Seattle's Earshot Jazz Festival: The sweet sounds of independence

The jazz festival story down in Portland has been full of drama: The large enterprise made an immediate, commercial impact on the city when it began in 2004 but suddenly went under last month, and the upcoming sixth-annual festival set for February 2009 was canceled. Then it was saved by a large, cash infusion from a deep-pocketed benefactor, Alaska Airlines, who PDX Jazz organizers announced had agreed to be the event's title sponsor.

By contrast, Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle's largest and most ambitious jazz series, operates on about half the budget (Earshot's annual budget is about $250,000), and is funded largely not by corporate, commercial interests but endowments, public commissions and private philanthropy.

If the economic model of most jazz festivals is capitalist, Earshot's is more socialist. The model seems reliable if not spectacular.

The festival, in its 20th year, features more than 50 performances spread out over three weeks at venues all over the city. Earshot begins Saturday night at the Triple Door — when the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band performs with Sean Jones, the young, lead trumpeter for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — and doesn't end until Nov. 9 when kora player Toumani Diabate, from Mali, also plays the Triple Door. Diabate is widely considered the greatest living master of the kora, a traditional, West African, 21-string harp.

"We book every jazz festival as if it was our last one," said John Gilbreath, Earshot's executive director. "We do the best we can do given the resources we have ... It's both a blessing and a curse.

"I'd like to think there's a [corporate] sponsor out there for us," he continued. "But we don't have the development staff to chase corporate dollars."

The lineup of musicians gives weight to the notion that a festival not beholden to market-driven commercial interests can take more of an artistic risk when it comes to booking talent. Indeed, it's probably easier to sign up the likes of Amir El Saffar, an Iraqi-American trumpeter whose music blends jazz with the vocal traditions of his motherland, when your benefactors aren't looking to peddle cellphone plans or sedans.

"We're a little left of center artistically," Gilbreath said. "The real creative juice in the art form is on the edges of it. Part of the heritage of jazz is to move forward. When you talk about financial support, that can challenge your own support base."

Even those who might criticize the Earshot Jazz Festival (knocks on Earshot include being too atomized and not based on any local identity) concede the event is one-of-a-kind, a consistently surprising and unique event, an impressive concert series if not a conventional music festival. Gilbreath maintains that spreading out the concerts avoids putting a fan in the position of having to choose between favorites who might be performing at the same time — something that can easily happen at a more traditional festival like Jazz Port Townsend.

"It's a chance to hear an eclectic mix of jazz," said John Bishop, co-organizer of the much smaller and younger Ballard Jazz Festival. "You'll be able to hear some real cool bands that you're not going to necessarily hear at Jazz Alley, or even if you went to a festival in New York or San Francisco."

Eclectic is the operative word. Among the more topical performers at this year's festival is Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra featuring Carla Bley. Haden, the former Ornette Coleman bassist, and pianist Bley first collaborated in 1969 on a composition that drew its context from the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War. With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Haden and Bley got new source material, which they will perform at Earshot.

Another large ensemble will be led by saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum. He and his group New York Hieroglyphics will perform "Aural Histories," a complex composition that features musicians improvising over a composed section of music while singer Abdoulaye Diabate sings a narration of that musician's life. Abdoulaye Diabate is a Malian griot, a long line of singers and oral historians who for 700 years have acted as keepers and interpreters of the country's music and culture. (Abdoulaye and Toumani are distantly related; Toumani is also a griot.) That Earshot has booked two renowned musicians from Mali says something about the festival.

Earshot also marks a homecoming for pianist Aaron Parks, the former prodigy who entered the University of Washington at age 15 to study music and computer science, then left Seattle at age 16 to study with Kenny Barron at the Manhattan School of Music. He spent five years touring with trumpeter Terence Blanchard and recently recorded an album of his own, "Invisible Cinema," on Blue Note records. Avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor will also perform a solo concert as part of the festival.

"It's stretching the music that moves it forward," Gilbreath said. "But like any growth, it can also be painful sometimes."

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com