Belltown Bent

I'm right behind you, honey

Lesser Snow Geese mate for life, and they have no trouble finding their partner in the flock. Even if the flock numbers as high as 60,000 and has flown 3,000 miles down from Russia's Wrangel Island, north of the Arctic Circle.

That's approximately the size of the Fraser-Skagit sub-population of migratory birds arriving on the Skagit Delta. They'll spend the rest of the winter winging their way back and forth between there, just an hour from Belltown, and the Fraser River Delta in BC.

Mating pairs and their young will arrive together, and usually hang out together. They'll munch their way through winter, the kids will hook up with a life-partner, and they'll all head back to their breeding grounds with heavy layers of fat and protein so they can wait out the spring thaw so they can all get busy on the next cycle. It's worth a quick trip up I-5 to pay your respects.

It was nice to see you

Folks waiting to catch a bus at the 1st Avenue and Bay St. stop use to be able to gaze up at the Space Needle, or, not. Now, it's just "not". Unless you watch for your bus from about a half block south, the Seattle icon is hidden behind one of Belltown's many emerging condos.

This particular view was not protected by the Department of Planning and Development's view protection activities. Nope, only ten "beloved" views of the Space Needle are protected. They're all associated with view corridors anchored by 13 Seattle City Parks (PDF) - three of which qualified for partial views.

One of those (slightly obstructed) protected views is from the forthcoming Olympic Sculpture Park, looking east to the Needle through the airspace corridor (PDF) opened by Eagle Street. Take a quick look as you go by.

Hammering out the future

Standing 48' tall, the Hammering Man, by the prolific Jonathon Borofsky, pounds out a steady cadence for progress on the forthcoming Seattle Art Museum expansion.

The "Man's" similarly sized sibling (44') swings a hammer in Basel, Switzerland, along with big brothers in Frankfurt, Germany (70') and Seoul, Korea (72'). Oddly enough, the shortest outdoor sib (24') is in, of all places, Dallas, TX.

Over the next 20 years, SAM, not the "Man", will eventually occupy 12 stories of the new building, in vertically organized space rising 155' above street level. This will triple the museum's current 150,000 sq/ft of space to an expansive 450,000. Learn more.

Look down on all of this from the WAMU-SAM webcam - and see all the way up First Avenue to Belltown.

Suspicious activity?

No, that's David King of The Bad Plus, getting physical with his drums. He found the phrase, often inserted in the middle of the airport advisory "please report (insert here) to authorities", an apt title for the band's newest limit-testing release.

He'll be appearing at Jazz Alley November 1-2 with his partners in purported musical crime, Reid Anderson (bass) and Ethan Iverson (drums), an acoustic power trio sure to pound out their notorious cover tunes and overlooked originals.

While they may be The Bad Plus, they're sure not bad boys, given they play by Sony Music's draconian copy protection rules. Come on. But we won't hold that against them.

Take a look at their 2004 Bumbershoot set.

A long swim home

The Bent just returned from a fly fishing trip to the Grande Ronde river, in SE Washington/NE Oregon. It's about a 7 hour drive from Belltown. But the steelhead trout we were hoping to delay, for just a few minutes, have to swim 600 miles from the Pacific, up the Columbia and Snake rivers, to reach the mouth of the Ronde in Hell's Canyon.

The deep canyon of the Ronde runs through Nez Perce country and the Blue Mountains and is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna, including free-roaming elk and bighorn sheep, and healthy populations of black bears and mountain lions. Boggan's Oasis, where highway 129 crosses the river, is where all the people hang out.

Note: no steelhead were harmed hooked in the making of this entry.

Good enough for government work?

Following last weekend's inspection of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the Washington State Department of Transportation said there is no safety problem on the bridge because of a growing crack.

As reported in the Seattle Times, "This is just more evidence that the viaduct is continuing to age," according to state engineer Harvey Coffman. Nothing the new gas tax can't fix, he did not add.

The Bent did it's own inspection recently. It didn't have to go any further than this support column near Western and Bell. The difference, in this case, is the missing chunk of cement was probably never there to begin with. Probably just a cosmetic problem, right? Thank goodness for re-bar and strong paint.

Between sunset and dusk

The sun has set, but darkness has not yet fallen. The glorious colors in the sky over the Olympics, made even more dramatic by darkening clouds, seem beyond explanation.

But about a century ago, a British physicist, Lord Rayleigh, explained why blue light scatters more and red light scatters less. To this day, his explanation is known as Rayleigh scattering.

Tonight, I just had to look it up. By tomorrow evening, I'm sure it will seem beyond explanation, again.

Rockin' the OSP

Heavy equipment does heavy lifting, although it should be pointed out, with considerable finesse. Tons of dirt and materials get moved around, in this case around the emerging Olympic Sculpture Park - Belltown's front yard.

But what is really amazing, is how much of this 8.5 acre project is being built by hand. In this case, wire cages, brackets, plastic mesh, and evenly spread rock are all hand crafted - with an assist from the heavy metal crew - to form part of a massive retaining wall.

Check here for a closer look at how bare-hands and brawn team with massive machines to create a park for the people of Belltown, Seattle, and the world.

Moments in time

A performance is perceived as the sum of all the player's energy and interaction - the continuum of their places in light and sound over time.

Live performances, in the eye of an artist, might be portrayed as the sum of each player's portrait - captured in different moments - combined to share the memory of a collective experience.

These moments were shared by Pat Metheny's Trio + 1 at Jazz Alley, September 8, 2005. Here are moments shared by other musicians at other times.

Get to know SRJO

The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra (SRJO) is the Northwest's premier big band jazz ensemble. Founded in 1995, the 17-piece big band is made up of the most prominent jazz soloists and band leaders in the greater Seattle area. You can see many of them in this section of my site.

The SRJO's mission is to provide authentic performances of great works of jazz, drawing on the entire 80-year history of big band jazz.

Hadley Caliman, pictured here on tenor sax, is one of the musicians who helps make this happen. He was an early disciple of Dexter Gordon, and has appeared in concert and on recordings with Roy Porter, Eric Dolphy, Della Reese, Freddie Hubbard, Jon Hendricks, Eddie Henderson, Julian Priester, Joe Henderson, Jessica Williams and Carlos Santana, and others.

A former member of the faculty at the Cornish College for the Arts, Hadley was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame in February of this year.