Earshot ends, promises fulfilled

Festival Review |

The final musician to perform at the Earshot Jazz Festival was Toumani Diabate, the ethnomusicologist's delight and master of the traditional West African harp called a kora.

As a showstopper, Diabate did not disappoint the adoring, capacity crowd at the Triple Door Sunday night, playing the 21-string kora alone, sounding often like three people playing at the same time, with only four fingers doing the plucking.

Diabate, who comes from a centuries-old caste of musicians, is chiefly responsible for introducing the kora to the rest of the world.

But how, one might ask, does Diabate's performance, which closed three weeks of eclectic and sometimes daring concerts, represent jazz? Perhaps that is exactly what the organizers of the Earshot festival want you to wonder.

As promised, Earshot gamely challenged audiences to rethink the boundaries of jazz. The value-added proposition of Earshot was that audiences could choose to listen to something familiar and reassuring (particularly in the suburban venues) or choose to take a chance on something new. Either way, you did not feel cheated out of a better experience.

Like a piano, the kora is an instrument with tremendous range and presence. But while a piano has a more processed sound that needs to be coaxed into expressing emotion, the kora sounds very delicate and organic.

What Diabate called the bass line and melody acted as repeating countermelodies, played in high and low registers. Over those two layers of sound, Diabate tapped out a spare but steady rhythm against the body of his kora and improvised a sometimes diabolically impossible round of riffs and variations.

All of the essential elements of jazz were in fact represented in Diabate's performance: virtuosity, tonal and rhythmic complexity, and improvisation. As an editorial choice, Diabate also served to remind us that jazz is at heart a folk art and began as such, an invention born of cultural circumstance and taught through personal relationships. (Diabate claims never to have taken formal instruction although his father was a kora master. You could say Diabate learned it old school.)

Jazz has risen to the status of fine art and is now taught through institutions — something particularly apparent here in Seattle, where early jazz education has thoroughly evolved.

The highly decorated Roosevelt High School jazz band opened Earshot three weeks ago. The musicians it and other local band programs have produced are the result of merit and scholarship. One of its graduates, vocalist Sara Gazarek, sang two sets with her trio at the Kirkland Performance Center Friday.

Gazarek, 26, who now lives in Los Angeles, acknowledged the youth of her group — everyone is younger than 30 — which might explain the preponderance of cheerful, earnest numbers in the set. Even the songs intended to sound wistful could not help but seem high-spirited in their hands.

Age aside, Gazarek is a polished performer with the vocal control of singers much older. Her backup was world-class, particularly piano player Josh Nelson, who showed an old-soul handle on the blues.

The group's creative interpretations of the standards that made up most of the concert did more than imitate. They reflected something of the generation performing them. One performance in particular seemed to channel a bit of Death Cab for Cutie. The song was called, without a hint of irony, "I'm Old Fashioned."

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com