It’s almost May, and that means Memorial Day and all it brings: yes, Sasquatch, but also the annual celebration of patchouli stink and singer-songwriters galore known as Folklife. This year marks the 41st annual Northwest Folklife Festival, taking place at Seattle Center all Memorial Day Weekend long. As always, admission is free, with a suggested donation of $10 per person, or $20 per family.
This year also marks the first-ever Folklife Festival Preview Party, this Thursday, May 3 at the Tractor. The show features bands from Folklife’s Indie Roots Stage–Denver, Big Sur, and the Annie Ford Band–along with two-step lessons care of Rockin’ Horse Dance Barn, a super-duper raffle spectacular with some pretty great prizes, and, of course, the announcement of the full festival lineup.
Tickets to the 21+ Folklife Festival Preview Party are $10. The SunBreak has a pair of tickets to this Thursday’s show to give away. Enter below by Tuesday at 5pm PDT to win!
It’s been three months since the first one, so that means it’s time for the second Starbucks/KEXP/Seattle Theatre Group Little Big Show at the Neptune this Friday night.
Not only is it a great cause (100% of the $15 ticket sales go to local non-profits supporting arts programs FOR THE CHILDREN), but it’s sure to be a great show, thanks to the combo of Brookyln up-and-comers Real Estate and new Sub Pop signees Poor Moon. (As a moony coincidence, at the first Little Big Show, the supporting act was Fly Moon Royalty.)
The July and October dates for the next Little Big Shows are still TBD, but the April date is upon us, and The SunBreak has a pair of tickets to this Friday’s show to give away. Enter below by Wednesday at 9pm PDT to win!
At 73, McCoy Tyner is the last living musician from John Coltrane‘s classic quartet, which also featured Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. After deciding in 1965 that he could no longer follow Coltrane’s lead, he’s lead an ever-shifting group through post-bop lyricism, with an increasing interest in Cuban rhythms.
I’d heard from a friend how Tyner had been seriously ill lately, but the man in the flat cap who sat down Thursday night at Jazz Alley to open a four-night run, seemed under the weather only through his raspy voice ID’ing songs and/or praising the musicians between numbers. His left hand lead his right hand most of the time, through insistent ostinatos and block chords close to mid-keyboard. Either side could fly up high or down low, though, and he repeatedly built grand assemblages from simpler figures, filling in the sound from his sustain pedal, before lifting his foot to dispel and resend.
Gary Bartz‘s white hair and matching jacket lent him a professorial air, and indeed he teaches at the Oberlin College of Music when not out on the road. His deceptively-simple, supple lines interlaced with the three rhythm players, with occasional piano-sax dialogues. Upright bassist Gerald Cannon, physically imposing as his instrument, struggled against less-than-optimal sound levels during his solos but stayed on the pulse and in the pocket. The band’s youngest member, Cuban drummer Francisco Mela, pushed the beat during the head melodies, laid cymbals on thick for solos; his irrepressible energy drove the wheel for the ensemble’s organic locomotive.
Tyner asked the audience not to “flash bright lights” in his face, a reference, presumably, to someone’s ill-advised flash photography. “I’m trying to maintain a mood up here.” The flashes remained unflashed, then, for most of the rest of the set as the master, deeper and wiser than most from so many journeys, settled into the deep ripples of that mood.
Reading the notes before the performance by Chunky Move (at UW’s Meany Theater through April 14; tickets: $39) left this audience member totally bewildered. Yet in rereading the notes after the performance, the light dawned and they made sense.
Gideon Obarzanek, the imaginative choreographer and director of this Australian dance company, was describing the collaboration between two arts, an intentionally mobile sculpture and the choreography designed to mimic it with moving bodies on stage, the two impelling each other.
The sculpture, by America’s Reuben Margolin, follows his series of “large scale undulating installations that attempt to combine the logic of mathematics with the sensuousness of nature,” as they are described in the notes.
The fascinating result, an hour-long performance titled Connected, had the sculpture taking up a full third of the stage. It looked like a streamlined Rube Goldberg piece with, at one side, a bicycle-sized wheel incorporating strands like a dreamcatcher, and dozens of strands coming out from it slanting upwards to the other side, dropping then in orderly rows almost to the floor with bulbs at the ends, perhaps like a machine which came out of a 19th-century factory.
To begin with, while the sculpture was still, the dancers careened around frenetically, sometimes individually, sometimes together. With moves you’d never expect to see in a ballet studio, the dancers in their oiled ease, speed, and flexibility displayed superb training in their genre.
The performance moved from segment to segment, seeming to have no particular reason for their sequence, no particular beginning or end to the work. During the first part one or more dancers took time to connect small pieces to the bottom of the hanging strands. Later one dancer connected the other four to strands themselves, like marionettes with horizontal strings. As they moved, so did the hanging strands, showing the connected pieces to be a grid of open squares which gracefully floated up and down in different configurations.
At another moment, the dancers, who had been wearing knee-length tights with short or long sleeved tops, four in black, one in white, gradually left the stage and came back dressed as security guards in suits, ties, and plastic name tags, walking around the stage while voices gave comments made by real-life guards about their philosophy on their dead-end jobs. One guard walked in squares, each side blocked at the end by another guard, so the square became smaller and smaller until she was blocked from moving anywhere, after which they shed most of their clothes to bikini bottoms and long-sleeved shirts, playing athletic games.
The accompaniment, by Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox, for this mesmerizing production sounded like what you would hear on an ancient factory floor, with the repetitive sound of machines changing with different areas of the factory. Sometimes there were electronic whistles, at others the noise of things moving in a tunnel with attendant air pressure, only occasionally with actual tones, sometimes very loud and sometimes no sound at all.
The work was performed without intermission and in other hands and lesser inspiration might have seemed more disconnected than connected, but the sense of early mechanical technology in motion pervaded thoughout, and was enhanced by the lighting of Benjamin Cisterne.
I know what you’re thinking. You hear the phrase “jazz festival” and you immediately think of middle-aged, silver-haired intellectuals sitting in silence, bobbing their heads, sipping merlot and listening to sleepy music with an air of importance that reeks of pretense.
Well, let me be the first to tell you that the 2012 Ballard Jazz Festival is decidedly not that kind of jazz fest.
Now in its tenth year, the BJF takes over most of old Ballard each April, spilling out from the bars and concert venues to coffee shops and many of the non-music businesses on Ballard Ave and beyond. Over three days you’ll get to hear world-class jazz musicians, both national touring acts and the crème of the local crop.
The mainstage show this year features two great artists from out of town, the Bobby Broom Trio and Orrin Evans.
Broom is a killer guitarist from Chicago who’s trio has been lighting up stages and festivals all around the world. His last album was a tribute to the music of Stevie Wonder that worked on all levels, and he’s set to release his first album of all original material this spring on Seattle’s Origin Records.
Evans is a rising star on the piano out of Philadelphia who has released many small-group records as well as a great recent disc with his Captain Black Big Band. He’ll be playing with Seattle’s Matt Jorgensen and a great quartet.
Also on tap is the annual “Brotherhood of the Drum” concert on Wednesday, this year hosted by ex-Santana drummer Michael Shrieve and featuring Kobie Watkins, Eric Eagle, Todd Bishop and King Tears Bat Trip, a band with 5 drummers, sax and guitar.
Thursday brings the Guitar Summit, with the aforementioned Broom, Tim Young, John Stowell, and Dave Peterson, all playing with various killer bands.
And with a nod to Ballard’s Scandinavian heritage, the Swedish Pancake Breakfast takes place on Saturday morning with music from vocalist Jeff Baker and Cornish College’s Advanced Jazz Combo directed by bassist (and recent Earshot Jazz “Golden Ear” Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame inductee) Chuck Deardorf. You can even bring the kids to this one!
But the crown jewel of the BJF is Friday’s Jazz Walk. The festival takes over eleven different Ballard businesses and showcases 21 mostly-Seattle artists. This is the part of the festival that is different than any other you’ll experience. The crowds wander up and down the street, dropping in and out of the various venues, catching a little of this act before running off to catch the next.
Some of the venues are more subdued than others, but at places like Conor Byrne or the New York Fashion Academy, the scene is often raucous and lively, more like Lollapalooza than the Village Vanguard, more Redhook than Chateau Ste. Michelle. This year’s highlights include the Jovino Santos Neto Quarteto, Gail Pettis, Human Spirit with Thomas Marriot, Mark Taylor & Matt Jorgensen, Wayne Horvitz, and a showcase for the upstart jazz label Table & Chairs.
If you set your preconceptions aside, you’ll hear a different side of the Seattle music scene, one thriving and packed with incredible talent. Tickets and more info here. See you on The Ave (Ballard Ave, that is)!
I’ll be there representing a podcast that I host, Jazz Now! Seattle. Stop by and say hi!
It takes an extra-talented group of musicians to earn the title of John in the Morning’s Favorite Band in the World, but Brooklyn’s We Are Augustines have done so twice–both in their current incarnation and in Billy McCarthy and Eric Sanderson’s previous band Pela. Arising from Pela’s ashes, with new drummer Rob Allen in tow, We Are Augustines have a sound similar to their predecessor: passionate rock with big bombastic choruses, anchored by McCarthy’s perfectly imperfect emotive voice.
At the Triple Door earlier today, they put on a gloriously exuberant KEXP set, drawing from their dynamic debut Rise Ye Sunken Ships, and declaring themselves as happy to be playing as the audience was to hear it. Tune into KEXP at 4:30 today to hear this performance, or get your tickets at the door ($20) and see them live at the Neptune tonight, opening for Band of Skulls.