Barca’s Adam Kessler & Phil Sparks photo by Colin Brynn

Various Artists

Live at Barca Vol. 1

Self-released

Earshot Jazz recently covered the 10-year anniversary of the Live Jazz Thursday sessions, and this album is a fine document of this vital element in the Seattle-area jazz ecosystem.

Each Thursday at Barca on Capitol Hill, drummer Adam Kessler and bassist Phil Sparks invite a third guest musician from the local scene to create a new trio, and the new album features highlight performances culled from hundreds of resulting sessions.

The Barca sessions are truly a community event, with a large cast of regulars making the scene week after week, and this recording beautifully captures the vibe at the club. It’s a visceral document of the scene, complete with the occasional talking patron in the background which could be a distraction in some cases, but here it actually adds to the ambience. It’s a jazz hang after all, not a museum, and when the musicians are in the zone, they’re focused on the music anyway.

The trio format provides unusual improvisational possibilities, especially for horns, giving them a flexible, open-ended canvas for improvisation freed from the harmonic constraints of chordal instruments and larger ensembles. Sparks and Kessler lock it all down with intuitive and sensitive interplay, a rhythmic mind-meld that can only come from years of playing together. Their foundation they provide is a setting that any instrumentalist would be lucky to contribute to.

Highlights include saxophonist Alexey Nikolaev freely exploring the trio format on “Take the Coltrane,” stalwart trumpeter Thomas Marriott shining brightly on a pair of Cole Porter tunes, and the amazing local treasure Bernie Jacobs tearing it up on both vocals and flute to open and close the album.

–Andrew Luthringer