EyeShotJazz | Jazz Photography

Another Earth day has come to pass. The Boston Globe blog The Big Picture has an interesting post with photos taken around the planet leading off with this beautiful picture.

The most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth created to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan  covers jazz performances, and creates portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle Wedding Photographer. At EyeShotPhotos, see more work from this Seattle Photographer.

Another view of the Wayne Horvitz, Briggan Krauss, and Lê Quan concert from last week at The Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepher Center Thursday night as the Earshot Jazz Spring Series continues.


Keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, tenor saxophonist Briggan Krauss, and percussionist Lê Quan Ninh, make up a diverse and crackling trio.

Their set sparked and crackled with energy and yet I loved the quiet spaces setting it off. The band was perfectly suited for the intimate Chapel Performance Space. Jazz Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan who covers jazz performances, and creates portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle Wedding Photographer , a wedding photographer with an artistic photojournalist style. At EyeShotPhotos, see more work from this Seattle Photographer.

Gebhard Ullman Clarinet Trio performing at the Chapel Performance Space as Earshot Jazz Spring Series continues.
Wow. I was not sure what to expect from a trio of clarinets coming out of Berlin, but I was blown away 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 but their music was swinging and sophisticated and out there to the mysterious and abstract yet strangely accessible.

From the Earshot 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 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, a wedding photographer with an artistic photojournalist style. At EyeShotPhotos, see more work from a Seattle Photographer.

Tomasz Stanko performed Monday night at the Triple Door as Earshot Jazz Spring Series rolls on.
Tomasz Stanko and his quartet, featuring pianist Alexi Tuomarila,  drummer Olavi Louhivuori, Anders Christensen on bass, and Jakob Bro, on guitar, put on a cool, mesmerizing and memorable performance. Playing smouldering Slavic soul music with a grainy-toned trumpet, the tunes were from his newest album Dark Eyes including the title track, The Dark Eyes Of Martha Hirsch. It was inspired by a painting by expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, Stanko saw in a New York art gallery. Stanko and Bro start the song by playing a muted jutting harmony, building up an intense tension which Tuomarila then exploits in a softly subversive solo. Echos of Miles Davis and Chet Baker his inspirational models were evident here and in a number of the other songs they played tonight, but there was a distinct Nordic influence surrounding their style of playing as well.

More photos will be posted later this week.

Wayne Horvitz, Briggan Krauss, and Lê Quan Ninh perform at The Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepher Center Thursday night as the Earshot Jazz Spring Series continues strong.
Keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, alto saxophonist Briggan Krauss, and percussionist Lê Quan Ninh, make up a diverse and crackling trio. Their set sparked and crackled with energy and yet I loved the quiet spaces setting it off. Ninh is a classically trained percussionist and veteran of contemporary music and percussion ensembles in Europe and North America. As an improviser, Ninh works in forms that mix improvised acoustic and electro-acoustic music, dance, poetry, experimental cinema, and photography. Krauss is a New York based saxophonist, composer, and sound artist, and is also a founding member of the bizarre and wonderful ensemble Sex Mob. Krauss has a strong musical relationship with Horvitz, working together in the Trio KVH with Vancouver percussionist Dylan Van Der Schyff. As ever, Horvitz brought his signature wit, intelligence, and adventurousness to the trio. The band was perfectly suited for the intimate Chapel Performance Space. 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, a wedding photographer with an artistic photojournalist style. Visit his newest website EYESHOTPHOTOS.COM to see samples of all of his work as a Seattle Photographer.