The School of Music presents a faculty concert by electric bassist John-Carlos Perea, chair of UW Ethnomusicology and Grammy winning multi-instrumentalist. He is joined by guests Marc Seales, piano, Gary Hobbs, drums, Michael Brockman, saxophone, and Shahin Shahbazi, tar, in a program featuring works by Perea, Seales, Coltrane, Ellington, and Shorter.
Biographies
Drummer Gary Hobbs is a native of the Pacific Northwest and lives in Vancouver, WA. He has played professionally for over 4 decades and appears on over 60 recordings. Gary played with The Stan Kenton Orchestra from 1975 through 1977. Through the years Gary has played with Randy Brecker, Bud Shank, George Cables, Ken Peplowski, Pete Christlieb, Greta Matassa, Anita O'Day, Dan Siegel, Glen Moore, The New York Voices, Eddie Harris and many more. Randy Brecker, Bill Mays, Kurt Elling, Dave Frishberg, David Freisen, Bobby Shew, Bobby Watson, Bob Florence, Carl Saunders, The Woody Herman Orchestra,Terry Gibbs, Jaquie Naylor, Jim Widner Big Band, Stan Kenton Alumni Big Band and Tom Grant are just a few of the artists that Gary has recently performed with. Carnegie Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Tivoli Garden, Kennedy Center and Wolf Trap are among the venues Gary has played along with scores of festivals and clubs all over the world. Gary is very active in Jazz Education teaching at The University Of Oregon and traveling all over the US doing clinics, concerts and jazz camps with the help of Crescent Cymbal Company and Yamaha Drum Company.
Shahin Shahbazi is an Iranian composer, scholar, and virtuoso tar and setar player based in Northern California. His journey in music began at the age of ten with the tombak, before transitioning to the tar and setar under the encouragement of his mother. Shahbazi received foundational training in Persian classical music from renowned masters such as Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Dariush Talaei, Hooshang Zarif, Masoud Shaari, and Farhad Fakhreddini, who shaped his approach to composition. He further refined his skills in composition and orchestration through the master classes of Professor Manuchehr Sahbai. His academic perspective was profoundly influenced by the ethnomusicology courses of Dr. Mohsen Hajarian, which deepened his understanding of musicology and inspired his scholarly pursuits. Shahin continued his studies of ethnomusicology and composition in the United States under distinguished professors such as Hafez Modirzadeh, John Carlos Perea, Ben Sabey, and Bruce Cook, further broadening his interdisciplinary approach to music.
John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, German) joined the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Washington in Fall 2023 as Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology. He has previously served as Associate Professor and Chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University (2010-2023), as Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley (2021-22), and as Visiting Researcher, Composer, and Performer (2022-23) at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).
An electric bassist, singer, cedar flutist, song maker, and ethnomusicologist, Perea’s research interests include jazz and improvised music performance and composition, urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions, music technologies, recording and archiving practices, social constructions of "noise," Native and African American jazz cultures, and the Creek and Kaw saxophonist Jim Pepper. In addition to his scholarly activities, John-Carlos maintains an active career as a GRAMMY® Award winning multi-instrumentalist and recording artist. He has recorded on eighteen albums as a sideman and three as a leader, First Dance (2001), Creation Story (2014), and Cedar Flute Songs (2023).
In April 2019, Perea was recognized by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s American Indian Initiative for his musical contribution “to reclaim space, to challenge false narratives, and to reimagine public art from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples.” He currently serves as chair of the UW Ethnomusicology program and holds adjunct appointments in the departments of American Indian Studies and Comparative History of Ideas.
Michael Brockman, DMA, moved from the East Coast to Seattle in 1987 to join the UW School of Music faculty. He instructs concert and jazz saxophone performance, and jazz arranging and composition. Brockman earned a Doctor of Musical Arts from the UW, and a Master of Music degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied arranging with Jaki Byard, composition with George Russell, and woodwind performance with Joe Allard. He earned a bachelor of music degree from Lewis and Clark College, and also attended both the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.
Brockman's doctoral dissertation is titled "Orchestration Techniques of Duke Ellington," and he has transcribed numerous classic large ensemble scores by Ellington, Mingus, Mulligan, Lunceford, Kenton, Monk and others. He is the lead saxophonist and co-director of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, and has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Quincy Jones, James Moody, Benny Carter, Ernestine Anderson, Arturo Sandoval, Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Joe Williams, and many other luminaries of jazz. The SRJO presents the annual Duke Ellington Sacred Concert in Seattle (now in its 23rd year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare big band works. In addition to performing in the SRJO, Brockman has prepared scores for much of the band's repertoire, based on rare vintage recordings of unpublished works by great composers.
As both a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, he has toured throughout Europe and the eastern United States. He is an active professional performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, including the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and appears on nationally acclaimed recordings with Jimmy Heath, the SSO, the SRJO, and Seattle drummer Clarence Acox, whose 1991 CD Joanna's Dance and 1992 CD Indigenous Groove were consecutively selected as Album of the Year by Seattle's Earshot magazine.
A perpetual student of woodwind acoustics, Brockman is the inventor of a patented device called the "Broctave Key" (U.S. Patent WO/2010/068909) that provides an additional octave/register vent to any wind instrument.
Brockman has premiered many new works for saxophone, including the West Coast premiere of Sonata for Saxophone by Gunther Schuller, and has appeared as a soloist in the Reims Music Festival, the Dubrovnik Music Festival, the World Saxophone Congress, the Stanford Computer Music Festival, the New Music Across America Festival, the Seattle New Music for Saxophone Festival, the Northwest Saxophone Symposium, and many others. Brockman is a clinician for the Selmer Company.
Brockman is Director of the UW Jazz in Paris program. For information, visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/jazzinparis/jazzinparis.htm/
For more information about the UW Saxophone Studio visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/
A noted pianist, composer and leading figure in the Northwest jazz scene, Marc Seales has shared stages with many of the great players of the last two decades. He has played with nearly every visiting jazz celebrity from Joe Henderson and Art Pepper to Benny Carter, Mark Murphy, and Bobby Hutcherson. With the late Don Lanphere he performed in such places as London, England; Kobe, Japan; The Hague in the Netherlands; and the North Sea Jazz Festival.
The musicians he admires most are Herbie Hancock, Charlie Parker, John Lewis, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Wynton Kelly, though he is quick to acknowledge that he owes the basically be-bop/post be-bop sound of his playing to his mentors, Don Lanphere and Floyd Standifer.
Critics have praised Seales variously for his "meaty piano solos," and "blues inflected, Hancock-inspired modernism." Winner of numerous Earshot awards (Instrumentalist of the Year in 1999 and Acoustic Jazz Group in 2000 and 2001; Jazz Hall of Fame, 2009), Seales retired in 2025 after 38 years at the University of Washington, where he worked as a Professor of Music in the Jazz Studies Program, teaching an array of courses, including History of Jazz, Jazz Piano, and Beginning and Advanced Improvisation, as well as leading various workshops and ensembles.