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 Ilze 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.”
In the Globe Building, those walls are a lovely hatch of weathered brick. The exterior’s timeworn stone is a response to the 1889 Great Seattle Fire. Marriott signed a single-year, rent free lease with Jones — the Fellowship pays utilities and insurance — which enabled the project to obtain liquor and occupancy licenses. One caveat? A prominent “For Lease” sign would remain on the front window at all times, because the building is still seeking a more remunerative long-term tenant.
In pricey, increasingly corporate Seattle, the Fellowship venue represents a conspicuously unlucrative exercise. Its modest 48-seat layout and limited wine and beer bar give way to the room’s centerpiece: a Kawai grand piano. There are no tables. There is no greenroom. Tickets run a recommended donation of $20, regardless of who’s performing.
The bare-bones concept is structured on listening rooms Marriott has visited around the country, among them the New York club Smalls under its former model. The Fellowship uses the classical world as a financial template, relying on grants, individual giving, annual memberships and nonmember ticket sales. With three to four shows a week plus a standing Monday-night jam session, the organization has been able to distribute $160,000 to artists so far this year, up from $100,000 in 2023 and $80,000 in 2022.
Marriott believes the Fellowship model is “absolutely” replicable in other cities: “I think we could run the whole thing on membership, if we were a little more conservative.” But for him, the organization is about more than economics. It’s about reinvigorating an art form that he views in reverential terms, one that he feels is getting stale as musicians focus on academy training.
“The cats had more of an influence than the jazz teachers,” Marriott said of his own education on trumpet. Making the teenage rounds with his horn — mostly in Pioneer Square — he underwent jazz’s gig-centric mentorship cycle, in which elders hone their chops and youngsters learn on the job. “That only happens on a bandstand,” Marriott said. “You can’t teach that in a classroom.”
After founding the Fellowship, Marriott and his new board members wondered about bringing in an artist in residence to bridge this gap, someone who might speak to both jazz’s intellectual rigor and its emotional heft. They aligned almost instantly: the 89-year-old trombonist Julian Priester.
A onetime bandmate of Max Roach, Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock, with sideman credits including Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, Priester represents Seattle’s most intimate link to the heart of the American jazz tradition. He moved to the Northwest in 1979 to take a job at Cornish College of the Arts, and continued to work with acts like Dave Holland and Charlie Haden through the ’90s. (“He’s Julian Priester, man!” Marriott gushed. “And here he is in Seattle!”)
Priester said the Fellowship gig “fits right in with my own goal, to have an impact on younger musicians.”
Since 2021, he’s been delivering an ongoing series of “Julian Speaks” lectures at the Fellowship, expanding his pedagogical sphere beyond the confines of his old professorship. “I talk about my life, about how I used opportunities that were there for me,” Priester explained. “The attitude is positivity.”
Priester’s most valuable suggestion for young musicians? “Listen. Learn how to listen.” He emphasized the word. “It’s difficult for human beings to get out of their own ego.”
The pianist Marina Albero, 45, has performed regularly at the fellowship, both in her own groups and as a sidewoman. “It’s not just a venue,” she said. “The beauty of this project is that it’s a community.” Specifically, Albero said that a city’s jazz performers need a dedicated, low-cost environment where they can gather and hear their peers, “Where if you’re a musician, you can just show up and hang out.”
Whether the Fellowship hangs onto its Globe space, however, is in question. The building changed hands in March; Marriott’s lease will be honored through at least November, and he hopes to stay in the space under a new agreement. He said he has “never stopped looking” for additional venues, and has backup plans if necessary.
“The question we ask ourselves at the Fellowship,” he said, is “does this serve the music? Does this serve the local musician?” So long as these benchmarks are met, he said, “The Fellowship is the people, not the location.”