Recent Stories with tag the hang

Andy Clausen, Corey Dansereau, Riley Mulherkar and Willem De Koch at the Racer Sessions (Photo: Jim Levitt)

Seattle music is no stranger to the national press. From Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana, to Death Cab for Cutie, to Fleet Foxes, to...ahem...Sanjaya, Seattle has been and continues to be an incubator for music and a force on the national scene.

Seattle's jazz scene, on the other hand, is rarely thought of as world-class or particularly influential. Beyond Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, not too many people can name any other jazz musicians from Seattle...even Seattleites! [Ed.: What about the frizzy-haired guy? With the sax!] But it turns out we are blessed with a vibrant and forward-thinking community of jazz musicians, young and old, who have been cultivating and celebrating a scene that is now starting to make some noise.

Recently, jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote an in-depth article in the New York Times that shines a spotlight on Seattle jazz. In it, you learn that,

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.

Cuong Vu's return to Seattle to join the faculty at University of Washington has had a profound effect on the jazz program at the school and by extension on the city as a whole. Vu's approach to jazz is not the typical "learn your standards" and "play this scale over this chord" pedagogy.... (more)