The 67th annual Grammy Awards ceremony takes place this Sunday, and in the hours leading up to the evening’s televised extravaganza (starting at 5 p.m. PST, CBS/Paramount+), a number of Seattle-affiliated jazz artists will hope to have their names called in the Grammys Premiere Ceremony. The Premiere Ceremony starts streaming at 12:30 p.m. PST at live.grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s YouTube channel. We caught up with the hyper-talented säje singers and guitarist Bill Frisell before a busy weekend.
säje
If you believe Sara Gazarek and Johnaye Kendrick of vocal supergroup säje, the joy of continued Grammy nods — the group’s up for its third and fourth this year — hasn’t diminished in the face of semi-regularity. The quartet, pronounced like beige, formed in 2019 at a retreat in Palm Springs and has taken an express route to the land of critical acclaim.
A tune written at that retreat, the aptly titled “Desert Song,” was nominated for best arrangement, instrumental and vocals in 2021. A number they recorded with singer and pianist Jacob Collier, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” won the category three years later. This year, the group is up for best arrangement, instrumental and vocals for “Alma” (featuring Regina Carter on violin and former Seattleite Dawn Clement on piano) and best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella for its rendition of “Silent Night.”
Made up of Kendrick, Gazarek and fellow singers Erin Bentlage and Amanda Taylor — the latter two earned an additional Grammy nomination this year for Scott Hoying’s “Rose Without The Thorns” — säje has abundant Seattle ties. Taylor is from the area and long lived in Renton — she’s now in Boston. Gazarek grew up on Queen Anne and learned about jazz at Roosevelt High School, through which she performed as a vocal soloist at the Essentially Ellington competition under band director Scott Brown. “The trajectory of my time (at Roosevelt) really changed my life,” she said. It wasn’t common to have a teacher lead both the jazz band and jazz choir, as Brown did. “He had the choir singing (Count) Basie tunes and transcribing licks,” Gazarek said. “It was a hardcore jazz education.”
Kendrick moved to Seattle in 2010 after a stint of living and gigging in New Orleans, of which she simply says, “Too much fun!” She opened her laptop looking to leave the Big Easy and applied to the first posting she saw: a professor gig at a wee arts school called Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Kendrick lives in Tacoma now but still commutes north three days a week to teach during the semester. Of her own college experience, she remembers a certain professor — to remain unnamed — who said of her musical career, “You do have a backup plan, right?”
Kendrick laughs about it now. “I remember thinking: ‘When I have my first Grammy, that’ll show you!’” It’s a common reflex in the face of adversity, but for Kendrick seems prescient in hindsight, even if she never expected it to come true. “The first nomination,” she said of säje’s 2021 nod, “was totally unexpected. We wrote ‘Desert Song’ getting to know each other. It was like, ‘How did this happen? How did they even hear this?’ So that first one was a shock and an honor. And the rest it’s: ‘What? This is still going on?’”
Gazarek feels the same way. She remembers watching Grammy ceremonies as a kid, totally unaware that one day she might be there herself. “Even as I got my bearings in the music world,” she said, “I never had it as a goal. I never thought, ‘I’m gonna fight to win a Grammy!’”
As prestigious as the award is, Gazarek and Kendrick are quick to point out that The Recording Academy can’t possibly listen to every bit of music released each year. “Some gets overlooked,” says Kendrick. “Some isn’t submitted. But it’s still an honor.”
Gazarek agrees. At this point in her career, “You start to realize it’s not a definitive declaration of value. But it’s a beautiful gift, to be acknowledged by your peers in a sphere that large.”
Bill Frisell
Another acknowledged Seattleite — well, former, he lives in Brooklyn now — is guitarist Bill Frisell, who picked up his seventh and eighth Grammy nominations this year: for best contemporary instrumental album for his massive double-record “Orchestras (Live),” and best jazz instrumental album for trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s “Owl Song,” a trio session featuring Frisell and the drummer Herlin Riley.
For an artist as integral to his instrument and genre as Frisell, the total of eight lifetime nominations (including one win) might have fans squinting at Academy leanings. Pianist Chick Corea, to make a nonmusical, entirely quantitative example, earned 75 nods before passing in 2021. The banjoist Béla Fleck, a fellow 2025 nominee, has 42. Frisell, ever kind, would undoubtedly quail at such comparisons. He’s grateful for the recognition but, in typical fashion, is too busy writing and performing new music to attend the ceremony, which this year will be a more sedate, relief-oriented affair due to the recent Los Angeles wildfires.
“I’m in deep in preparing new music,” Frisell said during a stopover in Austin, Texas, near the start of a touring season spanning the U.S. and 10 European countries. “It’s starting up in full force right now, until I don’t know when. Which is great. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than playing.”
Frisell hopes that arranger Michael Gibbs — a longtime mentor, now in his late 80s — will earn some overdue Grammy recognition for “Orchestras (Live).” As for the record with trumpeter Akinmusire, a musician 30 years his junior, Frisell said, “I’m a huge fan. He’s one of my heroes.”
Frisell was being interviewed on a radio station in Paris, doing a “blindfold test” — a jazz tradition wherein musicians are asked, on the spot, to identify instrumentalists on a given record — when he heard Akinmusire’s distinctive tone on a Gerald Clayton song. “This sound came in, I almost didn’t even know what it was.” They wound up meeting years later during a Joni Mitchell celebration at Toronto’s Massey Hall, where drummer Brian Blade had assembled a top-notch backing band for the Canadian singer-songwriter.
“Soon after that,” said Frisell, “(Akinmusire) invited me to do a duet thing with him in Montreal. Then I started asking him to play as a guest with my band.” As the collaborations continued, Akinmusire called Frisell and drummer Riley into the studio after a gig in San Francisco. The sessions were astonishingly free-form — Herlin and Akinmusire had never played together. “It was a whole thing like, ‘What is this, what are we doing?’” Frisell said. “It was so courageous of (Akinmusire), to put us together without knowing what it was going to be. We were in some sort of zone.”
That “zone” is now Grammy nominated, another mark of emphasis on a lifetime journey that has Frisell working as hard as ever at 73 years old. But for him and säje both, a little hardware never hurts.