New Stories

New Stories, a Seattle-based jazz trio specializing in post-bop, was formed in 1988. The members are pianist Marc Seales, bassist Doug Miller, and drummer John Bishop. New Stories is quite possibly the premiere jazz trio in the Pacific Northwest (winning Earshot Jazz awards for Best Acoustic Group three times), and the group divides their time roughly equally between trio performances and solo projects. Pianist Seales has won the Earshot Jazz Golden Ear Award for Best Instrumentalist in 1999 and is also a member of various other groups (Milo Peterson's Jazz Disciples, Marc Seales Quartet), as well as the head of the Jazz Studies department at the University of Washington. Doug Miller hails from the Count Basie and Mercer Ellington big bands and is one of the "first call" bassists in Seattle. John Bishop performs with roughly 40 different artists a year, as well as instructional videos and documentaries for PBS. As a group, New Stories has released three albums on Origin Arts and also backed multiple artists, the highlight being a Grammy-nominated album with vocalist Mark Murphy, Song for Geese. In 1993, New Stories became the first American jazz group to perform in Eastern Russia, at the JVC Jazz Festival in Vladivostock. They continue to perform regularly at home in Seattle and on tour. ~ Adam Greenberg