Bill Frisell photo by Daniel Sheehan

25th Annual Earshot Jazz Festival, October 1-November 17

Seattle’s annual Earshot Jazz Festival celebrates its 25-year anniversary with more than 60 distinctive concerts and events in venues all around the city.

Easily the most expansive jazz festival Seattle has ever seen, this year’s celebration opens with a Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock & Jack DeJohnette 30th Anniversary Concert at Benaroya Hall and closes with saxophone legend Charles Lloyd in a special finale with the Seattle guitarist Bill Frisell at Town Hall Seattle. In between, composer Philip Glass plays a solo piano concert, The Manhattan Transfer hold a three-day run downtown, and some of the world’s best-known jazz artists, including The Bad Plus, Patricia Barber Trio, Brad Mehldau, John Medeski, John Scofield’s Uberjam, and the Dave Douglas Quintet perform on stages throughout the city.

Never short of innovators, this year’s Earshot festival includes separate concerts by three MacArthur Fellows – Miguel Zenon, Dafnis Prieto and Ken Vandermark – and three recipients of the new Doris Duke Performing Artists Award – Nicole Mitchell, John Hollenbeck and Bill Frisell. They will join a marquee of forward-thinking artists like Chris Speed with Dave King, Kneebody, Peter Brotzmann, Darcy James Argue, Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri and The NEXT Collective, many of whom will also conduct educational workshops around town.

International artists visiting Seattle for the festival include Armenia’s Tigran Hamasyan Quintet, Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha, Brazil’s Vinicius Cantuaria and Norway’s Paal Nilssen-Love, as well as an impressive lineup of Cuban ensembles, including Omar Sosa’s Afri-Lectric Experience, Yosvany Terry Quintet, Dafnis Prieto Quartet and a special residency and concert by keepers of the Cuban son flame La Familia Valera Miranda.

The festival’s “resident-artist-in-residency” for this year includes four events with Bill Frisell, three of which are in collaboration with the University of Washington, where Frisell will join the faculty in the fall. The series includes duo and trio settings with Seattle artists Cuong Vu, Robin Holcomb, Ted Poor and Luke Bergman. The main stage at UW Meany Hall will host the Seattle premiere of Frisell’s Big Sur quintet, with Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Hank Roberts and Rudy Royston. Opening the Big Sur evening will be a creative collaboration between Seattle’s innovative violist Eyvind Kang and the eccentric visual artist Jim Woodring.

As always, the talents of world-class Pacific Northwest jazz artists and students will be featured throughout the festival. Seattle’s Roosevelt and Garfield high schools will have separate main-stage events, as will Edmonds-Woodway High School, which placed alongside the Seattle schools at this year’s Essentially Ellington competition in New York City. Some of the top University of Washington Jazz Studies students will perform with trumpeters Dave Douglas and Cuong Vu, and top Cornish College of the Arts jazz students will perform with composer Darcy James Argue. Additional festival concerts feature the work of Seattle artists Paul Kikuchi, Beth Fleenor, Samantha Boshnack, Steve Treseler with Ingrid Jensen, and Naomi Siegel, as well as the ensembles Bad Luck, The Kora Band, The Westerlies, Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra, and the all-star Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra.

Tickets for the Earshot Jazz Festival go on sale in August. Complete concert information will be available as it develops at www.earshot.org and 206-547-6763.