Human Spirit

Originally published in Earshot Jazz October 2012

Tight Seattle musical friends—trumpeter Tom Marriott, saxophonist Mark Taylor and drummer Matt Jorgensen—connected for three releases on Seattle’s Origin Records – Crazy: The Music of Willie Nelson, Flexicon and Another Morning. Along with New York organist Gary Versace, they debuted Human Spirit to critical acclaim in a 2009 recording on Origin.   

Last year the trio joined with New York artists Orrin Evans (Bobby Watson’s former pianist) and Essiet Essiet (Art Blakey’s last bassist) under the Human Spirit banner for two nights of sold out performances at the Earshot Festival. The artists from the Big Apple vivified the harmonic backdrop while the Emerald City performers moistened melodies and rhythms of the foreground. Selections of the live performance were released as Dialogue.

The program for this year’s festival performance will include original compositions by Marriott, Taylor, and Jorgensen from Dialogue plus new material. The group will perform in Chicago before the Seattle performance and hit the road to Philadelphia and New York City in November.



Taylor looks forward to the satisfying challenge of this performance because of “the freshness and uncertainty of getting up on stage with two musicians that I know very well, and two others that we don't.” He says, “Their interpretation and stylistic contributions to our tunes, and how that invariably steers us in different directions than we might otherwise go, is always intriguing to me.”

The sweet spot of social intimacy within artistic teams for maximum creative success also intrigues Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern. In studying Broadway musicals, Uzzi’s data revealed that the most successful work came from teams that “had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

This performance will be a reunion of Human Spirit, expanding their musical exploration where the comfortable and unfamiliar meet.