by Jesse Ziebart / Cultural Programs Manager, BIMA

This year, BIMA took the Within/Earshot Jazz Festival to places it has never been before—both figuratively and literally! For the first time, Within/Earshot was offered for free and presented digitally, allowing households across the globe to tune in. People from all over “visited” BIMA, streamed concerts, lectures, and programs all month long, allowing the museum to continue to produce meaningful and compelling digital programs throughout the lockdown and beyond.

Within/Earshot 2020 streamed from BIMA’s galleries, presenting concerts featuring some of the freshest, most exciting jazz voices in our region surrounded by the incredible art from BIMA’s Fiber 2020 exhibition. The best part about this online jazz festival? All of the concerts are available to watch (or rewatch) anytime you want! Check out each concert here:

• Jacqueline Tabor Jazz Band in Concert
• En Canto in Concert
• Jean Chaumont Group in Concert
• Evan Flory-Barnes in Concert

The festival also traveled off-site to Seattle to visit Jazz Alley and Washington Hall for lively conversations about jazz with musician Marina Albero, John Bishop (Founder of Origin Records), Carol Handley (Music Director at KNKX), Brian Kirk (Professor of Jazz Studies, Seattle Central), Rob Perry (Jazz Alley), and Amanda Wilde (KUOW’s “The Swing Years”), and artist Zia Gipson presented an interactive art workshop on improv & abstraction. Most of these presentations are also available to revisit anytime you’d like:

• A Conversation with Rob Perry of Jazz Alley
• “The Future of Jazz” Panel Discussion
• “Swing Years Unboxed” with Amanda Wilde

We would also like to extend enormous gratitude to our sponsors for supporting Within/Earshot so enthusiastically and so faithfully: Thank you, Realogics/Sotheby’s, City of Bainbridge Island, KNKX 88.5, and Steve Davis for championing jazz music and making this year’s festival possible. We would also like to thank all of this year’s be-masked and be-shielded staff and participants for diving into music, art, and conversation with such heart and generosity, and for doing so with safety in mind. Within/Earshot was rich, compelling, and fun, and it was safely produced and presented and we could not have done it without your diligence: thank you.

This is an important time in the world and it is an important time for art, so thank you for connecting with us and for keeping art in your hearts. We sure miss you! BIMA will continue to roll with the punches, creating programs and adapting them to the evolving world we live in. We look forward to doing so with ingenuity, imagination, and with the belief that we will all be together again soon.

Onward!