Letter From The Director

Volume 40, No. 06

The numbers on the cover tell the tale. This issue of Earshot Jazz takes us halfway through our 40th year of publication. That would mean at least two million individual copies, distributed free of charge in area coffee shops, bookstores, music venues, and news boxes around the city since December of 1984, showing up month after month as “A Mirror and Focus” in support of Seattle’s incredible jazz community. In addition to the time-sensitive content of performance listings, community news, and artist profiles, the collective body of Earshot magazines, now digitally archived in their entirety at earshot.org, serves as a living historical document of one of America’s most vibrant jazz scenes. 

And speaking of documenting Seattle’s jazz history, we’re happy and proud to feature Earshot Jazz founder Paul de Barros and writer Alexa Peters on this month’s cover. As the spark behind the Earshot Jazz idea, and the author of the 1993 book, Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle, de Barros stands as the city’s foremost scholar on Seattle jazz history. Appropriately, he and Peters, whose journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and The Seattle Times, among others, are at work on a new book that will pick up the story where Jackson Street After Hours leaves off, taking a deep dive into the recent 50 years of Seattle jazz connections. We can’t wait to see it!

History is being written each day, and the community we’re creating is the inheritance of today’s students. The importance of dedicated arts and humanities education to Seattle’s — and humankind’s — overall good cannot be overstated. Accordingly, we congratulate all the young jazz artists from Garfield, Roosevelt, and Bothell High Schools for representing the Seattle area so well at the recent Essentially Ellington competition at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. 

We are proud of the remarkable, 40-year legacy of  Earshot Jazz magazine. We’re enormously grateful to all of the writers, photographers, editors, researchers and distributors who make this magazine relevant and reliable time after time. And because, as you might easily imagine, a labor of love like the Earshot magazine is far from financially self-supporting, we’re super grateful to all of the individual donors and subscribers who keep the presses rolling over the years. Thank you all!! 

We’re picking up passengers for the next 40 years! Get on board. Join us! Please make a donation today at earshot.org. Thank you!

—JOHN GILBREATH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR