Earshot Jazz presents Shabaka Hutchings and Vijay Iyer Trio at Town Hall and Seattle Symphony: Oct 25 & 31

Among the abundance on offer in this year's Earshot Jazz Festival lineup, two representations of the newest variations in form and genre can be heard in the work of these distinctly dissimilar luminaries. With a date in his current North American tour, Shabaka Hutchings' mining of jazz's cultural memory will be on full display next month at Town Hall. Richly explored in his previous projects and quartets over the course of the last decade, Hutchings' ensembles include Sons of Kemet, its splinter trio The Comet Is Coming, Melt Yourself Down, Afro-futurist outfit The Ancestors, and as a guest player with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra. So there is possibly no better player in contemporary jazz more equipped to lead a quartet exploring the fringes of the territory once mapped out by postbop, Afrofuturist and spiritual jazz luminaries, Charles Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, and the aforementioned Sun Ra. His albums have found a home on Impulse!, the legendary and influential American jazz label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, and Bill Evans at the peak of their 1960's output. This adds another weighty dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with American jazz, placing him among the players whose legacy he’s endeavoring to subvert, deconstruct, and expound upon. All of which, Hutchings enthusiastically details in his interview for The Guardian, "History Needs to Be Set Alight: Shabaka Hutchings on the Radical Power of Jazz". Following these interviews, he performed a series of concerts "soaring to unfettered heights" on international stages, and in the years since has "shifted towards the meditative", after stepping away from the saxophone in 2023. This maven of "The New British Jazz Explosion" has been reassessing his art, exploring the gentler timbres of the Japanese shakuhachi on his most recent solo endeavor, "Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace", an elegant rebirth in which, "The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings is on a Fresh Journey: Flutes.".

Embodied by the Mats Eilertsen Trio, Thomas Strønen, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Tord Gustavsen Trio, Keith Jarrett's work with Jan Garbarek, and the quartet led by the late Tomasz Stanko, such players and ensembles comprise a corpus of the European-centric jazz which characterizes "The ECM Sound". The significance of the ECM label to the extended international jazz community, and its five decades of encompassing broad tangents both inside and outside of jazz, classical, avant-garde improvisation, and chamber music experimentation can't be overstated. Co-founded by producer Manfred Eicher, Manfred Scheffner and Karl Egger in Munich in 1969, the label's prestige has been meticulously constructed over five decades of "The Pristine Empire of ECM" bearing their distinctly refined auditory qualities and visual aesthetic. Dana Jennings "ECM: CDs Know that Ears Have Eyes" for the New York Times mines ECM's ensuing decades, focusing specifically on the imprint's meeting of sound, material, image and its half-century of "Manfred Eicher's Search for the Sublime". The ECM sound has also come to be epitomized by a new generation of players, outside of the Scandinavian scenes that initially defined it. Such is the case of the prolific pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer, who was rewarded Downbeat's 2015 Artist of the Year, and profiled by the New York Times in their "DNA of a Polymath, Restlessly Mutating". His newest trio alongside bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, developed its intuitive real-time exchanges in performances like those on the current tour, wherein "Vijay Iyer Wants to be Heard Loud and Clear" in Earshot Jazz Festival's night at Nordstrom Recital Hall. The reviews in the pages of The Guardian describe their synergy as a "an object lesson in music for the heart, head, and feet", which often sounds like displaced blues in its reflection of Miles Davis' postbop bands from the 1960s, or even their contemporaries in The Bad Plus, as they "push jazz into the future", through exercises as "a trio of rare intuition", in improvisations that sound simultaneously inside and outside the harmonies. Its in these two recent recordings for ECM, "Uneasy", and this year's "Compassion", they have established that, "Vijay Iyer’s New Trio Is a Natural Fit". Photo credit: Fadi Kheir

PJ Harvey's "I Inside the Old Year Dying", "Orlam" & North American Tour: Sept 11 - Oct 14 | "PJ Harvey on Doubt, Desire, and Deepest Darkest Dorset" | The Guardian

Sharing the company of some of the most influential bands of the era, such as Pixies, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, in which artists who were once underground found themselves ascending to the highest levels of popular culture, fueled by the cultural and economic abundance and liberalizing zeitgeist of the 1990s, the music of PJ Harvey defined that decade like few others. Her first album, born of the disassembly of her role in the band Automatic Dlamini as a vocalist, guitarist and saxophonist, playing alongside frontman, John Parish, was picked up by influential British independent label, Too Pure. Having only released a single, which instantly had play thanks to John Peel, and press in the then widely-read weeklies NME and Melody Maker, and championed as being "charged with aggressive eroticism and rock fury. It careens from blues to goth to grunge, often in the space of a single song." in the pages of Rolling Stone, by the time of 1992's debut album "Dry", Polly Jean Harvey was almost instantly established as one of the major musical voices of the era. Her vertical cultural ascension continued that year with the signing to her longterm home, Island Records in 1992. Hot on the heels of the first of their Peel Sessions, the band traveled to Cannon Falls, Minnesota to record their next album with indie legend Steve Albini, founder of such bands as Big Black and Shellac. The producer of some of the most memorable albums of that decade passed unexpectedly earlier this year, and many of those who's art was enhanced by his singular style and artistic philosophy spoke with The Guardian, “PJ Harvey, Mogwai and More on Steve Albini”. The resulting album "Rid of Me", would be the band's major label debut in May 1993, and initiate a chain of releases created alongside producers Flood and John Parish, that would find themselves in placements within Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Records of All-Time. Few albums and artists so fully expressed the rough edged, hyperkinetic songwriting energy, hybridization of underground styles, and general zeitgeist of the era as "Dry", "Rid of Me", and 1995's "To Bring You My Love". It was indisputable at this point that Harvey was an artist of-and-from her time, and as The Guardian states in their profile, "PJ Harvey: A Singular Talent, She Dances to Her Own Tune".

By the end of the 1990s, a new phase, tempered by introspective moods, more spare arrangements, and a lush, refined production arrived with her first major duo album with John Parish "Dance Hall at Louse Point", and was then further polished to perfection on the 1998 high water mark, "Is this Desire?". Harvey expanded her musical vocabulary again on the multifaceted arrangements of "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea", the following dynamic, "Uh Huh Her". Their decades-long and fruitful collaboration and friendship, and the production of the albums that closed out the last years of the 1990s were illuminated in the pages of The Quietus, "A Woman, A Man: PJ Harvey And John Parish Interviewed". By the mid-2000's a clearly delineated shift toward a stripped down minimalist on albums like "White Chalk", and following in rapid succession, the second major collaboration with Parish, "A Woman A Man Walked By" of 2007 and 2009 respectively. This third stylistic phase of sorts initiated in the new millennium finds her songwriting more restrained and inward-looking. Yet it also expresses a newfound point of entry for her creative enterprises, “I Feel Like I’ve Just Begun”: An Interview with PJ Harvey", with expanded instrumentation outside of the rock lineup, as heard on 2011's "Let England Shake", and 2016's "The Hope Six Demolition Project". Departing from her longtime home of Island Records, with last year's "I Inside the Old Year Dying" on Partisan, Harvey has been exploring the historic and fictional lore of her home of Dorset. Set in a magical-realist outpost of the West Country, the singer-songwriter’s "Orlam" delights in Dorset dialect and folklore, and it is these themes of "Light and Dark, Ecstasy and Melancholy", that define her most recent body of work. The UK performances of this work have been described as a "Haunting Journey into a Fantastical Dorset World", expressing the album's "Disquieting Escape into the Wilds of Dorset". Yet PJ Harvey herself was motivated to further test the mettle of these materials and herself and band live, "‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on Doubt, Desire and Deepest, Darkest Dorset", with the undeniable results on full exhibition this fall in North America, and a date at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. Photo credit: Richard Isaac

“Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” at SIFF Cinema: Sept 18 - Nov 20

Hailed as quintessentially British cinema, the films of Powell and Pressburger in fact were born of the creative energy when Michael Powell combined his dynamic direction and editing, with the elegant, incisive writing of Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish Hungarian emigré. Their core creative team, the production company they titled The Archers, was made up of individuals from across Europe, channeling their cross-border collective talents into a filmmography which took flight into complexly woven narratives defined by its lush colors, humanistic ethos and a dream-like romanticism. No filmmography stands on an island of its own making, but the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are so elevated over the body of British cinema, that they might be considered as being in a loftier realm. Concurrently, for many decades, this realm that their films occupy was also shrouded in obscurity, neglect, and inaccessibility. This status can be charted back to the box-office failure, and Powell’s critical shunning after the rejection of the themes explored in his then-controversial "Peeping Tom" of 1960. But by that decade, many of the pair’s joint glories from "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" to "The Red Shoes", had been recut then spurned, left to neglect and decay. Martin Scorsese, who's singular and essential restoration work with his World Cinema Foundation, would help to restore and resurrect both "...Colonel Blimp" and "The Red Shoes", for Janus Films and The Criterion Collection. Following these essential restorations, the film press has had a major reassessment of the work, hailing "'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' as one of the great works of art in the history of film", the "sublime celestial romance that is, 'A Matter of Life and Death'", "Dancing for Your Life" in the case of "The Red Shoes", and celebrating "Tales of Hoffmann"'s "over-the-top 1950s neo-Romanticism tipping over into surrealism"

This past year, Martin Scorsese and longtime collaborator and editor, Thelma Schoonmaker paid tribute to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the pages of Sight & Sound, as well as dedicating a personal tribute to the filmmakers’ legacy, in the form of the documentary, “Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger”. Scorsese went further, proclaiming his admiration and love of their art, "Kings of the Movies: Martin Scorsese on Powell & Pressburger". But he and Schoonmaker have hardly been the sole champions of the riches the two directors gave to the world. Beginning in the 1970s, critics, scholars, and curators began reviving and reclaiming the films, and in the ensuing decades, Powell and Pressburger have influenced creatives ranging from Derek Jarman, to Matthew Bourne, Kate Bush, Darren Aronofsky, and Tilda Swinton, finding inspiration their "Cinema of Rejecting Hatred and Fear". With last year's "Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger" the BFI aimed to introduce the work of The Archers to a new generation of imaginations, filmgoers and creatives, in the largest and most wide-ranging exploration of the legendary writer-producer-director team to be theatrically presented. This same retrospective was then announced to tour US and Canada, with a date at Seattle's SIFF Cinema. For this, we can thank programmer Greg Olson, who continues his essential work after "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off", with the elimination of his position at Seattle Art Museum. It should also be noted, that in addition to the loss of Olson specifically as the programmer of the longest running film noir series in America, the position has remained unfilled. Instead, SAM’s plan appears to be, to bring cat videos, guest chefs, and miniature golf to the museum. Subsequently, in the years since, Olson has rented SIFF Cinema as a guest programmer, bringing his film noir, Italian, and Fellini series to their screens. Now this fall, he has collaborated with the BFI to present “Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”, with a very special screening of "A Matter of Life and Death" featuring Thelma Schoonmaker in-person, as well in attendance at Scorsese's "Raging Bull", the following night.