All That Seattle Jazz & Funk, in Unexpected Places

Poet Robert Pinsky’s reading for Seattle Arts and Lectures this Friday will come with a side of jazz, with local musicians Marc Seales on piano and Paul Gabrielson on bass. “In American culture,” Pinsky says, “poetry and jazz are kind of advance scouts, making discoveries and innovations that are incorporated into other forms, sometimes softened or diluted a little. Poetry is the most vocal and musical verbal art, short of actual song.”

But okay, jazz and poetry go together, even if it feels like they’re a couple you used to know from way back and then something happened and now they’re not together, really, but sometimes you do seem them together and aren’t sure what’s up. Monday night, jazz and funk and rock got together, and the result was one of those evenings where you hear the future’s ultrasound, and have to look around to see if anyone else noticed.

Jason Parker

Jazz in Seattle, as our jazz correspondent Jason Parker mentioned a while ago, is springing up all over the place, not just at Benaroya Hall, and in all kinds of interesting evolutionary varieties. That’s just what you’d expect a jazz trumpeter to say, though, isn’t it? Exactly.

I exercised my editorial oversight on Monday, and dropped into Capitol Hill’s venerable Comet Tavern for a bill that ranged from jazz-inflected funk to funk-inflected jazz. First up was Hi-Fi Reset, a drums, bass, and sax combo with Troy Jagan on keyboard and lead vocals, occasionally showing off an R&B voice living in a funk world. The set was an up-tempo party, with more hits than misses, and once they locked into a groove, they got all they could out of it, including on an anti-war song that grabbed a line from “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

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Water Babies is one of Parker’s projects, “spontaneously created funk improvisations.” Candidly, a thrill of fear shot down my spine at hearing this, but the boys know that you’re a little nervous. You just relax, they’re gonna make this a night you won’t forget.

Water Babies are Parker on trumpet and flugelhorn, Josh Rawlings on Fender Rhodes piano and Hammond organ, Aaron Kassover on upright and electric bass, and Brad Gibson on drums. The way it works out, Kassover and Gibson bring the funk, keeping the improvisations strutting on down the street, while Parker and Rawlings hang out on top of the rhythm, trading solos.

One moment Parker was easing the sound out of his muted trumpet in liquid drops of notes, his fingers dancing on the valves, while Kassover fed our fever for more cowbell; the next Kassover was improvising a song about Dig Dug (which you can play at the Comet), and Parker was on triangle.

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Andrew Boscardin (foreground) and the Zubatto Syndicate

If Water Babies proves that there is such a thing as a successful jazz-funk bar band, the 12-member Zubatto Syndicate proved that the big band sound has a future with groove in it. I’ve talked with composer/bandleader Andrew Boscardin before, and he’s mentioned that his dream was to find a club on Capitol Hill to play, rather than a downtown jazz joint. So while it was good to hear them at Town Hall a while ago, it wasn’t until the Comet that I think I really heard them the way Boscardin intended.

I sipped at a shot of Jameson and pondered whether this had to be the first time an oboe and bassoon had been heard in the Comet. (Zubatto is more wind and brass heavy than the usual big band.) On the one hand, Zubatto’s music is highly structured–you can’t have twelve musicians heading off in all different directions–but Boscardin has also written in room for improvised solos.

Jim DeJoie on baritone sax took the crowd on a ride, with Chad McCullough throwing down equal fire on trumpet. Zubatto songs have numbers, and it was #30 that struck me as the highlight, when the big band shook off memories of sedate halls and played like they were at their 100th funk-rock gig, egged on by a sweaty crowd. Boscardin gave a bass line to Tim Carey that comes at you like a panther out of a tree, a hesitation before a quick, taut series of steps, and then a coiled-spring launch as the band joins in, and just when you think that’s loud, the sections unite to claw their way up to another crescendo. People hollered.