Earshot Jazz: Finally Back In-Person, Centering Black Experiences

By Will Crockett, The Seattle Medium

The Earshot Jazz Festival, which for decades has provided a month of jazz shows across Seattle, was finally back in person this year, and blurred the lines between art and advocacy post-COVID.

“COVID revealed the underlying structural problems with this country,” said Darrell Grant, composer, musician, performer at this year’s festival, and Portland State University professor of jazz.  “Yes, the pandemic was awful and it caused a lot of hardship, but it opened up gaps that were already there,” he said in a phone interview after his show at the Town Hall Seattle venue in October.

“It opened them wide enough that we could not possibly ignore them because so many people fell in. That disproportionate way in which the pandemic impacts communities of color was representative of all of the other ways in which that is true.”

Before his Oct. 27 show with the MJ New Quartet at Town Hall Seattle, Grant and bass player Marcus Shelby hosted a forum to discuss jazz and civil rights. Grant and Shelby asked followers to send in questions on social media before the event.

 “We are really engaged with music and social change, both in the themes for our projects and the work that we do in the community,” Grant said of himself and Shelby.

At the forum, “We talked a lot about the connections between music and identity, we talked about the connection between jazz and civil rights and consciousness raising both in the past and the present.”

Grant explained how their performance was a manifestation of this idea. “I was really interested in highlighting the music of African-American composers, so we did pieces by composers like William Grant Still and Florence Price,” he said. Still was the first African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a professional orchestra in the United States, and Price was the first ever African-American woman recognized as a symphonic composer.

“That was a really cool change in the way of getting to use music to support issues of identity and equity, and to share some of the broader cultural history with the audience.”

Experiencing jazz shows in-person brings creative genius and struggle to life. Attending virtual performances cannot do the music justice. Earshot offered the artists and residents of Seattle this opportunity once again. The festival ran from Oct. 8 to Nov. 6 this year.

Grant said jazz musicians have been waiting for an opportunity like the Earshot Jazz Festival to say their piece. “We saw George Floyd protests and racial unrest and were writing pieces about it, but it takes a while,” he said. “I think that we will continue to see themes and performances like this in the next two, three years as that backlog of work gets brought to the public.”

According to Alex Dugdale, Earshot’s 2022 artist in residence, “The root of jazz is the expression of struggle, a comment on the social environment brought about through social change and economic struggles.

“It’s how we communicate our freedom,” he said. “We can find some freedom, solace, comfort and joy in music because it gives us that freedom.” Dugdale is a local jazz musician, dancer, teacher and professor of tap dance at the University of Washington.

Earshot Magazine’s editor Rayna Mathis said in addition to foregrounding musical expressions of struggle and freedom, festival officials are working to shift perspectives on jazz through their monthly publication. “Our [mainstream media] sights are so often white and male, and those stories will always have platforms. My interest is not in that,” she said.

“It is in providing people who do not have the platforms that have been historically removed from them to share their stories.”

Reflecting on the diversity of Seattle’s jazz scene, Mathis said, “There is such a lack of access for young Black artists.”

 “Which is not to say they aren’t there, but rather we should acknowledge that these barriers come at a cost.” When imagining its future, she said “It is hard for me to imagine an authentic, thriving, successful, genuine jazz community without that presence. It is heartbreaking, it is lonely.”

Through her work at Earshot, Mathis said she is helping to change the scene’s demographic, to keep jazz as a current, cultural tool for historically silenced voices.

This year’s Earshot Jazz Festival allowed advocates like Grant, Dugdale and Mathis to have important social discourse through high-end performances and community conversations.

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