Bill Barton has posted a review of the first night of The Seattle Jazz Showcase featuring the Hadley Caliman Quintet and the Marc Seales Group.

The Seattle Jazz Showcase series got off to an auspicious start Monday night, October 15, at the Seattle Drum School’s LAB Performance Space …

Hadley Caliman’s quintet opened with “Morning Cycle,” a Thomas Marriott original that has a funky hard bop edge reminiscent of the heyday of Horace Silver and his classic Blue Note groups. Darius Willrich’s witty and swinging piano solo had some oblique allusions to what sounded like Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

It’s common for musicians to hit the stage running by beginning with an up tempo piece to get both themselves and the audience warmed up. Not so with this stunningly nuanced set from the Seales group. There was a long, introspective, deeply spiritual solo piano introduction that wended its way through a panoply of elegant and subtle variations on two traditional spirituals – “Bye and Bye” and “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen” – before morphing seamlessly into Seales’ composition “Soft.”

Click here to read the entire review.

Category:
Review, Seattle Jazz