Improvised Music Project Fest aims to get the talent at the UW heard

The music students currently at the University of Washington are too young to remember that Jazz Alley, the glamorous, downtown jazz club, first opened on University Way in the University District in 1979 as a small club and bistro that catered mostly to the local music scene.

Jazz Alley left the U-District in 1985, leaving a void that has been slow to refill despite the neighborhood's proximity to the university and the city's reputation as a hotbed of jazz education. A small nightclub, Lucid, is the only venue on "The Ave" devoted chiefly to the genre, balancing the needs of a lounge and a stage for serious jazz.

The newest layer of jazz performance in the U-District is the Improvised Music Project Festival, three nights of free music by nine bands devoted to challenging the boundaries of traditional jazz. The first three bands perform Thursday at Café Solstice at 8; three more groups perform Friday night at 6 at the Café on the Ave; and the festival wraps up Saturday night with performances at the University Presbyterian Church, starting at 7 p.m.

All the groups are composed of current or former UW music students, many of whom also attended high school locally, graduating from jazz powerhouses like Roosevelt, Newport and South Whidbey high schools. The Improvised Music Project (or IMP) is a registered student club at the UW, started with the help of assistant professor Cuong Vu. The club was one way of getting the music out of the classroom and in front of wider audiences.

"We make all this great music in the dungeon of the Music Building, in a small basement room that nobody knows about," said saxophonist Ivan Arteaga, 21, who studies jazz at the UW and leads the band Operation ID, playing Friday night. "The only time people hear any of it is at the quarterly school performances. That was a big motivation for us to put on this festival for the rest of Seattle to be able to listen to what we've created."

When Vu, an acclaimed trumpet player, joined the UW jazz studies program two years ago, he hoped to teach and inspire students to create the kind of improvised music that set free his career after he left Seattle as a college student in the 1980s.

Vu, 39, graduated from Bellevue High School and attending the New England Conservatory of Music on a scholarship, following the path of many talented high school musicians who sought instruction in other states.

"There are quite a few young, innovative, forward-looking kids doing some really amazing music here," Vu said. "But they all leave, because there is no aperture for them here."

Vu has sought to change that, partly with the IMP — the beginning, he hopes, of a new music scene in the city. He has pushed his students to examine, through the lens of jazz, the kind of music they're interested in, the music they know well be it rock or classical, and then exercise those musical instincts through free improvisation.

"They're coming up with very interesting music," Vu said. "I'm blown away. Some if it is genius. It's so original. The creativity is here — it just needs to be organized and nurtured. There are seriously talented kids here. Some of them are the most talented musicians I've come across in my career."

Vu will perform Saturday night with one of the groups, Speak, composed of recent UW graduates. Also playing Saturday night is the duo Bad Luck, with drummer Chris Icasiano and saxophonist Neil Welch, who was named the 2008 Emerging Artist of the Year by Earshot Jazz.

The student combos will play sets inspired by electronic music, rock, minimalistic music and traditional jazz. Some groups have devoted their sets to the compositions of Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus, for example.

"Lucid is a cool space for music, but it's still hard for a lot of these groups to find regular performance spaces," said Arteaga, who attended Newport High. "If people were able to come out and if we could spark the interest for this music to grow, that's the ultimate goal."

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com