Samantha Boshnack: Seismic Belt at Earshot Jazz Festival at The Royal Room

Seismic Belt is an eight-movement work is an exploration of seismic activity along the Ring of Fire through musical composition, experimenting with the friction of geographic shifts to create a new harmonic topography. The music examines our relationship with the earth we live on, and the element of risk and faith in that uneasy cohabitation. Movements of the work draw on influences and stories from some of the cultures and people living on the Ring in places such as Chile, Japan, Alaska, Western Samoa, and Russia.

Boshnack wrote “Seismic Belt” during a 3-month residency at 18th Street Arts Center earlier this year, through their annual Make Jazz Fellowship in Los Angeles. This award is sponsored by the Herb Alpert Foundation to support promising, emerging composers. ...

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Seismic Belt is an eight-movement work is an exploration of seismic activity along the Ring of Fire through musical composition, experimenting with the friction of geographic shifts to create a new harmonic topography. The music examines our relationship with the earth we live on, and the element of risk and faith in that uneasy cohabitation. Movements of the work draw on influences and stories from some of the cultures and people living on the Ring in places such as Chile, Japan, Alaska, Western Samoa, and Russia.

Boshnack wrote “Seismic Belt” during a 3-month residency at 18th Street Arts Center earlier this year, through their annual Make Jazz Fellowship in Los Angeles. This award is sponsored by the Herb Alpert Foundation to support promising, emerging composers.

Boshnack’s love of hiking the peaks of the Pacific Northwest, combined with travels to other areas located on the Ring sparked her fascination with volcanoes, and the cultures that surround them. As with her other recent projects, this work leads the listener into a storied landscape projected as musical narrative. In 2017, she released “Nellie Bly Project” which illustrated the 19th-century daredevil/feminist/journalist’s heroic life. In 2016, her desire to celebrate individual expression and virtuosity of musicians outside of Western classical music prompted her to compose “Global Concertos” - which explored the sounds of five continents, performed with a representative musical ambassador from each.

While prolific as a composer, and ever imaginative in conceiving her work, Boshnack doesn’t present concerts of her music all that often, or rather, as often as the jazz community at large would like. This exciting performance is an important unveiling to her hometown of this mighty work, which is the latest culmination of her work as an ever-evolving composer.

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