Crusader for Cannabis

This Photography blog seattlephotographer is ending here at wordpress.com but continues to be updated as it moves over to the new address for Seattle Photographer at danielsheehan.com/blog. Please go and set your bookmark to continue to follow the work of Seattle Photographer Daniel Sheehan. Here is the final posting to this site.

For an assignment for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week I photographed Sunil K. Aggarwal, above, who is in his final year of an M.D.-Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. They were running an article on him because of his efforts to convince the American Medical Association to help get marijuana reclassified as a drug with medical benefits.

” For more than 30 years, the federal government has classified marijuana as a highly dangerous drug with no medical uses, and for more than a decade, the American Medical Association has endorsed that classification. But this month, the association called on the government to reconsider the drug’s current status alongside heroin and LSD, and to consider its medicinal potential.” from the article by Katherine Mangan in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

NINA BERMAN PINE BEETLES – PORTFOLIO

Nina Berman has photographed something we all need to be aware of especially here in the Pacific Northwest.

British Columbia is in the midst of a mountain pine beetle epidemic with millions of trees dying from the pine beetle infestation. Nina Berman narrates her portfolio of images from her Consequences by NOOR climate change project, British Columbia l Pine Beetles

Since 1990, more than 36 million acres of pine forests in British Columbia have been decimated by the mountain pine beetle. Experts predict that by 2014 at least 80 percent of the pines in British Columbia will be dead. No larger than a grain of rice, the pine beetle is endemic in Rocky Mountains of western North American. Winter temperatures below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit once kept the beetle in check. Warming trends have permitted the beetle larvae to survive the winter and proliferate at an astounding rate in forests from Mexico to Canada. Mature pine trees, weakened by drought, cannot withstand the onslaught, and as the beetle multiplies, younger trees also are falling prey. Dead trees are fodder for wild fires. The beetle kill has wreaked havoc on the economy of regions dependent upon logging and tourism. Authorities acknowledge that man cannot stop the rampage of the pine beetle. The beetle will eat until it runs out of food or until deeply cold winter temperatures return to kill its larvae. ?I felt,? says Berman, ?like I was seeing a cataclysmic shift in our understanding of what forests look like.

Nina’s portfolio is part of a larger project from Noor.:

From the frontiers of climate change comes Consequences by NOOR. Featuring the work of nine, internationally acclaimed photographers, this exhibition documents the devastating effects of climate change around the globe. These stunning photographs show not what might happen in the future but what is happening today.

The subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.

Consequences by NOOR premiers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 through December 18, 2009.

Consequences by NOOR goes on tour in 2010 and is available for booking. View our PRESS PAGE for information.

EarshotJazz Festival Closes

Evan Flory-Barnes conducts his ensemble in the premiere performance of his large chamber composition ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A CELEBRATION at Town Hall in the final presentation of the 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival.

What a great performance by the orchestra moving through a fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and classical music, complete with modern dancers and freestyle break dancers. The Seattle bassist and composer is excited premiering the large chamber work, a snapshot of the abundance of inspiration that can thread artistic mediums together in Seattle. The premiere of Acknowledgement of a Celebration features 35 musicians and ten dancers set to Flory-Barnes’s new compositions.

Flory-Barnes performs with an inclusive passion and expressive intensity, as though he were completely immersed in music. He regularly brings his trio, The Teaching, to the Lucid jazz club in the University District for an open community jam and hang. The Teaching appeared in the 2008 Earshot Jazz Festival at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. Photographs by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in jazz photography and portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with a story-telling approach creating award winning wedding photography.

Earshot Jazz Festival Week 2

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I have been on assignment for a week and a half now covering the Earshot Jazz Festival and we are about halfway through. I feel lucky to have been able to see so many great jazz performances and photograph them too. Shooting the CELEBRATION of HADLEY CALIMAN was a highlight. Wish I could have stayed for the whole show. Here is a sample from one night of the Festival. To see more complete coverage go to my jazz photography website EyeShotJazz.com

An all-star quintet featuring renowned saxophonist Hadley Caliman, the legendary Curtis Fuller (trombone), Larry Vukovich (piano), Jeff Chambers (bass), and Eddie Marshall (drums) concluded its Pacific Northwest tour in a special tribute concert to the Seattle-based tenor master. Photographs by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in jazz photography and portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with a story-telling approach creating award winning wedding photography.

The concert caps a six-city run of performances coordinated by Singer and Simpson Productions, celebrating Caliman’s lifetime contributions to American jazz music by featuring an outstanding ensemble of artists to perform with Caliman, who has played, recorded and toured with a list of luminaries, including Gerald Wilson, Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Bobby Hutcherson, and Freddie Hubbard, among many others.

Marco Benevento , piano, Matt Chamberlain, drums, and Reed Mathis, bass on stage at the Triple Door as Earshot Jazz hits midpoint in its second of the three week Jazz Festival.

Thirty-one-year-old keyboardist Marco Benevento has made his name reimagining and reshaping the music of his youth. Benevento fluidly integrates the sounds he came of age with — rock, jazz, hip-hop, and music from more distant cultures — into an organic and far-reaching sort of improvisational music. As he told David Rubien of the San Francisco Chronicle, “It’s instrumental music but it has all these elements: rock, songs, jazz, free jazz. [...] I feel like I’m happily in this place among other musicians I know in this thing that sounds new yet it’s totally vernacular. People understand what we’re doing.”

In addition to past projects, such as Quartet the Killer (a Neil Young tribute) and Bustle in Your Hedgerow (Led Zeppelin), this philosophy is well represented in his new album Me Not Me(recorded here at Chroma Sound in Seattle). Mixing originals with interpretations of works by such artists as My Morning Jacket, Deerhoof, Leonard Cohen, and Beck, Me Not Me presents Benevento with his trio of bassist Reed Mathis and drummers Matt Chamberlain and Andrew Barr. Valuing the strong melodies and harmonic structure of the borrowed source material, Benevento focused primarily on innovation in his arrangements and improvisations: “I got into sculpting the sound around the original piano parts by using some of my favorite keyboards and re-amping them in interesting ways.”

Combining Benevento’s characteristic whimsy, ear for melody, and sonic ingenuity with the frenetic energy of the trio produces unexpected and thrilling results. Benevento seems capable of exploring any musical ground that interests him; with results such as these, why not?

—Peter Walton in Earshot Jazz Festival program guide.

Art Brown (alto sax), Aaron Otheim (keyboards), Tim Carey (electric bass), and Tarik Abouzied (drums) of the group Hardcoretet play Weds night at Tula’s as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival.

Hardcoretet infuses deep grooves with plenty of heat. They had a good thing happening at Tula’s.

Hardcoretet focuses on the groove. They play funky, driving tunes that are intensely precise and warm with electricity, both literally and figuratively (their use of effects pedals allows alto saxophonist Art Brown’s gleaming tone to morph into a wavering murmur, while Tarik Abouzied’s thriving acoustic drum beats simply buzz). There is no lead instrument; the band’s voices weave in and out of each other in a swirling mix that is balanced without sounding controlled.

The Seattle-based group’s performance is a celebration of two major milestones: the release of their first full-length album,Experiments in Vibe, and their first performance at the Earshot Jazz Festival. The former represents a recorded declaration of the band’s tight, neon playing style, while the latter is a mark of the members’ continuing maturation into their hometown’s music scene (all four of them grew up in the greater Seattle area and attended Seattle universities). It’s an exciting time to be in Hardcoretet, because on top of those pieces of good news, the group is about to embark on a West Coast tour.

Here is music that flies in many different directions, but constantly pulsates around the groove, which moves in a straight line. Tim Carey pours out strong, fluid bass lines that smoothly coast over Tarik Abouzied’s dense, ecstatic carpet of percussion. Aaron Otheim’s whirling keyboard dances its way into the rhythm sometimes as acutely placed block chords, other times in wandering single notes that fall like drops of water. Art Brown spins a smooth tone into commanding, varied phrases that gently float above his fellow band mates’ playing. The band plays as a true team; the only member who might be the leader is the fifth one, the nameless one. If there is a leader, the leader is the groove.

—Nathan Buford from Earshot Jazz Festival Program guide.

Cassini Views of Saturn at Equinox

There are some fabulous new images of our neighbor Saturn and its fascinating rings and moons. Cassini Equinox Mission Website. These photos were among 23 imahes featured on The Big Picture.

“Checking in with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn’s rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images. Cassini continues to orbit Saturn, part of its extended Equinox Mission, funded through through September 2010. A proposal for a further extension is under consideration, one that would keep Cassini in orbit until 2017, ending with a spectacular series of orbits inside the rings followed by a suicide plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017.

Read all about the Cassini Spacecraft Mission and see the other (tax payer funded NASA) space photos at The Big Picture The Boston Globe’s photo blog.. Seattle Photographer Daniel Sheehan specializes in photojournalism, portraits and photography for publications and corporations, and photojournalistic Seattle wedding photography.