EyeShotJazz | Jazz Photography

Jim Knapp, one of the most respected composers and arrangers on the West Coast, has evolved his concept of ensemble music into a uniquely identifiable sound.  Jim lead his orchestra in a performance last night at Poncho Hall at Cornish as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival.

His 15-piece orchestra featured many of the finest jazz soloists in the Northwest, and has appeared in collaboration with Lee Konitz, Jay Clayton, Julian Priester, Jovino Santos Neto, Robin Holcomb, Kirk Nurock, Carla Bley, and Steve Swallow. Knapp has also served as director of The Composers and Improvisors Orchestra and has led various small jazz groups such as Ohio Howie and the Temple of Boom and the J-Word. Knapp founded and developed the jazz program at Cornish College of the Arts in the late 1970s, where he continues to teach and currently serves as a professor of music. In 2006, he was honored by Cornish College with a special “35 Years of Jazz” award in recognition of his many years of service to that institution.

Photographs by Seattle photographer Michael Craft

Tom Varner conducts his tentet through some of his compositions and seem to be transported to a far away place. His music is so sublime.

From Earshot Jazz Festival we continue to see and hear such wonderful groups and performances. Tom Varner presented his new tentet and new CD, Heaven and Hell.
“Varner calls the piece “my big meaty work for tentet,” something he’s incubated and worked on since September 11, 2001. He notes that the piece mixes “My … hell … being in New York City on 9/11,” with that most incongruous thing, a sort of heaven, as he and his wife adopted their son in Vietnam a short 8 days later. That contrasting mix of elements and imperatives is a Varner specialty, something he did with magnificent ease on The Window Up Above, a take on the American song-book, in 1998. The free-ranging French horn, hardly something one associates with George Jones, made fabulous, slippery improvisational material out of, well, George Jones and other American staples on Window. The point? Varner’s got no fear of steep material, of flowing free, of going “big and meaty.” Varner’s discography shows him using his horn as if it were always an improviser’s mainstay, something that shone as it seemed to smear across notes, slowed brilliantly even as it sped (it is a French horn, after all). His 2001 look at Don Cherry’s Second Communion is nothing short of a master-work, a tribute, of course, but also something that takes the trumpeter’s clipped execution and makes it pliable and all-encompassing. That’s what Heaven and Hell promises, the orchestration of Varner’s elastic harmonics, his use of the ensemble as an instrument, his Ellingtonian ability to animate against the instruments’ limitations.”
—Andrew Bartlett
from Earshot Jazz Festival Program