I first heard Paul Hoskin‘s annual solo concert on contrabass
clarinet at a Pioneer Square loft in the late 1990s. There wasn’t much
to see, only the outline of a lanky, swaying scarecrow grappling a
metal snake glinting in the shadows. The room was cold, but the
music, intense yet spare with leftover trails of notes somehow
engorging into chords, burned. That night I witnessed the bravery, the
raw risk, of freely improvised music: Failure—and
courage—haunts all music, especially when it is made entirely in
the moment with no sheet music, charts, or other foreordained
patterns.
Afterward, I approached Hoskin and, astonished, wondered if he had
indeed been playing a contrabass clarinet, an instrument mostly seen in
orchestration textbooks. “That’s right,” he told me. “Good eye. Not
many people know the instrument.” Hoskin does, wresting from it
high chiming notes usually heard on standard-issue B-flat clarinets but
also the guttural rumbles expectorated by the contrabass’s smaller
sibling, the bass clarinet.
Along with Wally Shoup, Hoskin is one of the godfathers of
freely improvised music in Seattle; he launched the Seattle
Improvised Music Festival in 1985 with an evening much like
Derek Bailey‘s famed Company Week, which musters
musicians into new and unfamiliar duos, trios, and bigger groups. Now
one of Seattle’s cultural treasures, it remains North America’s
longest-running festival devoted to freely improvised music.
Compared to other improvisers of his stature, Hoskin appears on
too few recordings, most of them compilations; he is miscredited as
“Paul Hoskins” on a splendid disc issued by Baltimore’s famed High Zero
festival and graces the all-star 1998 disc UnFolkUs (Unit Circle
Rekkids). The best way to hear him is live.
After a hiatus, Hoskin now resumes his annual solo concert (Fri Oct
16, Chapel Performance Space, 8 pm, $5–$15 sliding-scale
donation). His 2007 performance at the Chapel surveyed the entire
compass of the instrument, emitting near-pure sine tones, prickly
spikes cocooned in breathy hiss, and notes low enough to evoke the
near-frozen undulation of a breeze-blown power line. Count on a
journey that broods as well as revels in silence, repetition, and
resonance.
This week the Earshot Jazz Festival (through Nov 8, various
venues, see www.earshot.org for
details) begins with saxophonist Miguel Zenón, who guest
stars with the smokin’ Garfield High School Jazz Band (Fri Oct
16, Triple Door, 7 and 9:30 pm, $11–$22). Also, Chad
McCullough, a quiet gift to the Seattle jazz scene, leads a quintet
(Tues Oct 20, Tula’s, 8:30 pm, $12) that showcases his near-rapturous
fluidity on the trumpet. More on the Earshot festival next week. 
