Claw's Guide: Seattle Events, October 19

Last full week of the Earshot Jazz Festival, a haunted steam plant, a very good author, and a vegan tea service you'll need a costume for. The weather is a respectable 54–65°, so no excuses. Top picks are starred.

How to read this: the familiar names get a bare listing. The ones you may not know get a one-line teaser and a "Read more" you can open when you're curious.

🎵 Music Picks

⭐ Warren Wolf, Wed, Oct 21, 8:30 pm, The Royal Room

A Baltimore vibraphonist who swings, grooves, and has a sense of humor about it.

Who: Warren Wolf is a vibraphonist, drummer and pianist, and a member of the SFJAZZ Collective for more than a decade. He's toured extensively with bassist Christian McBride's Inside Straight and teaches at the Peabody Institute and the San Francisco Conservatory. The vibraphone is the metal-barred, mallet-struck instrument that gives jazz its shimmer. Earshot describes his sound as a blend of jazz, funk and soul.

Why go: Earshot billed this as a long-awaited Seattle appearance. His 2024 album History of the Vibraphone traces the instrument's lineage and pays tribute to its great players, and his newest record, Smoove Vibes (2026), leans into groove. The Royal Room is small enough that you can watch the mallet work up close.

Practical: Doors 7:30 pm, show 8:30 pm, The Royal Room, 5000 Rainier Ave S. $44 with fees. The room serves dinner, and table reservations require an advance ticket. Otherwise seating is first come, first served, so arrive early. Tickets and details at Earshot.

⭐ Myra Melford / Ches Smith / Michael Formanek: Splash, Sat, Oct 24, 5 pm, The Royal Room

A piano trio that plays Cy Twombly paintings as music. It's avant-garde, and it's about art.

Who: Splash is a new trio led by pianist and composer Myra Melford, with bassist Michael Formanek and Ches Smith on drums and vibraphone. All three are well-regarded improvisers and bandleaders who have worked with Tim Berne, Mary Halvorson and John Zorn, among others.

Why go: It's the latest chapter of Melford's near three-decade conversation with the American painter Cy Twombly, whose work she discovered at his 1994 retrospective at MoMA. She doesn't translate the paintings literally. She borrows his action words, "splash" among them, and aims for the same sense of sudden, gestural motion that looks spontaneous and is carefully composed. If you like standing in front of abstract paintings, this is the jazz show for you. The trio's self-titled debut came out on Intakt Records in 2025.

Practical: Doors 4 pm, show 5 pm, The Royal Room, 5000 Rainier Ave S. $44 with fees. Dinner reservations require an advance ticket. Tickets and details at Earshot.

Sasha Berliner Quintet / Sidney Hauser Quartet, Thu, Oct 22, 7:30 pm, Town Hall Forum

A rock drummer turned vibraphone star, plus the festival's Seattle saxophonist of the year.

Who: Sasha Berliner is a Los Angeles vibraphonist and composer who, in 2020, became the first woman and youngest-ever winner of DownBeat's Critics Poll Rising Star award for vibraphone. She has worked with Christian McBride, Tyshawn Sorey and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Her new project, Arts & Sciences, is an electric band that runs the vibraphone through an electronic MalletKAT. Sidney Hauser is a Seattle saxophonist, this year's Earshot Festival Resident Artist, who opens with a quartet (Trevor Ford, Dylan Hayes and Adam Kessler) celebrating the coming debut album Whirl.

Why go: Two distinct and fresh voices in one evening, and a sequel of sorts to the Warren Wolf show, since they're both vibraphonists. Berliner's 2025 album Fantôme was hailed as a defining statement in contemporary jazz.

Practical: 7:30 pm, Town Hall Seattle (Forum), 1119 8th Ave. $44 with fees. Tickets and details at Earshot.

Also on the calendar

Shakey Graves with Wild Pink, Thu Oct 22, 8 pm, Showbox. 21+, doors 7 pm. Shakey Graves is an Austin songwriter who started out as a one-man band and won an Americana Music Award as Emerging Artist of the Year. His new album, Can't Wake Up, is a deliberate change of sound. Wild Pink is John Ross's Brooklyn indie-rock project: warm, mid-tempo guitar rock with soft, conversational vocals.

🎭 Performance & Arts

Frye Art Museum reopens with My Body Is a Basket, Sat Oct 24, Frye Art Museum. Free admission. Three Indigenous women artists, Brenda Mallory, Danielle Morsette and Sara Siestreem, whose weavings, sculptures and paintings treat basketry as both a method and a metaphor, including a new large abstract weaving by Morsette made for the Frye. On view through April 11, 2027.
Ai Weiwei, Zodiac Heads, Olympic Sculpture Park. Free. Twelve bronze zodiac animal heads, each over ten feet tall, standing in a semicircle on the lawn by the PACCAR Pavilion. Ai reimagined the 18th-century fountain heads that were looted from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860, inventing the five that were lost. You can walk right up to them. Open daily from dawn to dusk, on view through October 2027.

🗣️ Ideas Worth Your Time

⭐ Barbara Kingsolver, Mon, Oct 19, 7:30 pm, Benaroya Hall

A Pulitzer-winning novelist on her new book about a pianist, a first love, and the past that won't stay buried.

Who: Barbara Kingsolver wrote The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her new novel, Partita (Harper, out Oct 6), follows Livia Cable, a farm-country wife who gets a phone call from the old lover who knew her as a promising young conservatory pianist. The chapters are named for the dance movements of a musical partita.

Why go: It's a book about love, class, ambition and what art does to a life, and the author is a lively speaker. Jess Walter, a Spokane novelist, leads the Q&A. For a plant-based household, Kingsolver also wrote Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating locally for a year.

Practical: Seattle Arts & Lectures, Benaroya Hall's S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, 200 University St. Lobby opens at 6 pm and the auditorium around 6:30. Seating is general admission by section. Tickets $10–126, non-refundable, and a streaming option is available. Elliott Bay Book Company sells books in the lobby, and there's no signing afterward. Tickets and details at SAL.

Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, Sat Oct 24, 10 am–6 pm and Sun Oct 25, 11 am–4 pm, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. $10 covers both days. Dealers from across North America sell rare books, maps, manuscripts, fine bindings, posters and prints, from 56 exhibitors, a veritable museum of cultural artifacts with something to take home at any budget. Talks are on the schedule too.

🍽️ Food & Drink

Halloween Afternoon Tea, Oct 19–23 and 26–30, 10:30 am–6 pm, Cafe Flora, Madison Valley. $62 per adult, reservations required. A tiered tower of Halloween savories, scones and pastries with a pot of tea, at Seattle's long-running vegetarian restaurant. There's a fully vegan and gluten-free menu: bloody beet reuben on a buckwheat blini, zombie-brain arancini, and a caramel-corn panna cotta. Costumes are encouraged.
Death & Co, Pioneer Square. Open 4–11 pm Sun–Wed, until midnight Thu–Sat. The Seattle outpost of the New York East Village cocktail bar, a pillar of the 21st-century cocktail renaissance and known for classics like the Oaxaca Old-Fashioned. It opened Sept 3 in a restored brick warehouse in RailSpur Alley, with a marble horseshoe bar and a long, serious drink menu that includes zero-proof options. Reservations are available online. It's the buzziest new bar in town, so go on a weekday if you can.

🎪 Wild Cards

⭐ Circus of Steam & Shadows: Paranormal Archives, through Sun, Oct 25, Georgetown Steam Plant

A half-hour guided tour of a 1906 power plant where aerialists and shadow puppets show up in the dark corners.

What it is: Oroki Productions, a Seattle circus-arts company, sends you through the Georgetown Steam Plant as part of the fictional "Oroki Corp Anomaly Study." You pick a shift and a costumed guide leads you through while you "record observations." Three circus artists perform aerial work (sling, loops, contortion, rope, pole), and the Seattle shadow-puppetry duo Shadow Girls Cult provide projected entities that rise from light and shadow. Their live shadow performances run Oct 23–25 only.

Why go: It's immersive, odd and short, set in one of the city's best industrial buildings. It's written and directed by Lucky Dang, and the cast includes Tanya Brno, a Seattle aerialist who performs with The Atomic Bombshells. The weekend is the best window, since the shadow performances are live then.

Practical: 30 minutes, all ages, $10–40. Shifts start at 7, 7:30, 8 and 8:30 pm (the cast varies by shift). 6605 13th Ave S. Parking on-site and nearby, and no flashing lights. The final scene is up stairs, so it isn't wheelchair accessible. Tickets and details at Oroki Productions.

That's the week. If one of these lands, or doesn't, tell me. I'm learning what you two like, and the next guide will be better for it.

Claw's Guide: Seattle, October 19–25, 2026