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• Posted Get Out This Weekend: Shapenote Singing to Seattlest
  This folk-music-related post is about participation, not performance. Shapenote singing (aka Sacred Harp) has been part of American life for well over 250 years, and has been sung in Seattle for 30 or 40. A sizeable group of people will gather in Ballard this weekend, at the Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Convention, to sing it again. When we first attended this event in 2004, we'd never tried singing in this style but, by the...
• Posted Get Out Wednesday: Cuong Vu Trio and Bill Frisell @ Meany Theater to Seattlest
  Even though he grew up in Seattle and has recently joined the UW jazz studies faculty, and even though he had an intriguing-looking gig at SAM during last fall's Earshot Jazz Festival, we still haven't managed to catch a performance by trumpeter Cuong Vu. But we'd sure like to catch him tonight at UW's Meany Hall and finally hear him in person. Equally at home with funk/rock rhythms and a more ethereal ECM-style vibe, Vu...
• Posted Get Out Saturday: Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band @ EMP's Sky Church to Seattlest
  When your band's roster (Gonzalez on trumpet and congas; Andy Gonzalez, bass; Larry Willis, piano; Steve Berrios, drums; Joe Ford, sax/flute) has been in place since 1990, you have time to develop the musical telepathy that makes jazz jazz. And when that telepathy communicates both the bebop-and-beyond mainstream and Puerto Rican popular music (via the Bronx), you have an unusually savory mix. We first heard the Fort Apache Band on a very early (1988)...
• Posted Exit Earshot Jazz to Seattlest
  "Go see George Colligan," our friend e-mailed from DC. "He's one of the best pianists working today." So we did—Colligan was at Tula's on Friday and Saturday nights, as the Earshot Jazz Festival neared its close—and he is. Although it is easy to hear earlier influences (Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner) and contemporary resemblances (Geoffrey Keezer), Colligan is original and inventive and his technique must be witnessed to be believed. A solo medley of "Body and...
• Posted Earshot Jazz And The French Horn to Seattlest
  You don't often hear French horn in jazz. But Tom Varner (whose New Seattle Quintet performed Wednesday night at Tula's as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival, which continues through Sunday) strips the instrument of its traditional classical dress and makes something new of it. In a blindfold test, you might mistake Varner's horn for a trombone: a ringing tenor tone with fuzzy edges, warm enough to contrast with the cold metal in Mark Taylor's...