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Get Inside: Nine Things to Do While Stuck Inside This Week Stream WW s Funniest Five Zoom Showcase, watch another Portland-based rom-com and vicariously visit Italy via the Tooch. Katie Nguyen, Funniest Five Winner 2021 (Thomas Teal) Stream: WW’s Funniest Five Showcase Every year, Willamette Week surveys the local comedy community to find the city s best comics. Usually, that leads to a live standup showcase held in a packed theater somewhere in town. Of course, that can t happen this year. But in Portland, funny never stops. So we re going digital. Bri Pruett, herself a finalist in the poll s inaugural 2013 edition, hosts the Funniest Five Class of 2021, who ll be coming to you live from their living rooms and doing some show-and-tell with their variation quarantine projects. It s the live incarnation of t
February 15 2021
International concerts, music films, local shows mark the 18th event, which had to change like everything else.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began and normal life went away, the Biamp PDX Jazz Festival took place as usual in 2020 with in-person concerts. We wrapped our last day of the 2020 festival 10 days before the COVID shutdown happened, said Nicholas Salas-Harris, the festival s artistic director. We were literally one of the only jazz festivals to go to in 2020.
Well, if anything, they had a lot of time to plan for the 2021 festival, although Salas-Harris, Executive Director Chris Doss and the whole crew entered the summer of 2020 still believing the PDX Jazz Festival would happen live again. Once it appeared live wouldn t be possible and it would have to be virtual, organizers set about trying to make the best festival possible. (Upon last week s announcement that the Portland tri-county area s pandemic status had been upgraded and that some ind
15 Great Jazz Albums of 2020
Jazz may not have the mainstream cultural dominance that it once did, but it remains a thriving, multi-faceted form of music that continues to have so much more to say. Jazz informs so much of the rap and electronic music that
does have mainstream cultural dominance today, and it s long popped up in indie rock, metal, punk, and other styles of popular music too. Though jazz never went away, the past few years have seen a serious jazz renaissance that continues to grow, branch out into new innovative territory, and attract new listeners. The world of jazz is so vast and we don t claim to be experts of all of it, but if you re looking to catch up on some of the great jazz albums released in 2020, we put together a list of 15 that we strongly recommend. It s not a definitive best-of, and we probably haven t even heard all of the great jazz albums released this year, but we d like to think it s a pretty good place to start.