Kickstarter is turning out to be a godsend for artists who need seed money to get a project rolling. The concept is simple enough: The project comes with a time-sensitive funding goal, and if you reach it, the pledges are processed. If not, then not. Try, try, again. Kickstarter is both a testament to how little it takes to create art, and to big things growing from small seeds.
I’m a fan of the neo-big jazz band The Zubatto Syndicate, but unless you could hoof it across town on a particular night to Town Hall or the Comet, you were out of luck. They don’t play that often because scheduling twelve jazz musicians requires logistical resources normally reserved for the operations of the North Fleet. But Zubatto composer Andrew Boscardin has just finished camping out in a recording studio, mastering the group’s new album, after his Kickstarter project surpassed his initial funding goal.
Zilphia Horton
No Depression‘s Kim Ruehl (and former Seattlest editor), just moved to North Carolina from Seattle to write a book-length biography of Zilphia Horton. That project’s about 70 percent funded with about a week to go. Ruehl, a terrific writer and an aficionado of Americana, is redressing a blind spot when it comes to Horton’s many contributions. Writes Ruehl:
She was a musicologist, accordion player, teacher, labor organizer, activist, and path-forger born in rural Arkansas in 1910. She’s also one of a small handful of activists during the 1930s who had the idea that the songs people already knew and enjoyed singing, could be used to empower them and inspire them to work toward social change (a somewhat novel idea at the time).
She was fiercely dedicated to the labor movement, but passed many of the songs she discovered on to young folksingers like Guy Carawan and Pete Seeger, who later used them to embolden the Civil Rights Movement. Her most popular discovery–“We Shall Overcome”–to this day hands all its proceeds back to the poor African-American communities in the south, for example.
Here in Seattle, the Jason Parker Quartet is engaged in a musical form of tribute, to Nick Drake. Their CD will be called “Five Leaves Left: A Jazz Tribute to Nick Drake.” Their funding deadline is December 23; on the 26th, they enter the studio for three days of recording. The quartet is bandleader Jason Parker (an occasional writer on jazz for The SunBreak) Josh Rawlings, Evan Flory-Barnes, and D’Vonne Lewis. For this project, they’re joined by Cynthia Mullis (sax) and Michele Khazak (vocals).
Parker explains the notion of a jazz tribute to Nick Drake here, but you can also listen to their performance of “Three Hours” (below) and get a feel for what they’re going for.
