Seattle Photographer

JAMES CARTER swings with his sax in performance Friday night at the Triple Door as he played with his “HEAVEN ON EARTH” band featuring John Medeski on Hammond B3 and Adam Rogers on guitar, bassist Ralphe Armstrong and drummer Lee Pearson. The sold out first show was extraordinary and well received by the standing room only crowd.

We are starting into the second week of coverage of the annual Earshot jazz Festival and there were a lot of good performances this past week. I want to post a couple of pictures from this week here. the James Carter show was the highlight for me.

Here are some program notes by John Ewing:
“In 2009 James Carter released a record called Heaven on Earth (Half Note Records). It featured a select group of New York based musicians including organist John Medeski, bassist Christian McBride, guitarist Adam Rogers, and drummer Joey Baron. Like many of Mr. Carter’s recordings, it differed greatly from the work that preceded it. His previous release, Present Tense (Emarcy, 2008) portrayed the saxophonist as a rugged traditionalist more than willing to work within pre-established forms without ego driven pyrotechnics. Continue reading at: EarshotJazz

Robert Glasper performing Sunday night at the Triple Door with Vicente Archer on bass and Mark Colenburg on drums. On the heels of his acclaimed Blue Note release, Double Booked, pianist Robert Glasper continues to infuse jazz with hip-hop sensibilities. Glasper played a set that confirms his place on the “short list of jazz pianists who have the wherewithal to drop a J Dilla reference into a Thelonious Monk cover,” (latimes.com) with skill and finesse.

More than seven years ago, when in his early 20s, Glasper gave notice while working with Russell Malone, Mark Whitfield, Marcus Strickland, and “neo-soul” star Bilal that he may ascend to jazz-piano fame. A lyrical, rhythmic player, he “excels in providing crisp, melodic statements [with] a nice, lighter touch, and in restraining his considerable chops in the service of space,” said All About Jazz. Raised in Houston, Texas, he has combined lyrical insights with complex, compelling rhythms to emerge as one of the freshest voices in jazz today. He possesses what the New York Times called “percussive intensity, fresh ideas, [and] improvisatory logic.”

The son of a gospel-singing mother, Glasper played piano in church before he reached his teens. At home, he heard gospel, Motown, and R&B, and he also got into jazz, rock, pop, and hip-hop. Moving to New York to study at the New School University, he began playing with Christian McBride, Russell Malone, and Kenny Garrett.

The CHICAGO UNDERGROUND DUO, Rob Mazurek, primarily on cornet, and Chad Taylor, on various percussion, products of the fertile Chicago improv scene, performed at EMP Saturday night as the Earshot Jazz Festival continues on it’s second day,
The duo, formed in 1997 as one arrangement of the members of the Chicago Underground Collective, describes its music as “an organic mixture of African, electronic, coloristic, jazz-influenced life supporting systematic, non-systematic feeling from two humans trying ever to expand outward and inward for the people and ourselves.”

In another EarshotJazz Festival presentation, the superb quartet of Idaho saxophonist Brent Jensen and Seattle-based all-stars pianist Bill Anschell, bassist Jeff Johnson, and drummer John Bishop celebrated their latest Origin Records release, Motives on Saturday night at Tula’s. It was a superb performance all around of some wonderful music.

Already garnering stellar reviews, the disc is proof of “how many great jazz musicians there are throughout the United States,” according to Jazz Review. Jazz Chicago calls it a “true gem of a recording. This album entrances immediately from the start—beginning with Jensen’s tribute to free jazz pioneer and Ornette Coleman drummer Ed Blackwell…”

While the musicians are well-known to many in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, it is worth mentioning some of their credentials. Jensen currently serves Director of Jazz Studies at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls and has performed with a variety of jazz artists, including Gene Harris, Bill Watrous, Lew Soloff, John Stowell, the Manhattan Transfer and the Lionel Hampton Big Band. Pianist Anschell performs regularly with many of Seattle’s finest musicians and has also worked with Nnenna Freelon, Ron Carter, Benny Golson and Russell Malone.

Continue reading at: EarshotJazz Festival

Jazz Photography by Daniel Sheehan

Brian Heaney has a new group, Ask The Ages, that he wanted me to photograph so we made a series of informal individual and group portraits outside his house where the jazz group were rehearsing the other day for an upcoming concert on  Thursday, July 15, 2010 7:00pm – 8:30pm, at Egan’s Ballard Jam House, 1707 Northwest Market Street Seattle, WA 98107 Pioctured above left to right are:

John Seman, bass, Greg Campbell, drums, Brian Heaney, guitar and Matt Reid, trumpet.

Portrait Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan creating portraits for publications and a Seattle Wedding Photographer with an artistic photojournalist style.

I photographed Bill Frisell and Petra Hayden for an album they recorded together a few years back and tried using my tilt shift lens for a different look. This was the frame I really like best. The music they made together was a wonderful album I still listen to from time to time to hear Petra who has a smooth silky voice on top of Bill’s dreamy guitar licks.

Portrait Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan creating portraits for publications and a Seattle Wedding Photographer with an artistic photojournalist style.

Once again the Bellevue Jazz Festival is here and Kicking it off at the Meydenbauer Theater was The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra (SRJO), the Northwest’s premier big band jazz ensemble. Founded in 1995, the 17-piece big band is made up of the most prominent jazz soloists and band leaders in the greater Seattle area. SRJO played a concert of highlights from their 2009-2010 concert season, including hits from their November 2009 “Tribute to Ray Charles” concert (“One Mint Julep,” “Moanin”), their March 2010 “Big Band Monk and Mingus” concert (“Haitian Fight Song” by Mingus, “Misterioso” by Monk), their April 2010 “Birth of the Cool” concert (Boplicity, Rocker), and a new Michael Brockman composition for the SRJO titled “Passage Noir.” Featured soloists included trumpeter Jay Thomas, baritone saxophonist Bill Ramsay, pianist Randy Halberstadt, tenor saxophonist Hadely Caliman and Travis Ranney, trombonists Dan Marcus and David Marriott, plus alto saxophonists Mark Taylor and Michael Brockman. Here are some highlights from the concert.

For tickets and more information go to the Festival website; Bellevue Jazz Festival

Jazz Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, who photographs jazz performances, and creates portrait photography for publications and Seattle Wedding Photography with an artistic photojournalist style. See more work from this Seattle Photographer.

Gebhard Ullman Clarinet Trio
Last week I was assigned to photograph the Gebhard Ullman Clarinet Trio.  I was not sure what to expect from a trio of clarinets coming out of Berlin, but I was taken aback by the talents of Gebhard Ullman, Juergen Kupke and Michael Thieke and their music from their opening number as they slowly strolled through the house to the stage, to the finale. An amazing amount of variety from such a tight ensemble of reed players. Their music was swinging and sophisticated and somewhere out there to the mysterious, abstract yet strangely accessible.

From the Earshot Jazz Magazine program notes “Ullmann is a follow-up guy in a world of intermittency. We hear sounds in snippets, music in simple, single song structures, see acts come and go with astonishing speed. Yes, improvisers come up with different ideas constantly, never uttering the same exact thing twice, but the extended suite on Ullmann’s new Ballads and Related Objects comes back again and again to a series of firefly-like blinks, woody auras with sonic embers around the core combustion, as on “Variations on a Theme by Claude Debussy.” But the blinks go to yelps and clarinet shouts, barking that front-ends a chatter of clarinet/alto clarinet/bass clarinet, a recurring intensity.

Ullmann sees his follow-ups more concretely, too: “However I may seem to go in different directions at the same time, I follow up most of the formats for many years. Mostly more than a decade.” He’s right, too, bringing bands back time and again to explore the platform, to survey how the ensemble has grown as individuals. Ballads is the third session from Ullmann, Jurgen Kupke (clarinet), and Michael Thieke (alto clarinet), and as it’s released, Ullmann is also putting out another date with trombone madman, Steve Swell. The simply named Ullmann/Swell 4 spills out News? No News!, a rambunctious blurt of energetic action that records no distance or creative tension between Ullmann, a Berlin transplant who spends most of his time in Europe, and the New Yorker. One could imagine the difference in scenes, Europe more friendly to the avant-garde, North America more occupied by its love for the mainstream, its measuring of art by the yardstick of commerce. But Ullmann resists the characterization: “We are all trying to move forward musically and be able to survive. There is no difference,” he replies when questioned on how we differ on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

As for the Clarinet Trio, Ullmann infuses the music with what qualities he sees in Thieke and Kupke: “They bring in contemporary music, performance, jokes.” He’s emphatic about their musical potency, too: “You never heard a trio like this. It is at times more than a trio almost an orchestra. It is all of my woodwind music.” Like ROVA and the WSQ before them, the Trio does indeed encompass Ullmann’s many interests, his core. “Be it bands like Henry Cow or Can, be it the classical music I grew up with or the contemporary composed music I listened to as a teenager, composers like Lutoslawski, Henze or Stockhausen,” he comments, the woodwind elements didn’t exist. And even as some of Ullmann’s impetus was to “transpose to wind instruments” what he heard in music that did not feature them, he also knows that “minimalistic techniques and techniques using overtones, multiphonics and such [can] give the impression of more than 3 players,” enabling the ensemble to move beyond some of the limitations of the source material. Continue reading here. Jazz Photographer and Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan covers jazz performances, creates portrait photography for publications and corporations and is a Seattle Wedding Photographer, wedding photography with an artistic photojournalist style.

Kurt Elling

Kurt Elling won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album tonight at the 52nd annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles for “Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman” He is always wonderful to see live and this album is a fine example of his music. I photographed him last spring at the Bellevue Jazz Festival, the most recent time he was in Seattle.

Jazz Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan who covers jazz performances, and creates portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer at A Beautiful Day Photography, wedding photographers with an artistic photojournalist style.

Evan Flory-Barnes conducts his ensemble in the premiere performance of his large chamber composition ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A CELEBRATION at Town Hall in the final presentation of the 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival.

What a great performance by the orchestra moving through a fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and classical music, complete with modern dancers and freestyle break dancers. The Seattle bassist and composer is excited premiering the large chamber work, a snapshot of the abundance of inspiration that can thread artistic mediums together in Seattle. The premiere of Acknowledgement of a Celebration features 35 musicians and ten dancers set to Flory-Barnes’s new compositions.

Flory-Barnes performs with an inclusive passion and expressive intensity, as though he were completely immersed in music. He regularly brings his trio, The Teaching, to the Lucid jazz club in the University District for an open community jam and hang. The Teaching appeared in the 2008 Earshot Jazz Festival at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center.

WAYNE HORVITZ: THESE HILLS OF GLORY

Soloist Carla Kihlstedt (violin) and the Odeonquartet, a world-renowned chamber group featuring Seattle Symphony musicians, perform Wayne Horvitz’s new chamber-music work, These Hills of Glory

The Earshot Jazz Festival is in it’s final week and so I am looking forward to staying home in the evenings starting next week for a least a little while. It has been a lot of fun covering the festival. I have seen and heard a lot of different styles of mostly jazz being played but the music of Wayne Horvitz was something very special.

Pianist Cristina Valdes performs the world premier of Wayne Horvitz’s For Piano Alone in Four Parts

The Odeon Quartet consisting of Gennady Fillmonov, violin, Artur Girsky,violin, Heather Bentley, viola, and Helene Ferret, cello, perform the world premier of Robin Holcomb’s Carry Over

Wayne Horvitz joins the Odeon Quartet and Carla Kihistedt on stage at the end of the performance of These Hills of Glory

GARFIELD HIGH SCHOOL JAZZ BAND, With SPECIAL GUEST MIGUEL ZENÓN, under the direction of Clarence Acox, opened the 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival Friday night to a packed house at the Triple Door. What a great vibe to begin the festival. It is amazing to see some many talented young musicians coming up here in Seattle. What a fantastic show. Miguel and all of those student sax players were a delight to hear.

Miguel Zenon was back smokin at the Triple Door  on Saturday night with his Esta Plena Quintet.

Allen Toussaint was  at the Triple Door Sunday with his quartet and they were all in the comfortable New Orleans style rhythms and blues. It is amazing how many great songs he has put out over the years and how comfortable his feet must be in those open sandle shoes.
Composer, producer, pianist, singer, and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Allen Toussaint is a living legend. His work in the 1960s and 1970s helped define the sound of R&B, soul, and funk as we hear it today. Penning such songs as “Working in the Coal Mine,” performed by Lee Dorsey, “Ruler of My Heart,” by Irma Thomas, and “Mother-in-Law,” by Ernie K-Doe, Toussaint’s contributions to modern music extend far beyond what is commonly acknowledged. Combined with the easygoing charm and style of his home city of New Orleans, Toussaint has established himself as a true joy of song and culture. Continue reading at Earshot Festival Guide