After Grunge Improvisational Music Is Taking Over Some Of The Seattle Haunts That Spawned The Grunge Age

Pearl Jam rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard is on stage in a smoky club, playing to a small room full of knit caps and pierced noses.

The scene could be mistaken for a vintage view of Northwest rock, circa 1990.

But no heads are banging, nobody’s wailing into a mike. Gossard is playing quiet backup, giving a frenetic saxophone player plenty of room at center stage.

The wiry saxophonist works his horn like a bass drum, leaning in and releasing a cascade of wild notes with every beat, or like an assault rifle, firing measures of music at Gossard, local jazz drummer Mike Stone, the hip young crowd.

Inspired by a dance-music craze and bolstered by Seattle’s solid jazz history, that free-form, horn-laden flavor is peppering and sometimes overpowering the city’s renowned rock recipe.

Gossard and other reluctant icons have responded by making surprise appearances at former grunge temples around town, improvising with less high-profile musicians.

“When you’re out on a tour and you’re playing the songs you know the structures to, there’s just a lot less that can go wrong,” Gossard says. “With free form, it’s either really great or you can fall on your face, or it can be really great and fall-onyour-face all in the same song.

“You’ve got to be willing to take chances and expose yourself emotionally. That’s what I’m addicted to,” says Gossard, who was publicly playing bass guitar for the first time at the Crocodile Cafe.

And the tattoo-and-T-shirt set is lining up at clubs around town to hear something new.

“An awful lot of it is the improv, free-form type of jazz. That seems to be going over big with this kind of crowd,” said Jason Fitzgerald, a booking agent for Moe, a former rock-only club that recently started showcasing jazz acts. “I think they’re just getting kind of bored with rock.”

Another factor is the dance scene accompanying “acid jazz,” most often defined as free-form music played live over pre-recorded tracks with a danceable beat. The form, traced to clubs in England, moved to New York and recently caught on in Seattle.

Moe began booking free-form combos after the sell-out success of the Sunday acid-jazz dance night it introduced last winter. The Weathered Wall, another Seattle nightspot, often features acid jazz on its main stage while more traditional trios play an upstairs room.

“It’s a phenomenon that is happening in Seattle right now,” said Lynette Westendorf, the program director for Earshot Jazz, a 10-yearold monthly newsletter that serves as the voice of the region’s jazz community. “In the last year and a half the opportunities have really begun to expand for improvised music.”

The growth of improv makes sense in Seattle, where jazz roots run deep. Many of the workers who came here for World War II shipyard jobs were jazz lovers and they sparked a boom in music clubs. Many musicians stuck around after the war and now serve as role models.

“There’s always just enough room (here) that if you’re good, you can make it,” says trumpeter Floyd Standifer, who has toured with Quincy Jones but prefers the local jazz scene: “It isn’t as vicious as the East Coast, and it’s more humane than a lot of other places.”

Nationally recognized music programs at city schools have nurtured players with diverse styles. And graduates of suburban high school jazz programs, begun in the last decade, are starting to strut their stuff. But they’re showing off Seattlestyle, by thumbing their noses at tradition.

“The fact that the Northwest is considered to be one of those irreverent places is not an accident,” Standifer says. “This whole region was populated by people who came out here because they were fiercely independent.”

Westendorf rattles off a list of local acts who have embraced innovative jazz styles, including Disband, which mixes a spoken-word lead vocalist with an electronic sound, and the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, an all-female horn group named after the female musician who had posed as man so she could succeed in male-dominated jazz.

“All these borders musically and artistically are being broken down. I think it’s fantastic,” she says. “People are more willing to listen to music they don’t understand … with a different harmonic form than they may be used to with traditional pop and jazz.”

Clubs such as Moe and the Weathered Wall are already straddling those borders, and older grunge-delivery rooms such as the Crocodile, the O.K. Hotel, the OffRamp and RCKNDY have been opening their mikes to oftenunadvertised jam sessions.

For example, Skerik, the onename-only saxophonist who played with Gossard at the Croc, jammed with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and local violinist Eyvind Kang at a RCKNDY Halloween show.

“To get up there and play freeform or stuff that’s not really together when you don’t have your dead-ringer singer with you, it’s a little more of a challenge,” Gossard said.

Skerik recalled his conversation with a woman watching a more traditional rock band after his freeform performance.

“She said, `I like these guys, but I know what they’re going to do next. I didn’t know what you were going to do next, so it was more exciting.”’