Tago and in Silang, Cavite.
While Lisa and Tom are no strangers to the continent, this marks Andrew’s first foray into Southeast Asia, having previously spent time performing in Türkiye.
For Lisa, concluding the tour in the Philippines is deeply intentional. “It’s a chance to collaborate with local musicians and to learn Filipino children’s and folk songs as I introduce to them similar songs from my own culture,” she writes in her website. She also included the Philippines “to explore the musical parallels among nations with a shared history of colonization.”
Fresh and intense
The fiercely elegant Mama Bear came out strong in their first number with a grown-up reharmonized treatment of the simple nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” aka “Are You Sleeping (Brother John)?” Lisa opened with a recognizable, sparse statement of the theme—a universally memorable round—before Andrew and Tom pushed it to a post-bop exploration, together with our very own Angelo Gabriel Lapuz (of Kiss the Bride and the UST Jazz Band) on drums. The result was a bracing deconstruction: a familiar melody rebuilt as a modern jazz anthem.
With the audience thus pulled into a familiar, if mature, embrace, the entire first set flowed into scenic views and deeper waters. Lisa’s originals—“Forget-me-not” and “Sampaguita,” the former being Alaska’s state flower and the latter the Philippines’ national flower—let the listeners in on her romantic side without the band losing its grip on high-level interaction and improvisation.
Acknowledging “love in the air,” Lisa gave a shoutout to the lovers on their date night before the band sailed into “Siena,” an original by Tom—a lyrical and graceful piece that captures the moment the composer fell madly in love with the Italian city. “Siena” highlighted the bass not merely as a timekeeper but as a primary melodic storyteller. Tom and Andrew traded lines here with telepathic ease, with Tom often using a rich, singing tone in the upper register of the bass.
Of course, no Valentine show would be complete without the season’s theme song, coolly rendered by Krina, and famous for its minor-key intimacy and backhanded lyric. Closing out the first set was another original by Tom—“A Bridge for Mostar,” arguably among his most poignant and culturally resonant compositions. It bears emotional weight, functioning as both a musical tribute and a metaphor for reconciliation: The title refers to the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 16th-century Ottoman bridge that was a symbol of the city’s multicultural heart until it was destroyed during the Croat-Bosniak War in 1993.
Cultural conversation
“My take on the nursery rhyme was a result of my experiences as a mother raising six children,” Lisa says. The controlled chaos, the joy, and the never-ending sense of wonder no doubt continue to inform her creative life as an award-winning jazz pianist, composer, and educator.
Her debut album, “Half Moon,” reimagines traditional Korean children’s songs through the harmonic and improvisational language of jazz, while her second album, “Dari Sabang,” continues this global conversation by interpreting Indonesian folk melodies in a jazz idiom.
“I am so happy and honored to have played on this tour with my teachers,” she adds.
In 2024, Lisa began her Doctor of Musical Arts in Jazz Performance and Contemporary Composition at the University of Michigan (UM), where she was awarded the prestigious Rackham Merit Fellowship for academic excellence and artistic vision. In January 2025, she received the Presidential Graduate Fellowship in recognition of her groundbreaking musical collaboration with a Korean Pansori singer.
In March, she will present an original song cycle inspired by “The Vegetarian,” a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang. Performed by her ensemble in collaboration with the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the UM, the concert will explore themes from the book: silence, resistance, and transformation through sound.
Andrew, a versatile saxophonist, clarinetist, flautist, composer, scholar, and educator, maintains an active national and international career and serves as a professor and chair of the UM Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation in Ann Arbor, where he teaches applied saxophone, composition, and improvisation.
Critics have noted that Andrew combines a “jazzman’s fire and flow with a rigorous compositional sensibility”: His playing can be high-energy and improvisational, but it is nearly always deliberate and well-constructed.
In a 2024 interview with the Interlochen Center for the Arts, he notes that “a band is about group dynamic, and I hope people can draw on the energy of the moment.” For him, the saxophone is “a beautifully designed instrument, and once you get a handle for it, it feels like an extension of your own body.” And although he’s played plenty of classical, at heart he is primarily a jazz player: “I have a great love for improvising on the instrument,” he says. “It’s been such an important part of who I am as a musician—the ability to use the saxophone as a vehicle for expressing my musical ideas.”
His three recordings as a leader, “De Profundis,” “Time” and “Imaginary Time,” and the Hank Williams Project received widespread acclaim from The New York Times, Downbeat Magazine, and the Chicago Reader, among others.
Tom has made a life from his diverse musical passions as a bassist, composer, and educator. Classically trained on two continents and having been drawn to jazz since childhood, he has plotted a course and flourished in these worlds, leaving a trail of critically celebrated concerts and recordings, inspired compositions, and a growing roster of students making their own mark on the music scene.
He has performed on tour and recorded with jazz greats like Gene Bertoncini, Randy Brecker, Art Farmer, Dave Brubeck, and Fred Hersch. He and Eric Marienthal co-led the “Dream Band” with Toots Thielemans, Kenny Werner, and Harvey Mason in the first live interactive jazz concert multi-cast worldwide over the internet.
A professor of bass and director of jazz studies at Western Michigan University and leader of the Western Jazz Quartet (WJQ), Tom and his WJQ received high praise for their five CDs of original music. He has appeared on over 30 CDs; his 4 solo CDs, Home Bass (1998), Siena(2004), Lines of Influence (2009), and The Muse (2011), have received critical acclaim.
On a high note
The evening’s second set, with Tago’s Nelson Gonzales taking over on drums, trotted out the jazz standards “If I Were a Bell,” a Latinized “My One and Only Love,” and “Footprints.” The trio plus Nelson took on the Lucio San Pedro classic “Ugoy ng Duyan,” doubtless the set’s emotional peak, before it closed with the durable “Emily,” which showcased Andrew’s delightful wide melodic leaps.
One night is not nearly enough with this trio, and one hopes to see and hear them again, and yet again. Their body language on stage is precious: Lisa in full concentration bent over the keys, shoulders swaying and feet tapping to the beat or somewhere in between; Andrew keeping time at points deep in the pocket; and Tom, the pulse, eyes closed, in a tight dance with the double bass loaned to him by his friend who had played with the Manila Symphony Orchestra.
To answer the one question Tom and I left hanging that night, I went searching online. What’s it like working with an all-star jazz lineup?
I found part of the answer from a 2010 interview of Tom’s with the website of For Bass Players Only: “…Brubeck was one of my very first influences. I bought his recordings while I was in middle school and to work with this brilliant and compassionate gentleman was awe inspiring. I performed with him just after Miles Davis had passed and he played ‘In Your Own Sweet Way,’ which he had written as a tribute to Miles. Because of where I was standing, my head was almost inside of the piano when Brubeck performed. I will never forget that experience.
“I have shared so much with Billy Hart also, throughout nearly twenty years of teaching, touring and recording with this living legend. Hart, by the way, seems to recall every detail from his entire career and is always making historical and personal connections, which is remarkable and enlightening…”
Such musical connections are precisely what must be forged and nurtured to keep the meandering jazz conversation going across the world. CS
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