[Dixielandjazz] Young Grass Roots Jazz in Seattle

[Stephen G Barbone]

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Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

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

Alt-Rock Hub, Purring With Jazz


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 to Nirvana), 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.”

That self-renewal comes from boomerang musicians like the trumpeter  
Thomas Marriott and the drummer Matt Jorgensen, who headed East but  
eventually returned. Along with peers like the saxophonist Mark  
Taylor, they are now stalwarts of the jazz mainstream here, working at  
places like the New Orleans Creole Restaurant and Tula’s Jazz Club.  
And their music has a strong outlet in Origin Records, a Seattle label  
with worldwide distribution, and an impressive track record on  
national jazz radio. Mr. Jorgensen runs Origin with its founder, the  
drummer John Bishop; together they also started the Ballard Jazz  
Festival, featuring area artists almost exclusively.

Jazz also has a presence at Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle  
Symphony. The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra performs there, to a  
loyal patronage. “They’re folks who would otherwise have subscribed to  
the chamber orchestra or the symphony,” said the saxophonist Michael  
Brockman, one of the orchestra’s artistic directors and a longtime  
University of Washington faculty member. “That’s 80 percent of our  
audience, and they rarely if ever go to a jazz club.”

What galvanizes Seattle jazz audiences more than anything is the  
diligent effort of its teenage musicians. “The big-band programs here  
are kind of like high school football in Texas,” Mr. Jorgensen said.

The chief catalyst is the Essentially Ellington contest, which began  
in 1995. Over the last decade Garfield and Roosevelt have won first  
place a combined seven times. “The bands have different philosophies,”  
said Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director and  
the avuncular soul of the competition. “In general Garfield’s band has  
strong soloists, and Roosevelt has really good ensembles.”

A glimpse into rehearsals by both bands in April, a month before the  
contest, illuminated the difference. Clarence Acox, who came to  
Garfield from New Orleans in 1971, led the Garfield band with an  
offhand but booming authority. “Stay right there,” he growled at his  
drummer, indicating a rhythmic pocket, during “Launching Pad,” a 12- 
bar blues.

At Roosevelt, Scott Brown exuded a warmer and more technical air,  
often tinkering with the mechanics of a phrase. (Interschool rivalry  
aside, Mr. Brown, a trombonist, plays alongside Mr. Acox in the  
Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra.) Between takes his students were a  
fount of wisecracks, but at each downbeat they snapped into gear. For  
“After All” Mr. Clausen took the lead against a purr of saxophones.

The band directors aren’t the only reason for the schools’ track  
record. “Both Garfield and Roosevelt are public schools, but the  
support is akin to a private institution, in terms of what the parents  
do,” said the trumpeter Tatum Greenblatt, a graduate of Garfield and  
Juilliard, who lives in New York. Parent groups raise money to send  
the bands to competitions and on tour in Europe; the first Garfield  
jazz fund-raiser, in 1990, organized by Mr. Marriott’s parents, earned  
about $80,000.

The other secret weapon has been the jazz program at Washington Middle  
School that until two years ago was led by Robert Knatt, who is now  
retired. “People would come into ninth grade already knowing how to  
read music and play in a section and improvise,” Mr. Greenblatt said.

Ask young Seattle jazz musicians what’s new about the scene, and they  
are likely to point to Mr. Vu. By all accounts he has galvanized his  
students, charging them with a radical sense of purpose and advocating  
on their behalf. He invited some — like the bassist Luke Bergman and  
the drummer Chris Icasiano, both now alumni and key figures in the  
Racer Sessions — to be in his new band,Speak, which recently released  
its self-titled debut on Origin. Mr. Vu also advises the Improvised  
Music Project, a coalition of students and alumni, which held its  
second annual festival this spring.

“This really is a marker of a new phase,” Richard Karpen, the new  
director of the University of Washington’s School of Music, said in  
April at a 20th-anniversary celebration for its Jazz Studies program.  
Mr. Karpen, a composer, said jazz is now a greater priority for the  
program.

As part of the festivities Mr. Vu played three concerts with his Vu  
Tet. On the first night the crowd was full of students, including  
Carmen Rothwell, a bassist in the Garfield band. “A few days ago I  
decided that I’m coming to U.W. to major in Jazz Studies,” she said.  
“I really, really like the direction that it’s going in.”

The University of Washington isn’t the only Seattle educational  
institution in the process of rejuvenation. The Cornish College of the  
Arts, which has a history of avant-gardism stretching to John Cage in  
the ’30s, recently hired a new department chairman, Kent Devereaux. He  
said his decision to take the job had been influenced by the five  
teaching positions that will be turning over in the next five years,  
enabling him to put his stamp on the faculty.

Cornish has also stepped up its recruiting, begun a capital campaign  
for a larger new building and, for the first time, acquired dormitory  
space. As a result, Mr. Devereaux said, “I went from a program where  
last year it was 83 percent Washingtonians to one where my incoming  
class is only 46 percent.”

Applications have risen by roughly a third in each of the last two  
years, and the college has started a high school summer jazz program.  
“We weren’t connecting to the community,” he said.

These changes at the college level should benefit Seatle’s jazz scene  
at large. But such abstractions were far from anyone’s mind in May, as  
the Garfield and Roosevelt bands, and 13 others from across the  
country, descended on Frederick P. Rose Hall in Manhattan for  
Essentially Ellington. Each band performed and then waited for the  
announcement of the three finalists.

Mr. Mulherkar almost missed that moment, because he had to slip away  
for his Juilliard audition. But he returned in time, with news that he  
had been accepted. Then came word that Garfield was one of the final  
three and would perform that night with Mr. Marsalis. Roosevelt just  
missed the cut, earning an honorable mention nod.

A few hours later Mr. Mulherkar went toe to toe with Mr. Marsalis at  
Avery Fisher Hall, trading soulful barbs and plunger-muted whinnies on  
“The Shepherd.” In essence he was sparring with the world’s most  
celebrated jazz trumpeter, and he held his own, earning stagy glares  
from Mr. Marsalis, vicarious hollers from the hall and ultimately a  
standing ovation.

There were more cheers for the results: Garfield had won the  
Essentially Ellington competition, for the second year in a row. And  
Mr. Mulherkar received the Ella Fitzgerald Outstanding Soloist Award,  
its highest individual honor. “We even heard some things we’d never  
heard done before on our instrument,” Mr. Marsalis said of Mr.  
Mulherkar. (Mr. Clausen won the award for outstanding trombone.)

Speaking by phone recently, Mr. Mulherkar focused squarely on the  
transition ahead. But he did say he’d miss Seattle and its nascent  
scene. “I was actually just talking to my brother, who’s at the New  
England Conservatory now,” he said. “He was saying how lucky my peer  
group was because he didn’t have anything like that when he was in  
high school.”

As for Mr. Clausen, he played a farewell show at Cafe Racer last  
weekend, with Speak and four of his other bands. “Summer has been  
really productive,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Completed a two-week  
European tour with the Roosevelt Jazz Band, finished recording two new  
bands of my own, and a group of us from the Racer Sessions are forming  
a new record label/music foundation to present, share and promote our  
music. Leaving is bittersweet.”