Seattle-based nonprofit Earshot Jazz has long supported the scene with an expansive annual music festival, a monthly jazz magazine, education programs and regional performance listings. During the pandemic, it livestreamed small, socially distanced performances from Town Hall, and has also distributed $73,000 to local musicians, via the Seattle Jazz Artists Relief Fund granted by the Rayner Institute and Foundation.
Earshot Jazz executive director John Gilbreath is upbeat about a resurgence. The Earshot festival was entirely online last year but will return in person this fall at numerous local venues. (Schedule to be announced.) “We’re back to doing probably 40 concerts,” Gilbreath says. “And it will likely be a hybrid presentation with live audiences and simultaneous livestreams for people who aren’t ready to go out.”
Bassist John Clayton, artistic director of Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend program, says his organization is also experimenting with dual formats in the upcoming summer workshop and fest (July 26-30). “It will primarily be virtual,” he says, which means the popular Jazz in the Clubs offerings won’t happen. “But we’ll have a limited faculty of performer-instructors at Centrum. They’ll submit short videos and talk online about what they went through making the performance.”
A live component has faculty members (including Seattleites like pianist Randy Halberstadt and sax player Alex Dugdale, and imported artists like singer Tina Marie) doing an in-person concert for Port Townsend residents, which will also be livestreamed. Workshop fees will be reduced, so “we can make it more accessible than in the past,” says Clayton.
The Centrum event has long attracted a large contingent of students from local and out-of-state high school and college jazz programs. That remains a target group, stresses Clayton. “We don’t get kids who are just looking for a summer camp,” he says. “They’re really into the music and being a part of what we have to offer.”
Ultimately it is those enthusiastic youths who’ll determine the ongoing viability of Seattle’s jazz scene, whether as professional musicians or as patrons. Opportunities for them to study jazz and perform live together are critical, especially after a lengthy hiatus from in-person schooling (not to mention Zoom burnout).
But Gilbreath points to the lively, multigenerational jam sessions at the Owl ‘N Thistle Pub in Pike Place Market on Tuesday nights as a promising sign.
“It’s so heartening and reflects a lot what the magic of jazz can really be,” he says. “Young musicians learning on the bandstand, and the implicit mentorship that happens with older ones — it’s part of the jazz continuum, especially after a time when people couldn’t make music together in the same room.”
Seattle’s long, deep history as a jazz hub stretches from the bustling 1930s and ’40s club scene on Jackson Street, to the early careers of famous practitioners like Quincy Jones and Ray Charles in the 1950s, to the flowering of jazz festivals and supper clubs since the 1980s.
Yet with so much uncertainty — including virus-dependent shifts in public health guidelines and a swiftly changing cityscape — it’s impossible to predict the future of live jazz in Seattle.
In the near term, the “variants could shut it all down,” acknowledges Pearl Django’s Gray. “And even in better times, musicians exist on a wing and a prayer. But I’m not a glass-half-full person — I’m a glass-half-running-over person,” he says. “We have a lot of great jazz musicians in the Pacific Northwest, so the music is great. And it’s America’s music.”
"Scene" - Google News
July 14, 2021 at 07:03PM
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Seattle's jazz scene turns up the volume as clubs reopen - Crosscut
"Scene" - Google News
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