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    A New Set of Gits Releases Gives Mia Zapata Her Voice Back

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    The Seattle frontwoman was killed in 1993, as her punk band was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Remastered recordings provide a chance to rewrite her story.Here’s how I wish the story of the Gits could be told: Four hardworking musicians finally escaped the grind of underpaid gigs and indie recordings and followed such compadres as Nirvana to global fame, led by the poetic howls of Mia Zapata, heiress apparent to Janis Joplin and Patti Smith.Here’s the story you may already know, as told by shows including “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Forensic Files,” and the documentary “The Gits”: Talented singer found raped and murdered on a Seattle street just as her band was on the cusp of success.In an attempt to bring what might have been to life, the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop is releasing remastered recordings by the Gits on Nov. 13. While the band was together, Zapata, the bassist Matt Dresdner, the guitarist Andy Kessler (a.k.a. Joe Spleen) and the drummer Steve Moriarty released only one album of their complex thrash rock (Kessler calls it “five-chord punk”): “Frenching the Bully” (1992). Sub Pop’s digital releases will also include three LPs of unfinished recordings, early work and live tracks. In December a concert album, “Live at the X-Ray,” will arrive for the first time.“It’s been a long, long road to get to where we are,” Dresdner, 57, said in a video interview from Seattle with Kessler. “There were decades through which I didn’t have the bandwidth or emotional strength to attack a project like this.” As the group worked to finally make its music available, a “secondary motivation” arose, he said. “Mia’s talent as a singer — the music we were able to make together — we hope will be the first sentence, moving forward.”By 1993 the Gits had paid their dues and honed their sound. But their ascent was cut short by Zapata’s killing.David HawkesThe Gits formed after Dresdner saw Zapata perform at an open mic at Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1986. “When we started the band, it was because I fell in love with Mia’s voice,” he said. “It was so beautiful and so powerful, and so intimate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jazz Has a New Home in Seattle. One Caveat: The Place Is ‘For Lease.’

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      The nonprofit Seattle Jazz Fellowship has carved out a performance space in the historic Globe Building — for now — and is putting its economic model to the test.The Pacific Northwest might be synonymous with grunge rock, but Seattle’s music scene has historically maintained a rich undercurrent of jazz. Even in the 1990s, with plaid-clad darlings riding high on barre chords, the trumpeter Thomas Marriott recalls an ideal downtown scene for budding improvisers to “pay dues,” a sort of low-cost, low-pressure musician’s utopia where rent could be made in a single weekend’s worth of gigs, and “you could just take your horn, walk up and down the street and see people you knew.”Marriott, 48, is a longtime fixture in the area’s jazz community and knows better than most what makes an operable scene. “Bandstands and elders and youngsters,” he said. “The whole cycle.” Soft-spoken but fiercely opinionated, often wearing his signature orange-tinted glasses, Marriott won the prestigious Carmine Caruso Trumpet Competition in 1999 and used the prize money to move to New York. After several years, he returned to Washington State to build a livable career.But two decades later, art is barely sustainable in Seattle. Small and midsize jazz venues are floundering. Marriott calls the city’s musical pay scale “abysmal.” “The whole crux of the problem,” he said, “is that economically, local jazz is not really much of a commercial enterprise.” Rent is too high. Tables don’t turn over enough. Tastes have shifted.Tired of watching the scene ebb, Marriott plotted a solution: the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, a nonprofit he founded in 2021 with the goals of building community, increasing mentorship and reducing barriers to entry for performers and listeners. The Fellowship entered a new phase this year when it moved into historic Pioneer Square, a waterfront neighborhood that originated as a Gold Rush-era den of vice and still endures exacerbated booms and busts. The landscape architect Ilse Jones, a Pioneer Square advocate with an ownership stake in the rustic 1891 Globe Building, was searching for a new tenant last winter and thought the struggling block would benefit from jazz artists. Someone to “enliven the place,” as she put it.“We’re an ideal tenant for a less than ideal space,” went Marriott’s pitch. “We really only need four walls and a bathroom.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Barrier-Breaking Conductor Will Lead the Seattle Symphony

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      Xian Zhang will be the first woman and person of color to lead the Seattle Symphony, and one of only two women leading a top-tier American orchestra.Xian Zhang, a renowned conductor who has helped bring the New Jersey Symphony to new heights over the past eight years, will be the Seattle Symphony’s next music director, the orchestra announced on Thursday.When she takes the podium in 2025, Zhang, 51, will be the first woman and the first person of color to lead the Seattle Symphony in its 121-year history, and one of only two women leading a top-tier American orchestra. (The other is Nathalie Stutzmann, the Atlanta Symphony’s music director since 2022.)Zhang, who was born in Dandong, China, and moved to the United States in 1998, said she would work to attract new audiences in Seattle, including more young professionals, families and people of color.“My goal is to have the symphony become even more of a musical icon and a magnet for the city,” she said. “We need to be more obvious and attractive.”Zhang, whose full name is pronounced she-YEN JONG, emerged as a favorite because of her “impeccable technique” and her warm relationship with the orchestra’s musicians and audiences, said Krishna Thiagarajan, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. She made her debut with the Seattle Symphony in 2008 and has been a regular in recent years, earning praise from critics and audience members.“There’s an electricity between her and the orchestra, and an electricity between her and the audience,” Thiagarajan said. “You can feel it in the hall.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seattle Repertory Theater Cuts Staff to Refocus on Producing

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      The institution, Seattle’s pre-eminent repertory theater, says it is making the cuts so it can focus its resources on productions.As nonprofit theaters around the country grapple with continuing financial troubles and a changed post-pandemic theatergoing landscape, Seattle Rep announced this week that it would lay off 12 percent of its employees.The move by Seattle Rep, the city’s pre-eminent repertory theater, underscores the painful calculus that nonprofit theaters across the industry are facing. As the financial crisis in regional theaters continues, many have pared down programming or shaved costs by relying on co-productions with other theaters.The theater says it is cutting administrative roles to prioritize production. It is cutting its head count from 108 to 95, a net loss of 13 full-time jobs.“There has to be some sort of action in response to what’s happening in the field,” said the theater’s artistic director, Dámaso Rodríguez. “Some folks suspend production for a while. That’s not the approach we’re taking.”The theater, founded in 1963, has a storied history. It helped start Richard Gere’s professional acting career when he was 19, was home to the original workshop production of Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer-winning play “The Heidi Chronicles” and saw the first reading of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”But like many theaters, Seattle Rep is facing financial challenges. It has lost more than half of its subscribers — who buy tickets for multiple shows at a time — since the pandemic began. It is expected to report a $335,000 deficit on a $16 million budget when its current fiscal year ends this month. Rodríguez said the newly announced cuts were part of a three-year plan to better position the theater for the future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift-Quake: Fans Cause Seismic Activity at Seattle Concert

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      Seismometers can pick up many types of ground vibrations but this drew comparisons to the “Beast Quake” of 2011, when Seattle football fans roared in celebration of a last-minute Seahawks touchdown.“I shake it off, I shake it off,” Taylor Swift sang. And boy did her fans deliver.A Taylor Swift concert in downtown Seattle last weekend shook the ground so hard, it registered signals on a nearby seismometer roughly equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, seismologists said.“It’s certainly the biggest concert we’ve had in a while,” said Mouse Reusch, a seismologist at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors earthquake activity in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re talking about 70,000 people and all the music and paraphernalia associated with the concert.”The so-called “Swift Quake” recorded a maximum ground acceleration of roughly 0.011 meters per second squared, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University.Seismologists use acceleration to measure ground vibrations, which are then converted to the more conventional Richter scale, the common measurement for earthquakes.Seismometers can pick up ground vibrations of all types — including from cars and stampeding cattle — but the magnitude of the “Swift Quake” has drawn comparisons to the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011. That seismic activity was triggered when Seattle Seahawks fans roared in celebration following a last-minute touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, the running back whose nickname is “Beast Mode.”Reusch of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network said that the activity at the time was close to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake. The “Swift Quake” was recorded by the same seismic station, located just outside Lumen Field.The readings occurred throughout both of Taylor Swift’s concerts on the nights of July 22 and 23 and was sustained throughout. The shaking of the ground was more than “twice as hard” as at the 2011 Seahawks game, Caplan-Auerbach said. While this was 0.3 magnitude greater than in 2011, that’s a twofold difference under the Richter scale, which is logarithmic.A comparison of ground vibrations recorded by a seismometer near Lumen Field in Seattle for the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011 and the Swift Quake, which shook the earth twice as hard.Jackie Caplan-AuerbachThe likely cause was a combination of the music from the concert’s sound system and Taylor Swift’s fans — sometimes known as Swifties — dancing in sync with it, seismologists said.The pop megastar is currently four months into her Eras Tour, a sold-out 52-date national tour that has drawn immense crowds of Swifties to hear her perform songs spanning her 10-album career.Her opening Arizona show in March drew about 70,000 fans. Ticket prices for her show in Santa Clara on Friday were selling for up to $20,000 on Vivid Seats, a secondhand ticket exchange.The two back-to-back concerts in Seattle logged a near-identical pattern on the seismometer, Reusch said, which suggested the sets were nearly identical as well.“That was surprising to me, that we’re able to see something so coherent,” she said. “One was offset by about 26 minutes because it was late.”The shaking at both shows reached a maximum peak twice, first around 7:30 p.m., and the second around 9:30 p.m., according to data shared with The Times.It was not immediately clear which Taylor Swift songs caused the peaks. Besides “Shake It Off,” the set list included “Love Story,” “Bad Blood,” and “Anti-Hero,” all songs guaranteed to get Swifties on their feet.While the concerts shook the ground exceptionally hard, Caplan-Auerback said, it is important to understand that seismometers pick up signals from “anything that shakes the ground,” including cars, trains and even wind.Nor are Taylor Swift’s earthshaking abilities unique to the music world.The seismometer also recorded signals when The Weeknd played at Lumen Field on Aug. 25, 2022, Caplan-Auerback said, though they were not as strong.Beyoncé will be playing there on Sept. 14, she said. “I’ll be looking at that for sure.”As for Reusch, she was encouraged by the public attention.“Maybe there’s some young Swifties out there that will some day become seismologists or earth scientists,” she said. “That would be a real happy ending.” More