Earshot Jazz Festival

Go to the Festival Sites and Addresses page

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3 CHAPEL PERFORMANCE SPACE, 8PM
Wright / Burns / Kaylor Trio
$12 general, $10 members/seniors, $6 students BUY NOW

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7 PONCHO CONCERT HALL, CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 8PM
Jack Wright / Gust Burns Large Ensemble
$12 general, $10 members/seniors, $6 students BUY NOW

Wright / Burns / Kaylor Trio:
Jack Wright, saxophones
Gust Burns, piano
Mark Kaylor, drums

Jack Wright / Gust Burns Large Ensemble:
Jack Wright, saxophones
Wilson Shook, alto saxophone
Mark Collins, bass
John Teske, bass
Gust Burns, piano
Doug Theriault, electronics

“In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king,” according to the Washington Post. For more than twenty-five years, Wright has toured practically non-stop and rightfully claims that he has played in virtually every venue available to experimental improvised music in the United States, and many in Europe as well. Wright mostly plays alto and soprano saxophones, but he is a pianist as well. To date, he has made over 40 recordings (many published on his own Spring Garden label), performed in over 20 countries, and written extensively about music and society for journals such as Improjazz (France) and Signal to Noise (US).

Over the years, Wright has focused most of his public performances on collaborative exchanges with artists like William Parker, Bob Marsh, Nate Wooley, Bhob Rainey and Andrew Drury, just to name a very few. For this year’s Earshot Jazz Festival, he presents two shows in collaboration with his preferred collaborator in the Northwest, Seattle’s own Gust Burns, a pianist, improviser, and composer who seeks new routes into improvisation by working with diverse areas of music such as silence, density, structure and alternative narrative approaches.

Similar to Wright, Burns has been a partner in many successful collaborations, working with improvisers like Jeffrey Allport, Wally Shoup, Keith Rowe, Andrea Neumann, Stéphane Rives, and many others. In addition to his work as an improviser and composer, Burns has directed the Seattle Improvised Music Festival since 2003.

For these meetings between Wright and Burns, it might be fair to assume that various traditions of improvised music from the last 40 years will be both touched upon and eschewed. Wright himself has written that “In relation to assessing a performance, improvisation has an evolving history, which means that some of it is ‘past’, and valued for that, and some of it is ‘contemporary’…My particular version of this music is one of many possible, and does not easily fit the hierarchy based on an aesthetic model.”

-Danielle Bias

to top