Join us for the 36th Annual Earshot Jazz Festival!!!
Year after year, the Earshot festival celebrates Seattle's place in the world of jazz by featuring performances, premieres, and special projects by Seattle's esteemed resident artists alongside international masters.
This year's featured resident artist is SKERIK- a legendary saxophonist, arranger, and studio owner treasured for his work in the Emerald City. Also included in this year's festival is the world premiere of a festival commission from Freddy Fuego that will bend genre, rhythm and harmony to create compelling music. Special projects include workshops (to be announced soon); Garfield, Lincoln and Edmonds-Woodway High School Jazz Bands will take the stage with truly special guests; film screenings; and more. Playlists coming soon for listeners to get a glimpse into each each week of the festival.
Schedule of Events:
7:30 pm: What's Going On Festival: Conduction, Improvisation, and the Culture of Structure (4)
Julius Hemphill: Compositions for Jazz Orchestra
Selected works for large ensemble with members of The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble and guests.
Electric Circus: "Nublu"
Electric Circus celebrates the NYC Nublu residency. Butch Morris and the conduction of groove.
Conduction, Improvisation, and the Culture of Structure
Celebrating the legacies of Lawrence "Butch" Morris, Sun Ra, and Julius Hemphill.
8:00 pm: Day Soul Exquisite
Day Soul Exquisite is a 6 piece band who has spent the last 3 years recording and performing original music throughout the Pacific Northwest. Formed during the pandemic, they explore sound as a means of collective healing.
French and Congolese singer/guitarist Francesca Eluhu started the project in 2021 by posting flyers around the Central District in Seattle. She found kindred spirits in Zora Seboulisa (bass), Josh Pehrson (drums), Lillian Minke Tahar (keys), Thomas Arndt (percussion) and Xiomara Mills-DuPree (sax).
Their debut record, Sanguine and Cardamom, was released in January 2024 and was on KEXP's top 10 most played albums for 2 consecutive weeks. The EP explores self-actualization in the face of adversity and shares vulnerable introspection about moving through the world as a queer person of color.
As a group of multi-instrumentalists from diverse backgrounds, they embrace their multitudes. Day Soul Exquisite encompasses many marginalized identities–Black, Queer, Trans, Asian, Non-Binary and Disabled. Their mission is to amplify disenfranchised voices and create music that reflects their embodied values of equity, freedom and mutual aid. As Dave Segal notes "they're something special. This queer/BIPOC-centric group proved that they could segue from liquid sunshiny funk/soul to militant free jazz with preternatural poise." The Stranger
Earshot Jazz COVID-19 Policy: Earshot recommends that all ticket holders be vaccinated. Policy subject to change. Full COVID policy here.
8:00 pm: SHABAKA
The London-born, Barbados-raised multi-instrumentalist, Shabaka Hutchings, best known from Sons of Kemet, here creates stunning, genre-transcending music spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture, and the rich South African jazz tradition "all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz' tradition," he says. Deploying flutes of globe-ranging cultures, and with ethereal elements such as harp, he constructs transporting "sonic poems."
Over the course of the past decade, the lion's share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, but Shabaka has always been open to change. His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes, and South American Quenas. On New Year's Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024 he'd take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly.
Shabaka's most recent album is Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace (Impulse 2024). Artists included on the album include pianist Jason Moran, percussionist Carlos Niño, drummer Nasheet Waits, and bassist Esperanza Spalding, as well as vocalists Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas among others. Like in previous albums the titles of the songs have significant meaning that Shabaka hopes will resonate with listeners as much as the music does. He coined the term "sonic poems" to capture the concept. As Shabaka explains, "each track title reads as a poem. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace follows in this tradition of titles as symbolising a narrative which is necessarily subjective and expansive in relation to the listener's experience with the heard music."
Additional Dates:
