On any given week in Bellingham, you can hear live jazz at a library, a hotel lobby, a converted fire station, or a craft brewery. The network of venues, educators, and musicians that supports this music scene stretches from the San Juan Islands to Everett and connects students, professionals, and listeners across generations. This summer, that network is especially visible.
The Organizations Behind the Music
The Jazz Center of Bellingham is the anchor institution for the region's jazz community. Founded in 2016 by musician Julian MacDonough, the nonprofit presents more than 20 concerts annually at the FireHouse Arts and Events Center in Bellingham, featuring local musicians from Portland to Vancouver, B.C., as well as national recording artists. The organization also runs education programs including combo classes and a summer jazz camp for high school students and older learners.
For board member Steve Jones, the Jazz Center's value extends well beyond the concert calendar. "We would not only lose the education program's combo classes and summer jazz camp, but we would lose the 20-plus annual concerts with some of the finest local jazz musicians from Portland to Vancouver B.C., plus the national recording artists we have been hosting," Jones said. "But perhaps more importantly we would lose the community we have built around these events."
The Jazz Center is one node in a larger circuit. The Whatcom County Library System hosts free jazz through its Whatcom Grooves summer music series, bringing live performance into public spaces across the county at no cost to attendees. Hotel Leo in downtown Bellingham holds Sunday evening jazz jams. Aslan Depot, a brewery and gathering space in Bellingham, runs weekly Tuesday jazz nights that have become a community anchor. "The line is out the door every Tuesday night," said Bellingham percussionist Jerry Steinhilber, who has played and taught in the region for decades.
The Mentorship Cycle That Keeps Jazz Alive
The geography of northwest Washington's jazz scene is not just about venues. It is about relationships: between teachers and students, between performers and audiences, and between the region and a wider world of jazz education and performance.
Renowned saxophonist and Berklee College of Music professor George Garzone, whose students have included multiple Bellingham-connected musicians, described the relationship between teaching and performance as mutually sustaining. "I spent a lot of time furthering the minds of the young musicians and playing to keep up the art," Garzone said. "The two fueled together help to keep me on an even keel."
Steinhilber and bassist King Dhal both studied with Garzone at Berklee, while saxophonist Nick Biello studied privately with him at the Manhattan School of Music. That lineage now plays out in Bellingham's rehearsal rooms and on its stages. At a Jazz Center educational combo recital held at The Blue Room in December 2025, Steinhilber heard the results of that mentorship chain in real time. "Holy sh*t," was his immediate reaction, he recalled. "We are really making a difference."
Garzone himself has a message for the Bellingham community: "Keep the Bellingham thing alive. That's important."
Students as the Next Generation
Recent Bellingham High School graduate Lily Earthman represents the generation emerging from this ecosystem. Her path through the music ran from school ensembles to private lessons to community programs, and along the way she found belonging as well as musicianship. "My freshman year, the drumline community welcomed me into the big scary high school world," she said. The experience she describes, of students moving fluidly between school jazz bands, summer camps, jam sessions, and professional mentors, is exactly the cycle that educators across the region work to sustain.
That pipeline connects Bellingham's school music programs to the Jazz Center's educational offerings and ultimately to the professional and semi-professional performance circuit that runs through venues like the FireHouse, Aslan Depot, and Hotel Leo. Students become performers. Performers become teachers. Audiences become volunteers and donors. The whole thing reinforces itself if the organizations and venues that anchor it remain healthy.
A Regional Network With Roots in Bellingham
The network extends well beyond Bellingham's city limits. The Everett Jazz Walk, Centrum's Jazz Port Townsend workshops, and school jazz programs throughout Skagit and Whatcom counties are all connected to many of the same musicians and educators. Performers based in Bellingham regularly appear at venues across northwest Washington and into British Columbia.
The Salish Sea's geography, with its ferries, its islands, and its relatively small cities connected by water and mountain passes, creates an unusual kind of regional music scene: intimate enough that most working musicians know each other, but large enough to sustain a diverse calendar of concerts and educational programs throughout the year.
For anyone who has driven past the FireHouse Arts and Events Center on Cornwall Avenue without stopping, or walked by Aslan Depot on a Tuesday night without knowing what was happening inside, this summer is a good time to look closer. The Jazz Center's concert calendar and the library's Whatcom Grooves series are both free or low-cost entry points into a scene that has been quietly flourishing. For more on arts and culture events across Whatcom County, the county's event listings and venue websites are the best starting point. You can also find earlier coverage of Bellingham's performing arts landscape in our August arts calendar.
