Research Guides
Improvised Music Project, Seattle May 2012
Arianna Delsman
08 June 2012
I. The Music Practice
Historical Context: Seattle Jazz
Seattle jazz history begins circa 1918, when Lillian Smith’s jazz band played the inaugural performance (for a NAACP event) at the Central District’s Washington Hall. Now-historic Washington hall began as a settlement house in the central district and would soon become a hub for the African-American community in Seattle. Throughout the 1900s the theater hosted notable musicians and speakers ranging from W.E.B. du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. to Duke Ellington and Jimi Hendrix. Miss Lillian Smith’s Jazz Band performance as the inaugural event of Seattle’s historically diverse Central District effectively made jazz the birthplace of a multicultural community in Seattle.
As one of the only jazz critics in Seattle, Paul De Barros writes that the jazz scene “peaked between 1937 and 1951, years in which Seattle came of age as a nerve center of the defense industry [and when] a plentiful supply of soldiers and civilians…made Seattle a boomtown for musicians.” In the many ebbs and flows of the jazz scene in the Pacific Northwest’s commercial powerhouse, this period of time was an avalanche. In 1948 there were dozens of Jackson street nightclubs featuring live music, contributing to a scene that fostered young talent like no other. According to jazz radio show host Jim Wilke, the dip in Seattle jazz came in the 1960s with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, as that scene subsumed most local musicians and venues. The scene fell to a low point again the 1980s when Parnell’s closed, Jazz Alley tugged on its creative reigns, and the few jazz musicians in town either left or quit playing. However, as grunge brought more attention back to musical creativity in the Pacific Northwest, jazz resurfaced in the 1990s. Apparently, however, the talent that Seattle has had in the making for decades today tends to leave for the brighter lights of New York, San Francisco or LA. A trend in Seattle jazz is to create great jazz musicians, and then let them fly the nest.
Duke Ellington and Ray Charles represent “big jazz names” that are nationally renowned for their artistic genius – and also cultivated that genius in Seattle. Historically, they did so and then flew the coop for the larger, more influential national scene, usually starting with the East Coast. Seattle jazz giant and pianist extraordinaire Overton Berry describes this East Coast-West Coast binary in jazz as something that has existed for at least a century. While there is clearly a difference between the two coasts’ jazz styles, Mr. Berry says, “I don’t think there’s a signature Seattle jazz…Jazz music reflected a kind of East Coast/West Coast thing, an internationalism that truly showed diversity within jazz music itself.” He continued to speak about the difference in East Coast jazz, reflecting particularly the more rehearsed qualities of the performances as opposed to the laid-back West Coast musical style: “You had Broadway productions from the Gershwins all the way up to “My Fair Lady.” It was very artistic, and very intense, and quite industrialized. Musicians would take their set up state and try it out on a few audiences, and then bring it down to be LIVE ON BROADWAY. Meanwhile, Berry describes California jazz as if the musicians approached performance saying, “hey, we’re kind of on island time, but we’ve got a studio orchestra sitting over there…” The Seattle jazz scene, according to Berry (who was recently inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame), is on the far end of the West Coast spectrum, very much removed from that of East Coast jazz.
It is perhaps for this reason that the insular nature of the Seattle music scene is so good at producing great musicians, and also so great at letting them go. Comedians, historians and disgruntled civilians often cite the rainy weather made for long days indoors as an incubator for good practicing ethics, and the geographic isolation of the city makes it hard to “be discovered” if musicians stay here once they are ready to mature. A recent article in the New York Times, “Seattle’s Alt-Rock Hub, Purring with Jazz,” discusses Seattle’s propensity for losing the musicians it creates. Two of the Seattle school district’s high schools, Roosevelt and Garfield, have incredible jazz music programs that annually rank nationally, producing talented students who go on to do wonders in their larger careers post-graduation. However, like in the mid-20th Century, talented musicians are still leaving the Emerald City. As one student put it, “I was very, very close to staying here. It was a tough decision, because I’m excited about what’s happening, there’s all this momentum here now,” but ultimately New York was better for his cultivation as a student of jazz. A graduating high school senior in 2010, Andy Clausen left Seattle for Juilliard’s Jazz Studies Program two years ago.
From de Barros’ writing to local scholarship and out to nationally-read publications such as All About Jazz, jazz aficionados seem to agree on at least one thing: “while Seattle has produced its share of great players, as a jazz town it has made no stylistic contributions to the development of the music.” While in the larger national context this may seem true, local Seattle musicians and fans are attempting to change this conception of Seattle’s lackadaisical approach to jazz production.
Why is it that Andy Clausen was so torn about leaving Seattle for New York? His hesitance may likely have been born out of his awareness that the jazz scene in Seattle is changing. Cuong Vu, a jazz trumpeter “widely recognized by jazz critics as a leader of a generation of innovative musicians,” is also an assistant professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Washington and plays an integral role in the current developments in Seattle’s jazz community. Local musicians, according to the New York Times, cite Vu as an important factor in the new jazz scene: “By all accounts he has galvanized his students, charging them with a radical sense of purpose and advocating on their behalf.” The nascent jazz scene in Seattle reminds Mr. Vu “of the energy of New York’s 1990s downtown scene,” saying “Seattle could be a model for all the other places in the U.S. that need a scene like this.” Mr. Vu’s co-conspirator in the Jazz Studies program, Director of the UW School of Music Richard Karpen agrees, adding that today things are happening that “really [are] a marker of a new phase.”
In this comment, Karpen refers to the Improvised Music Project created out of the University of Washington Jazz Studies program as what “really is a marker of a new phase.” While jazz critics, writers, and musicians across the country argue that Seattle does not have any scene-specific sound, local musicians and organizers in the past four years beg to differ.
Building a New Scene: The Rise of Improv
As described by Mr. Overton Berry, jazz has always been an “influenced” sound. Whether with regards to the more familiar jazz standards and the impact made on them by popular music at the time of their composition, or with regards to the sources from which modern musicians draw their inspiration for solos and riffs, all jazz is influenced by the thematic social scene around it. Amusingly, Berry says, “we have gotten so used to listening to an artist in their particular style that we forget that artist listens to all sorts of music outside of his own performance – everything is influenced.” Ralph Alessi, a master trumpeter from New York, agrees. Trained classically, he now sticks to jazz, but explains how his classical training – as well as working with bass – has influenced both his trumpet playing and his composition. Alessi says, “I used to work out of etude books that had interesting intervallic shapes to them. I think that impacted how I hear a little bit. I used to live above a musician, and I would play out of his book by this French composer named [Marcel Beech], and he would say to me, wow, I've gotta get those etudes. I guess they have this suggestion of the improviser’s world, with some of the shapes and intervals.” Alessi adds that he “had some influence from Steve Coleman as well, and he would talk about that, where a lot of people do have that tendency, to just play in a linear way, which can be a little bland. At least, that’s what he would impart. So, that was some encouragement to explore things like wider intervals.”
A keyword in this discussion is “influenced.” Critics of jazz in the Pacific Northwest often write that the scene offers nothing new and inspired, but merely replicates national trends. Upon taking a little time and energy to get to know the incredibly welcoming community that is the Seattle jazz scene, it is clear that the opposite is true: local jazz may be influenced by national trends, but Seattle musicians have made it their own. The creation of the Improvised Music Project in Seattle’s University District offers a prime example of this homegrown enthusiasm for new musical trends, and it is partially for that reason that this paper will attempt to delineate some of the enormous value in the University of Washington-associated undertaking.
With its backdrop as the University of Washington’s Jazz Studies department in the School of Music, the Improvised Music Project (IMP) is a self-declared musical collective. On its festival programs and project website, the IMP describes itself as
a collection of musicians and music fans working to present great improvised music and promote its appreciation. The IMP is based in Seattle’s University District and exists as both an artistic movement and as a Registered Student Organization at the University of Washington. Our vision is to shape the local music culture by serving as a voice, network, and source for live spontaneous music.
The IMP first appeared as a concept in the fall of 2008, and became a functioning reality soon thereafter. UW’s Jazz Studies department served as the backdrop, where a particularly charged group of students, tired of the music industry’s ugly hegemony, realized the need for greater participation in the local music scene. The group currently consists of students and alumni from the UW School of Music, and is expanding rapidly. The group hopes to spread the word about local and improvised music through these festivals and year-round concerts.
The festivals referred to are annual weeklong festivals that have just completed their fourth cycle. This spring, in partnership with the UW School of Music, Improvised Music Project presented IMPfest IV, a four-night program hosting thirteen local and national groups and artists. Central to the focus of this paper are the author’s efforts to seamlessly archive one of those four nights, Thursday May 10, 2012.
As a prologue to describing the evening archived as a part of this paper, it is necessary to highlight the source of the ability to even begin the archival project. The openness and convivial nature of the improvised music community in Seattle’s University District represents a beautiful rarity in the modern age. Every organizer and every musician went above and beyond to help integrate the archival work smoothly into the second evening of IMPfest IV, and also to welcome the archivist (and the author) into their community. Not just at an open rehearsal held for the evening’s performance, but also at the set-up of the performance and throughout the rest of the project, the musicians were open about their ambitions, their attitudes, and their friendly disposition to anyone interested in (albeit relatively ignorant of) their craft. At the first venue for the archival project – an open rehearsal hosted by Ralph Alessi – the famous trumpeter and educator himself joked with the author about ambiance, in response to the author’s excuses for causing a ruckus, Alessi quipped that any noise from the audience was “absolutely unacceptable as they were trying to recreate the classical complete silence, but for the music…” Don’t even breathe, he added, laughing. He would later describe jazz improvisation as “getting over your neuroses.” Unsurprisingly, the rest of the experience was casual and lighthearted, in spite of the incredible talent overflowing out of the room.
An evening at IMPfest IV
The University of Washington’s Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre, circa 1940, was the first “theater in the round” built in the United States, and it is just that. With a round, rust-red tiled stage encircled by the theatre’s 160 seats, the venue creates a welcoming sensation, giving the audience members the feeling of being a “fly on the wall” in the private lives of the performers. The evening of May 10 was no exception: the performers set up in the middle of their audience, and stood in a circle to collaboratively improvise their way through loosely organized pieces loosely pre-written. The audience was warm and receptive, sometimes clueless and sometimes
Sequoia Ensemble
The eight-person Sequoia Ensemble opened the evening’s performance with three pieces inspired by natural landscapes, creating a warm space filled with heart and a happy audience. Their first piece “Forty by Flagstaff” was written by member Evan Smith and portrayed a cross-country road-trip from Virginia to LA allegedly completed in just 51 hours. It did not take that long to perform, but the author could write enough about the lyrical melodies, percussive bass lines and sauntering piano riffs that it would take you, the reader, fifty-one hours to read the description. Briefly: beginning with a baseline that evokes putting foot to gas pedal, and introducing each instrument with a new line, the piece picks up speed, intermittently hitting rest stops for piano, then drums, bass, and then they are back on the road. Finally, the ensemble arrives in the City of Angels with a fine-tuned accomplishment.
Sequoia Ensemble’s second piece, “Old City,” written by Levi Gillis, evoked a trip through Israel exploring both dramatic natural monuments and also sentimental Jewish roots. The piece explores some klezmer melodies that the composer was “pretty into for a little while.” As the pianist and base melodically plod out a percussive line, drummer Jarred Katz unconventionally approaches his drum set with the palms of his hands, and the clarinet gets super klezmeric. Ultimately, the third piece, entitled “Palouse” by Levi Gillis, was written after a visit to Palouse Falls in an Eastern Washington national park. As Carns trickles away at the piano, the drummer leaves his traditional role as timekeeper and the music runs together as fluidly as water. In the middle, the piece gets experimental, reminiscent of getting lost in a whirlpool. At times it crashes against cymbals like falling water on rocks, and at other moments horns blend with cello to glisten like a droplets in the sun.
Sequoia Ensemble was formed in the Spring of 2011 as a part of Levi Gillis’s curatorship at the Racer Sessions. This collective of Seattle musicians – including woodwind extraordinaire Evan Smith, trumpeter Chris Lewis, trombonist Nick Rogstad, cellist Natalie Hall, bassist Abbey Blackwell, pianist Gus Carns, and drummer Jarred Katz – utilizes its vast array of timbral possibilities to create intricate and provocative soundworlds. Drawing on inspiration from natural landscapes, Sequoia Ensemble captures an earthy and organic sound, fusing melancholy, poignant melodies with spirited improvisation. –IMPfest IV program
Smallface
A local Seattle duo of keyboardist and cellist, Smallface introduced its first entirely acoustic set ever (they usually use some synthesizer effects and assorted backlines) as an entirely improvised piece. The improvisation began with a growling, tremulously dynamic cello line. Piano joined soon after as the duo rumbled around in the grand piano’s lowest octave for a while. Experimenting with sound as well as lighting effects that grew dimmer as the music got softer and brighter as it expanded in volume, both pianist and cellist displayed their technical chops. To mix things up, in a particularly dark moment, Aaron Otheim slowly stood up from the piano bench and began to play inside the piano. The author has seen this done in the past: in this unconventional method, the pianist reaches into the belly of the piano and plucks a melody out of the piano strings, or with flat palms beats against the strings to harmonically create a percussive rhythm. Meanwhile, the lights dimmed and flickered, and then brighten again as cellist David Balatero returned the audience to where it all began, full circle. Staying true to its self-declared status as a “late-night radio noise,” Smallface successfully produced a space and many emotions with their ringing melodies and intricate musical textures.
Smallface is a late-night radio noise haunted by lyrical strains recalling the intimate passion of classical chamber music. Cellist David Balatero and keyboardist Aaron Otheim create walls of sound through which the ghosts of music-past glide; songful melodies and textures coalesce from and are reabsorbed by emotional static. Through the use of keyboard programming and pedals, the duo’s sound frequently expands beyond the sum of its parts, transfiguring the individual timbres of the cello and piano into a unified, orchestral voice. – IMPfest IV program
Ralph Alessi
Jazz Times magazine wrote that Ralph Alessi has “drop-dead trumpet chops…[his music is] as clean and airy and sophisticated and disciplined as post-modern progressive jazz gets.” Regardless of the national accolades Alessi routinely receives, as a performer and educator he is humble and funny. Casually presenting his approach to jazz and improvisation at an open rehearsal hosted by the University of Washington School of Music’s Jazz Studies department, Alessi frequently cited “just jotting a few thoughts down here and there” to get started on his professionally sophisticated, occasionally joyful, music. He likes to write ideas on napkins while he rides the New York subway. Slightly less experimental than Smallface’s performance and closer to classical jazz than that of Sequoia Ensemble, Alessi’s performance at IMPfest IV was with a group of five undergraduate students from UW’s School of Music, highlighting several of Alessi’s original tunes, including Twenty percent of the eighty percent, which Alessi said he had “no idea what that means.”
As an educator, Alessi is very open about his craft. While he readily discusses his methods for writing and expanding a repertoire and technique, he also readily inspires young musicians to remember why they “do music.” In a recent interview posted on the IMP website, Alessi said the tendency and inclination [for recent graduates of music schools] is to be really concerned about making it…a lot of times people take their eye off the ball, so to speak, and they spend more time on the business part of this whole realm and less just working on music and practicing. I would just say to try your best to take it slower and stay on that organic path of working on your music, making it better, naturally meeting people, and not falling prey to the temptation of you know, “I gotta do my thing.” Regardless of his attitude toward work ethic and the rigors of the music industry, it seems that Alessi understands chemistry and passion, and tries to inspire students to follow those to producing good music as opposed to falling prey to the music industry. A 2010 New York Times article describing Alessi and his current quartet as “unstoppably inventive” also underlined Alessi’s challenge as one “revolving around emotional expressiveness, along with the issue of purpose.” While Alessi’s attitude toward his music is borne of his natural tendency and affiliation to it, based on the New York Times review the author of this paper hazards to guess that Nate Chinen had not yet heard Alessi teach. Alessi’s teaching – on the East Coast or West Coast – is passionate and inspiring in its clear-cut honesty as to what music today is and what it can be.
Ralph Alessi was born in San Rafael, CA, and since moving to New York in 1991 he has become a ubiquitous presence on the downtown scene. He’s been a frequent collaborator with such notable musicians as Steve Coleman, Don Byron, Ravi Coltrane, Uri Caine, Fred Hersch, Drew Gress, Dafnis Prieto, Brad Shepik and Jason Moran. Alessi has recorded 7 albums of his music, which draw on everything from post-bop to neo classical. His most recent is Wiry Strong on Clean Feed Records featuring his band This Against That.
As an educator, Alessi is currently the founder and director of the School for Improvisational Music (www.schoolforimprov.org), a non-profit entity currently holding improvisational music workshops in Brooklyn. Since 2002, he has been on the jazz faculty at New York University. – IMPfest IV program
Conclusion
This archival project taught me about the love and comfort in the improvised music scene in Seattle. Sequoia Ensemble embodies a creative and friendly atmosphere created by seeing each other as co-conspirators in music, love and life. Smallface’s inventive and refreshing approach to traditional chamber music succeeds in its effort to include an enormously diverse musical community and welcome them with open arms into new sound territory. As the community so well received an outsider such as Ralph Alessi from NYC, and as Alessi seemingly felt comfortable playing his compositions among recent strangers so well reflected the community’s ability to warmly welcome. While the isolated event of a Thursday night at IMPfest IV showcased the beauties of Seattle’s improvised music scene, it is necessary at this point to recall and remember another recent event that, too, displayed the strength and beauty of that community.
One week ago, a tragedy occurred at Café Racer, cherished venue for the Racer Sessions of Seattle improvised music. In the wake of the horror of a senseless and unexplainable shooting that left four friends dead, the community responded in mourning with undeniable heart. Missing their friends and conspirators in music, the people of the Seattle improvised music displayed an inexplicable ability to love and remember. Four days after the shooting, members of the music scene and particularly of the Improvised Music Project gathered outside Café Racer to pay tribute to their fallen comrades in a musical wake, where they displayed “joy and despair in equal measure” and simultaneously raised over $7,000 dollars for the families of the victims of the tragic event. The recent website caferacerlove.org says, “We are broken, but we are together in our brokenness – and this simple fact means that this tragedy was not meaningless.” While scholars and jazz critics have essentially written that the musicians destined for greatness leave Seattle for “better” venues, recent events have more than demonstrated that the musicians who stay here embody the notions of heart, love, emotion and pure, unadulterated talent.
II. Archival Plan
I propose that in a preliminary attempt to archive the products of the Improvised Music Project, a commitment be made to document the IMP’s annual IMPfest. This documentation – like much of the current documentation in the Puget Sounds archive – should likely consist of video and sound recording for archival purposes only. For convenience and in keeping with current technology, the recordings should be done with digital recording equipment. As the musicians often request access to the recordings, digital recordings will allow for easy file transfer between archivist and musician. Additionally, creating the recordings digitally will implement efficient and effective storage facilities: files can be stored on the Puget Sound archive’s private network database (through the internet) and can also be backed up for safekeeping to external hard-drives. Keeping digital copies both on a network database and a physical hard-drive will partially guarantee preservation. To further this preservation, copies could be burned onto DVD or CD-ROMs, in keeping with whether the recording includes video or only audio.
Employing backup options such as discs and external hard-drives does incur a certain monetary cost. However, given the supplies available today, such storage is more efficient space-wise and also more readily available, decreasing the price compared to other methods of storage (or even of playback options – reel-to-reel tapes, anyone?). Additionally, it is more likely that a large public university facing budget restrictions will readily contribute to purchasing multipurpose external hard-drives than, an alternate storage method for music archives, perhaps wax cylinders for example. I suggest in requesting funding from the university, the multipurpose usages available via digital storage and file transfer techniques be emphasized, while the explicit purpose of using them to archive improvisational jazz be less strongly accentuated.
Copyright and ethical concerns for the material produced are more a nonissue than a problem. When I approached each group to be archived for the Thursday of IMPfest IV, I articulated “the recording would be used solely for educational and archival purposes at the University of Washington, and would be made available to researchers and the public for scholarly and educational purposes only. They will never be released for commercial purposes without your express, written permission.” Each artist readily agreed to those specific terms, liking the raison d’être of educational and archival purposes and the restricted access to researchers and the public for scholarly and educational purposes. The two more local groups, Sequoia Ensemble and Smallface, requested that I make the footage available to them for their own promotional uses, which was consistent with the ethics of the archive, and so I complied. The only copyright or ethical concerns for the material produced would arise in the event that the archive or the University began to monetarily profit off of the stored archives.
Additionally, copyright and ethical concerns would be limited by defining the audience with access to the archive. My request to the artists suggested that the archive be made available to researches and the public, but solely for scholarly and educational purposes. A way to monitor the use and intent in usage of the archive would be to offer the recordings only streaming – not in a fashion that allows for downloading, for example – if offered online, or only in restricted viewing at the University (the Crocodile Café Collection displays such a restricted viewing opportunity). Such restricted viewing would not be necessary, as the IMPfest archives, unlike those from the Crocodile Café Collection, would be owned by the archive with express permission from the artists to distribute it for educational and scholarly purposes. The artists involved in IMPfest on the most part simply desire for their music and style to be heard and appreciated by a larger audience, and so the groups so far encountered appreciate the, in a phrase, “free publicity.”
Ultimately, the archiving value of the annual IMPfest rests in several less-explored facets of the musical scene. As previously discussed, today’s improvisation in jazz has changed, moving away from the standard improvised jazz solo. Traditionally, such solos were identified as a development of the melody, while today the approach to jazz improvisation is more experimental, emotional and therefore more “organic” to the individual musicians and each of their unique sounds. Capturing this monumental change in the attitude toward improvisational music will likely be respected and appreciated with the coming developments inherent to every musical style. Most importantly, however, is capturing this moment of camaraderie and innovation in Seattle jazz history. As depicted by recent events, and cited repeatedly by old timers who enjoy clichés, you never appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone. Do not let this moment of innovation and inspiration get lost in time, Seattle archivists. Do your job.
Works Cited
Alessi, Ralph. 2012. Interview by the Improvised Music Project. Retrieved from http://improvisedmusicproject.com/ 06/04/2012.
Berry, Overton. 2012. Guest speaker, Honors 394B “Puget Sounds.” 14 May 2012.
Chinen, Nate. 2010. “Jazz Quartet Finds Clarity and Chemistry Together.” New York Times. New York.
Chinen, Nate. 2010. “Seattle’s Alt-Rock Hub, Purring with Jazz.” New York Times. New York.
De Barros, Paul and Eduardo Calderón. 1993. “Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle.” Seattle: Sasquatch Books: pp. 1-35
West, Jason. 2007. “Paul de Barros: Critically Speaking.” Seattle: All About Jazz. Retrieved from http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=24729. 06/04/2012.