When Seattle bassist Tim Carey was 13, he was taken underwing by a crew of older kids — and they loved jazz.
“My bass teacher was the bass player, but he wanted to switch to drums, so he called my mom, and was like, ‘Hey, can Tim come over and play bass with us?,’” Carey said.
Growing up in a small town on the Kitsap Peninsula, Carey found the music that would later become his career by jamming and listening to vinyl with these guys. He was further exposed to jazz at Olympic College, where he did Running Start, and through his pianist mother.
“When I started getting serious about playing bass guitar, my friends were like, ‘Hey, let's go play some jazz,’ and I look at The Real Book, and I'm like, ‘Oh, this Clifford Brown tune in here is the one that my mom's been playing since I was a kid, I should learn to play this,’” he said.
Today, he’s paying it forward to other jazz lovers in the area as the program director at Jazz Night School. Established in 2008, the nonprofit is one of only a handful across the country where adults can engage in professional jazz instruction — and Carey plays a key role in selecting the organization’s teachers, students, and curriculum.
Along with his directorship, Carey is an accomplished bass player who has his own group, the Tim Carey Band, and performs with many local artists, including Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto and versatile saxophonist Kate Olson.
Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Are you from Seattle? If not, where do you hail from?
I grew up in Seabeck, Washington, which is technically Bremerton, but it used to have its own zip code back in the day. Seattle was "the city."
Why and when did you move to Seattle?
I moved to Seattle in 2004 to go to Cornish [College of the Arts], so I've lived here for 22 years.
After Cornish, I spent a couple of years teaching private lessons and playing a lot with this band called Reptet with trumpeter Samantha Boshnack and percussionist John Ewing and those folks, and we did a lot of traveling. We would go on the road a few times a year.
I did that and played jazz gigs with trumpeter Jason Parker, and then got hired to teach at Cornish College of the Arts pretty quickly after that. It was 2010, and since then I've just been teaching. I've had a few full-time teaching jobs here.
What musical projects you focused on right now and how did they come about?
Right now, I'm playing with Jovino Santos Neto, who I've been playing with for 20 years. I think I met Jovino when I was a student at Cornish, and started playing with his trio, and I'm still playing with him a couple times a month.
That's a really huge part of my musical life, playing with Jovino, and with Kate Olson, who I've been playing with now for almost 15 years. She just put out a record, So It Goes. I met Kate at a duo gig we did at the Sea Monster Lounge about a decade ago, and we started developing her music into bass and saxophone stuff.f
I also play with some singers like Seattle's Isabella du Graf and Gail Pettis.
You have your own band as well, right?
I have my own quartet, the Tim Carey Band. The last time we played it was me on six-string bass guitar, pianist Jake Sele, Chris Symer on upright bass, and Kyle Doran, who's a wonderful drummer. We did the Seattle Jazz Fellowship and it was really cool, it was my original music and some covers.
Tell me about your role as program director at Jazz Night School. Is this you main gig these days?
That's my full-time thing. I teach a class, and then I have some private students, but mostly, I'm nine-to-five at Jazz Night School. I get to work with a bunch of different teachers and tons of different people in the community, and it's super cool. It's a lot of work, but when I go out to events in Seattle, I know tons of people in the audience. I really enjoy the job. I hire all the teachers and audition all the students and build the combos and schedule the concerts, and basically do all the program-related stuff.
How do you approach jazz education?
Well, it depends on the student. I work with a lot of people who I would consider to be in the beginning stages of learning to play jazz, and who also are adults, which makes a difference, because the idea of becoming an incredibly high-level player is not necessarily off the table, but it's not the focus, right? With adults, the focus is, how can I engage with this art form in a way that makes my life better, and that makes it rewarding?
So, my philosophy really comes down to doing, so trying to get people in the room playing music together as quickly as possible, with as few barriers as possible, and then build using that activity as the basis. I try to avoid too much music theory. I try to focus on playing by ear, memorizing music, meeting people and playing as often as possible.
What aspects of jazz and its culture do you most identify with?
One thing I love about jazz culture is we work to recognize that the music that we're playing comes from Black America, so there's a way to connect it to something deeper and try to use it as a way to learn about ourselves and [the] country we live in.
Because it's something that I grew up in, to a certain extent, I just feel connected to it organically, the idea of community and everyone learning the same tunes and just coming together and playing. I think in some other musical cultures, that's definitely not the case. In the classical world, you auditioned for your part, you have to be able to play at a certain level, and with jazz — not to say it's not rigorous and not competitive — but I think it's a little bit more chill.
Do you have a musical idol?
My teachers, like Julian Priester and Jim Knapp. Jim Knapp, honestly, is somebody who I really do consider to be a musical idol, because of all the work he put into teaching at Cornish and developing the program there, writing a book and giving younger musicians a chance.
I would also say Hermeto Pascoal and Jovino Santos Neto. Hermeto, he just lives music. In a way, that is totally fearless and constant and almost overwhelming, but it's really beautiful because it's just this constant wellspring of creativity through music. The result of that with Hermeto and Jovino is you leave behind this body of work that everyone can draw from and learn from.
What do you think makes the Seattle jazz scene special?
I think that it's small enough that if you're here for a while, you end up just making a lot of friends that you see somewhat regularly. It ends up being a community of people. You can go out and have a bunch of friends everywhere, which, from what I've heard, some other cities aren't really like that as much. I have some friends that moved to L.A., and they're like, it's great down here, but every time I go out, it's different people and it's hard to tie down a core group. In Seattle, I feel like you go out to Jazz Fellowship or you go to a jam session, there's all the people you know. It's tight knit.
