Seattle Jazz Supergroup Burn List Trades in Spooky, Lynchian Noir
Burn List CD Release Show
Wednesday, May 14
Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Ave. N.
206-679-6576.
$10 ($20 with CD).
7:30 p.m. All ages.
from The Seattle Weekly:
When many people hear the word “jazz,” they grumble. As Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins said in a recent interview, “Jazz is mistakes. You’re playing a song, but you are playing it wrong . . . [It’s] an accident waiting to happen.” Hubbins’ expert analysis be damned, Seattle’s jazz musicians have been playing all the right wrong notes of late, pushing the genre into uncharted territory by mashing its traditional forms with far-flung influences. Table & Chairs, a local jazz label founded by grads of UW’s excellent School of Music, purposefully signs artists with academic jazz knowledge who willingly skewer their work with all sorts of left-field weirdness that might make the seemingly unapproachable genre more fun and palatable for rock fans.
Take Burn List, the latest Table & Chairs signees. Something of a jazz supergroup, it brings together influential and celebrated trumpeter Cuong Vu, who has played with Laurie Anderson and David Bowie; Aaron Otheim, a keyboardist who also cuts his chops in an “experimental” band named Uncle Pooch; Chris Icasiano, an incredible, fluid percussionist who lends his talents to Table & Chairs’ flagship drum-assault band King Tears Bat Trip; and saxophonist Greg Sinibaldi, who plays with local manic indie band Heatwarmer. The result is a spooky, Lynchian noir sound that swirls in movements alternating between smooth, crisp grooves and maniacal breakdowns—a self-described intersection of “Ligeti to Albert Ayler to Aphex Twin to Meshuggah.”
Continue reading at The Seattle Weekly.
Seattle-area high school jazz bands fared less well than usual at the Essentially Ellington competition Saturday in New York.
