Three Seattle-area high school jazz bands will take the stage to duke it out — Duke Ellington, that is — at the 31st annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition happening in New York City, April 30 through May 2.
The event, which occurs at Jazz at Lincoln Center, aims to “elevate musicianship, broaden perspectives, and inspire performance,” according to the institution’s website.
Qualifying high school musicians from across North America spend three days in jam sessions, rehearsals, workshops and performances. Students also benefit from the tutelage of jazz greats, including JLAC’s managing and artistic director, lauded trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
Almost 120 schools from across the world submitted auditions to the competition this year. In February, the jazz bands at Mountlake Terrace High School, Bothell High School and Shorewood High School, all located north of Seattle, qualified.
Then, in early spring, acclaimed trombonist Francisco Torres, known for his work with bandleader and percussionist Poncho Sanchez, visited the Seattle-area finalists. Professional musicians, like Torres, are sent by Essentially Ellington to work with the bands and help them put their best foot forward at the festival.
“Instruments are mechanical. So, there's a mechanism that has to happen, right? Like, this is the way you play a B flat or this is where you play a swing pattern,” Torres said.
“So, what I try to do is I try to get them to realize that the music is already in them. You’re trying to blur the mechanical aspect through what you're already feeling inside.”
Torres, who is also a composer and educator, is based in Los Angeles and began working with Essentially Ellington four years ago.
As musical director and producer for Poncho Sanchez, and a member of countless other groundbreaking bands, Torres has toured the world and recorded on Grammy-winning records.
He developed a passion for educating, and is a sought-after clinician and guest artist, despite, as he noted, having dropped out of his own college music program to go on tour with Sanchez.
A legacy of PNW talent
Since Essentially Ellington opened to high school jazz programs on the West Coast in 1999, Seattle-area schools have consistently secured finalist spots at the jazz competition and festival.
“Seattle’s are the finest jazz programs in the country, with Garfield, Roosevelt and other significant programs leading the way,” Marsalis told Cascade PBS in 2023.
The jazz band at Garfield High School, based in Seattle’s Central District, has earned first place at the competition four times and Roosevelt High School, located in North Seattle, has earned first place three times, most recently in 2019. This year’s qualifiers are also Essentially Ellington veterans, though none have yet won top honors.
The Mountlake Terrace High School Jazz Ensemble, directed by Darin Faul, last qualified for the Essentially Ellington competition in 2025. This year marks the program’s 11th invitation to the event. They’ve placed third three times.
For Bothell High School Jazz Band, 2026 marks the fifth year in a row the band has been selected to perform at Essentially Ellington. The band is directed by Zane Romanek.
Under a previous director, Shoreline’s Shorewood High School Jazz Band placed as a finalist four times in the early 2000s. After 17 years, they band is returning to the competition and festival under the direction of Dan Baker, who began teaching at the high school in 2019.
Baker said his students are really excited to head to New York City for the competition. He has a handful of “musical leaders” in his program who are very passionate about learning jazz, going to jam sessions, and listening to the classic recordings. His jazz band students have also watched past Essentially Ellington competition performances through the official livestream and YouTube.
“That is the motivation that got us there in the first place, watching all these streams of the festival last year, because they just want to hear people play the music really well,” Baker said. “That's why they're in the class, and that's why they have been working hard.”
Imparting jazz wisdom
That work continued in the pre-competition clinics with Torres, who visited in March.
Everything Torres learned performing, recording and touring over the last 28 years with Sanchez, as well as Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, John Beasley’s Monkestra, Bill Holman’s Big Band, and a host of other groups, inspires him to pay his experience, and access to great musicians, forward.
“With education, I think it's just a matter of just directing young students that don't have an opportunity to study with big names. You're in Seattle, you’re far away,” Torres said.
“So, I always ask questions when I play with somebody of that stature, ‘Hey, give me a little pointer...what would I do here? Why did this happen?’ And I always internalize that information [for] when I do a clinic.”
During his clinics with Mountlake Terrace, Bothell, and Shorewood high schools — as well as West Seattle’s Chief Sealth High School, which was connected to Torres through Essentially Ellington’s Outreach Program — that wisdom surfaced frequently.
“A couple of bands were playing Latin charts, and neither percussionist knew how to play a conga,” Torres said.
To help the students better understand how to properly play the drum, he compared it to another object often found in a teen’s hands — their iPhones. Proper left-hand conga technique, which is vital to maintaining the rhythm, involves a flat, rigid hand striking the drum with the meaty part of the palm.
“Just basically tell them, ‘Ok, your left hand is an iPhone. Can't bend the iPhone, you know, the iPhone doesn't go like this, doesn't bend, stays straight,” Torres said. “So then they were like, ‘Oh, wow. I didn't think about that.’ And within 5 to 10 minutes I had them playing congas.”
Overall, Torres used a light touch during his Pacific Northwest clinics. All three bands impressed the professional, and fell in line with his expectations of the jazz scene in Seattle, shaped by his regular trips to the area since 1998 to play Jazz Alley.
“Seattle has a lot of good musicians,” Torres said. “And like I said, it’s just pushing them a little bit, you know, giving them the little push, get them to be a little more sure of themselves.”
The bands will take the stage in New York City this week.
On May 1, Mountlake Terrace performs 12:30 a.m. EDT and Bothell performs at 4 p.m. EDT. Shorewood will perform on May 2 at 10 a.m. EDT. All three Seattle-area bands’ Essentially Ellington performances will be available via a free livestream on Jazz Live, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s app.
On May 26, all three bands will participate in a homecoming celebration show at Seattle's The Triple Door.
!["I'm not really preaching to the musicians and the other artists," Martin says. "I do music for the person that's nine months late on their rent [and] ain't got no job but got two kids."](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/1cf95a8/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2500x1393+0+7/resize/560x312!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnpr.brightspotcdn.com%2Fdims3%2Fdefault%2Fstrip%2Ffalse%2Fcrop%2F2500x1407%200%20130%2Fresize%2F2500x1407%21%2F%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F47%2F09%2F349024994d6a85f30f8fbee2bd25%2Fdscf0788-2.JPG)
