[Dixielandjazz] Youth Jazz in Seattle Part 1

[Stephen G Barbone]

Didn't go through the first time, probably too long so here it is in 2  
parts:

Alt-Rock Hub, Purring With Jazz - PART ONE.

NY TIMES - By Nate Chinen - 8-29-10

SEATTLE

THE atmosphere at Cafe Racer, a coffeehouse and bar in the University  
District here, skews distinctly postgrunge, with its scuffed floor and  
mismatched furniture, its thrift-store paintings on boldly colored  
walls. One Sunday evening this spring the place was packed mainly with  
teenagers and 20-somethings in T-shirts and sneakers, all listening  
intently to a band. Everything seemed of a piece except the music:  
sleek, dynamic large-group jazz, a whirl of dark-hued harmony and  
billowing rhythm.

“Split Stream” was the name of the composition, by Andy Clausen, an  
industrious young trombonist. Most of the players in his 10-piece  
band, crowding one end of the room, were his classmates at Roosevelt  
High School. A few others hailed from Garfield High School, which like  
Roosevelt is a reliable favorite in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s  
prestigious Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition.  
The intelligent sheen of Mr. Clausen’s writing was as striking as the  
composure of his peers, notably the trumpeter Riley Mulherkar, then a  
Garfield senior. It was impressive, and not just by the yardstick of  
their age.

Seattle, a city synonymous with alternative rock, has long sustained a  
provincial jazz culture, without much fuss or a signature sound. To  
outside jazz partisans the city is known as an incubator for high  
school talent that usually flies the coop, heading East for  
conservatory training and professional careers. Mr. Clausen and Mr.  
Mulherkar are both arriving in New York this week to begin their first  
semester at the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, which highlights  
both the lofty promise and a lingering problem of their hometown.

But the landscape has been shifting because of recent events at the  
university level and at joints like Cafe Racer, home to a musician-run  
series called the Racer Sessions. A growing number of young musicians  
have been focused on building an autonomous scene, something  
distinctive and homegrown. The acclaimed trumpeter Cuong Vu, who left  
Seattle in the late 1980s and recently made his way back, said he was  
reminded of the energy of New York’s 1990s downtown scene, the tail  
end of which he experienced firsthand. “Seattle could be a model for  
all the other places in the U.S. that need a scene like this,” he said.

Mr. Vu is by no means an objective observer. A few years ago he joined  
the faculty of the University of Washington’s School of Music, where  
he has worked closely with a number of players, bringing an  
ultramodern ethos to a fairly traditional program. He might be  
overstating the case, but he could also be on to something.

“I was very, very close to staying here,” Mr. Clausen said after his  
group had yielded the floor to a series of improvised responses,  
according to Racer Sessions protocol. “It was a tough decision,  
because I’m excited about what’s happening. There’s all this momentum  
here now. It’s a really exciting place to be.”

The history of jazz in most American cities is a tale of ebb and flow,  
and Seattle fits the bill. In his 1993 book, “Jackson Street After  
Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle,” Paul de Barros recounts a  
nightclub boom that ran from the late ’30s into the ’50s, cultivating  
regional heroes like the trumpeter and saxophonist Floyd Standifer.

The low ebb, according to the jazz radio host Jim Wilke, came in the  
’60s, with the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Musicians were still playing  
jazz, but mainly along the margins. That ended up suiting people like  
the guitarist Bill Frisell and the keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, two of  
the most prominent jazz artists to call Seattle home.

“When I moved here from New York in 1989, I wasn’t looking to be in  
any kind of a scene,” Mr. Frisell said. “I was kind of looking for a  
place to hide out.” (Still, his album “Beautiful Dreamers,” due out on  
Savoy on Tuesday, features another adopted Seattleite, the violist  
Eyvind Kang.)

Since the 1990s, which saw an underground jazz boomlet parallel to the  
rise of grunge (Mr. Horvitz was a fixture of the OK Hotel, which had  
also been a home toNirvana), the city has developed a civic pride  
about jazz that few others can rival. “Seattle has a value system  
around jazz,” said John Gilbreath, executive director of Earshot Jazz,  
which will present the 22nd Earshot Jazz Festival this fall. “It’s  
part of the cultural expectation. There’s an independent-jazz ecology  
here, it’s factionalized, but all the factions are in harmony. And  
it’s self-renewing in this really wonderful way.”