[Dixielandjazz] Young Grass Roots Jazz in Seattle

[Scott Anthony]

Just checked times:

Bob Schulz Frisco Jazz Band
Saturday, September 18, 4pm-8pm
New Orleans Restaurant, 114 1st Avenue South, Seattle

Sunday, September 19, 12:30pm-4:30pm
Puget Sound Traditional Jazz Society, Ballard Elks Lodge

Scott Anthony

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Anthony" <santh at comcast.net>
To: <santh at comcast.net>
Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Young Grass Roots Jazz in Seattle


Speaking of jazz in Seattle, the Bob Schulz Frisco Jazz Band will be playing
at the New Orleans Restaurant, 114 1st Avenue South in downtown Seattle on
Saturday, Sept. 18 and at the Puget Sound Traditional Jazz Society at the
Ballard Elks Lodge on Sunday, Sept. 19.

I'm not sure of the times, but generally we play the New Orleans Restaurant
from 5pm to 9pm and the club meeting is 1pm to 5pm.

Hope to see you there!

Scott Anthony
Golden Gate Rhythm Machine
Bob Schulz Frisco Jazz Band

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen G Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: <santh at comcast.net>
Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 7:46 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Young Grass Roots Jazz in Seattle


Good News?

Cheers,
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.”
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