Earshot Jazz festival blows away expectations

Festival Review |

At a length of three weeks, featuring performances that could be painfully challenging at times, held in austere settings like museums, former churches and auditoriums, the Earshot Jazz festival has at times felt more like a symposium than a festival.

The earnest listener of Seattle's marquee jazz event needs patience, determination and a commitment of time — not to mention more than a tank-full of gas to get to the venues which are spread over downtown Seattle, Ballard, the Central District and the Eastside. A trained, malleable ear comes in handy, too.

This year, Earshot has again proved to be education as much as entertainment, and a sizable risk, as true art can sometimes be. Heading into its third and last week — on the schedule is a jazz opera, plus a solo performance Toumani Diabate, by the planet's greatest living player of the kora, a West African harp — the event has so far been nothing if unpredictable. Those willing to see the schedule through have so far been generously rewarded.

True to form, Earshot has challenged the boundaries of the genre. Guitarist Johnny A packed the Triple Door in the first week with a jazz blend that sounded at times like hard-driving, prison-tour country. (Call it truck-stop jazz if you will.) And this past Sunday night, pianist and vocalist Robin Holcomb performed a set at the Seattle Art Museum that took the jazz format (two saxophones and a rhythm section) into spaces typically occupied by folk-inspired, rock bands. Her vocal phrasing was surely jazz, but her melodic instincts seemed right at home with the likes of John Hiatt or Sarah McLachlan.

Back on Oct. 26, Eldar Djangirov, the young pianist from Kyrgyzstan, brought his very athletic trio to the Triple Door for a demonstration of idiosyncratic bop. Highly punctuated and often disharmonic, he played extended runs over frenetic rhythms, sometimes pitting his left against his right on two keyboards (he placed a synthesizer atop his grand piano).

One of the most daunting performances of the festival so far was a solo set the same night as the Eldar Trio show, by pianist Cecil Taylor at Town Hall. Taylor, an avant-garde pioneer who took the stage wearing psychedelic socks and a big, clownish tie, and opened his show by reciting a bit of his own poetry, a dizzying scramble of scientific and mathematic themes, which if recited on a street corner would probably have been taken as the rant of another crazy homeless man.

Taylor's art has been known to both enthrall and alienate audiences. His show resulted in a few early departures who, frankly, could not be blamed for not entirely enjoying the performance. Taken as music, it was difficult to cozy up to — his songs were neither major nor minor, and were not played in traditional time. But view Taylor's work as an abstract arrangement of sonic and percussive art, and his intent starts to come into focus (overriding the temptation to claim, "My cat could play that.") Through the sandstorm of sound, you could hear the synchronization of sound and the deliriously happy fingersteps of an old master.

The audience wasn't sure when the song ended, and surely not everyone enjoyed it. But it was a unique and explorative moment.

If there is a risk in performing something extraordinarily new, there can also be one in playing something universally familiar, as on Tuesday, when saxophonist Hans Teuber played his toe-tapping version of the Jackson 5 song, "I Want You Back," at Tula's accompanied by just his bass player. When everyone knows the song — a pop song at that — there is a risk in sounding predictable and corny. But Teuber bent the song into breathtaking, new shapes. He ran laps around the melody before returning squarely to it.

Lest the festival be accused of being too serious and determined, there was Saturday night at Benaroya Hall. Comedian Bill Cosby, who performed his own show at Benaroya earlier that evening, made an unplanned appearance at the Nordstrom Recital Hall when he introduced to the stage his good friend, saxophonist James Moody, the featured performer with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. He proved to be just as big a ham as Cosby. The unsuspecting crowd was treated to 15 minutes of impromptu, vintage Cosby, which Earshot program manager Karen Caropepe called, "just one of those beautiful festival moments."

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com