John Gilbreath photo by Daniel Sheehan
For a man who’s given thousands of introductions, he needs none—at least not to you, our steadfast Earshot readers.
Long a fixture on stages and airwaves across the Sound and beyond, John Gilbreath looms large, making his departure from the helm of our beloved Earshot Jazz that much more profound.
It’s hard to do this without any platitudes: an instrumental figure, a visionary leader; a final curtain call, an end of an era. How do you distill a career spanning three-and-a-half decades of service to the art form, its artists, its audiences, into a thousand words?
Well to start, you have to go back to the beginning, before said career even launched.
“Just Show Up”
The son of a daughter of the Depression, Gilbreath grew up under the mentality that “you have to work all the time…. all of my siblings had three, four jobs going through school.”
Jazz came to him when he was around 10 years old, and he tried to come in through the door like a lot of his peers at the time: the drums. After a brief spell playing in his teenage years, Gilbreath abandoned the instrument but stayed close to music through photography, working for a number of years in the Minneapolis scene.
A life-saving course correction occurred some time later, including after a stint in the hospital. “Sometimes we reach in and save our own lives, and we don’t even know we’re doing it at the time,” he says. “After the fog cleared…I felt like my life was over here, and my work was over there, and they needed to come together.” Gilbreath set forth to find alignment between his career and core values, arriving to his birthplace of Seattle in the late ‘80s.
His past, coupled with “a fundamental work ethic to just show up,” inevitably led Gilbreath to volunteer with Earshot Jazz, and in 1991, he applied for the role of executive director.
Now, 33 years later, Earshot, under his leadership, is celebrated around the world by jazz artists and presenters alike. Gilbreath himself has become a major player in arts presentation, education, and advocacy, frequently serving as grants panelist, nominating committee member, emcee, and board member for respected institutions like the MacArthur Fellows, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Doris Duke Foundation.
And yet, despite these accolades, Gilbreath admits to the insecurity that creeps up from time to time—even now, as the community celebrates his retirement. “Frankly,” he confides, “imposter syndrome never ends.”
Pivot Points
As John and I logged on for this final interview, I listened across the screen—just two old friends sitting down for a chat.
“Sometimes, we’re at a pivot point in life—you know something very clear happens,” says Gilbreath. “Other times, it’s very subtle and cumulative and just builds.”
For me, that pivot point came in early 2014, when I went in to interview for a brand-new position at a local jazz non-profit, headquartered in Fremont, Seattle. The humble two-room office, with its large windows overlooking the heart of the “Center of the Universe,” floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with archives, and quirky artwork on the walls, felt like a place I could belong.
I was invited to see Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band that evening at the Seattle Art Museum—and I was hooked. Not only was it a transcendent performance, but the palpable sense of community, from the volunteers to the audience to the artists onstage, was immensely appealing to a recent transplant.
And so, Earshot Jazz became a full-time staff of three.
My first festival, headlined by the great, late Pharoah Sanders, was themed “Masters, Monsters and Mentors”—now, three descriptors apropos of the brain behind it. A master at his craft: after 30 years of working in stone sculpture, Gilbreath will be teaching a class at Pratt in the spring; a monster curator: opening ears and expanding minds through his DJing and booking; a mentor to all who’ve worked with him: interns who evolve into production managers, homegrown talents who explode onto the global stage.
A Front-Row Perspective
Dave Emerson and his wife Jane arrived in Seattle in 1973, after trucking for six months and needing a place to stop for a while. The city’s vibe appealed to them—”It’s just different here in the far upper left of the country,” says Dave.
The Emersons came to volunteer for Earshot in the ‘90s, and for 40 years, jazz was their soundtrack. It was rare to attend an Earshot show without seeing the two of them in the front row, basking in the music.
“John has always been able to bring in people either I haven’t heard live or often are totally new to me,” says Dave. “The contacts in the music world he has made and shared has enriched everyone who has taken time to listen.”
Although sadly Jane is no longer with us, her legacy as a devoted patron of the organization, along with her husband, lives on.
“Over the years, some people…have made a big impact on our lives. John is one of those people,” he says. “John, my ears go out to you.”
Carving One’s Legacy
Somehow finding time during the last week of the 2024 Earshot Jazz Festival—his last as executive director—Gilbreath, in a winding conversation filled fittingly with references from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Joseph Campbell and Eric Dolphy, shared what it means to grow and sustain a legacy.
Dolphy once said, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.”
Gilbreath ponders if that’s the reason he was drawn to working with stone, a passion he has pursued for 30 years, in parallel to his work in music.
“It’s not until somebody comes around and says, ‘Oh, I was at that concert, that really changed the way I look at music’ or ‘It changed my life,’” he says. “Then it comes alive again.”
“With stone, as opposed to making noise and then going away, stone is very quiet after you’ve worked on it,” he explains. “It’s rock’n’roll when you’re doing it, but once you’re done, it sits very quietly. It would sit forever until somebody moved it.”
Stone sculpture echoes Gilbreath’s earlier work in construction as a project manager and estimator before coming to Earshot. “There’s something about having the fruits of your labor in a realm that is very physical. You can drive by or go there and look at it and think, ‘Well, I did that,’” he reflects.
While the music itself may be ephemeral, Gilbreath has laid a sturdy foundation for Earshot Jazz. With a devoted audience, strong community presence, healthy financials, and a highly capable interim director already putting in the work, Gilbreath is assured of the organization’s future.
“It’s one thing to build the legacy, and for me, that has just been a question of showing up and doing the work, day after day after day,” he says. “In all of this work I’ve been doing, the one word I need to stop and take a look at is ‘responsibility’ [because] as far as framing the legacy and communicating it—that’s up to me.”
One Helluva Ride
Gilbreath is the first to acknowledge Earshot would not be where it is today without the tireless work of Managing Director, Karen Caropepe, who has hired and trained staff and interns, led the charge in development, oversaw the implementation of a new database and website, and much more.
“I mean, what do you say?” she asks, reflecting on her colleague and friend of more than two decades. “If I start thinking about John leaving, I cry. He’s gonna be missed.”
A pause, and then, “What a ride.”
For someone who admits they’re not great at sitting still, Gilbreath’s grand plan for his first days of retirement is, simply, stasis.
“The main thing I want to do is just sit down for a while,” says Gilbreath. “I feel like I’ve been on a treadmill for 30 years and I just want to step off and let it just run next to me.”
But true to form, he won’t be idle for long: he’ll be back on his feet in February for a trip down to Colombia.
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It’s been more than a decade since I first stepped foot in the Earshot Jazz office at the Center of the Universe. I can definitively say, as can so many others, that my world became decidedly better with John Gilbreath—his impeccable ear, his devotion to the arts, his embrace of humanity, in all its flaws and splendors—in it.
Thanks for the ride, JG.
