In 2025, Earshot Jazz, the celebrated local jazz nonprofit and festival presenter, announced that longtime Executive Director John Gilbreath would be retiring.
For 33 years, Gilbreath connected with audiences at the Earshot Jazz Festival, the annual multi-venue Seattle jazz extravaganza championing a diversity of national, international and local jazz artists. As Gilbreath stood up to introduce each festival act year after year, he became a familiar presence for regional jazz fans.
As of January, there is a new executive director: Stephan Blanford. After a national search that drew over 70 applicants, Blanford, a nonprofit professional and jazz fan who’s lived in Seattle for 30 years, was selected as the nonprofit’s new leader.
“Stephan embodies the kind of leadership that inspires confidence, energizes community, and strengthens our mission at every level,” said Maurice James, Earshot Jazz Board Chair, in a press release. “His depth of nonprofit experience, combined with his lifelong passion for jazz, makes him the ideal person to shepherd Earshot into its next chapter.”
To gain more insight into who Blanford is, KNKX asked him to meet in a location that is significant to him. He chose the jazz CD section on the 7th floor of the Seattle Central Library.
“This building as it's currently constructed is so architecturally innovative, and is a space that celebrates art and structure at the same time," he said. "It makes me think of jazz in the sense that really good jazz artists understand the structure of jazz, but they are endlessly creative."
Instilling jazz reverence
There’s more to this library location, too. Thirty years ago, on Blanford’s first night in Seattle after moving from Denver, he stayed at the YMCA across the street from Seattle Central Library, then a mid-century modern building. The newly-relocated Blanford thumbed through CDs for inspiration and comfort.
“I would pull CDs that reminded me of home and reminded me of my childhood,” he said.
Blanford, the eldest of four siblings, is the son of a military man. Blanford’s family moved around quite a bit, but music was a constant. Blanford had a vinyl collection he would tote around with him through each move. His favorite artists were John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and the organist Jimmy Smith.
“Yeah, my dad was an audiophile. He had a, back then, a reel-to-reel player and a really nice turntable, and I would just watch the needle go and the record spin,” Blanford said.
For a time, Blanford’s family was stationed in Japan. There, Blanford learned what he calls the Japanese “ritual” around vinyl listening: taking an album out of its sleeve, cleaning it off, putting it on the table, and then focusing deeply on the music.
“My dad did that when we lived in Japan, it would be like when he put a jazz album on, he would tell us, ‘No talking, you we need to be quiet and listen to this, right?’ And just the reverence that was shown to the art form. I'd love to see ways to make that happen,” he said.
Though this is his first role in the jazz industry, Blanford’s respect and taste for jazz has only grown with time. Today, he views the music as a gift to the entire world, born from the Black experience.
“You can go, you know, on any continent, and we hear jazz being played, right, but with a recognition that it is a Black art form, right?," he said. "So, trying to honor the tradition of it while allowing for it to mutate and grow in ways that the original founders couldn't have imagined."
Down to listening
Blanford originally moved to Seattle to attend law school at the University of Washington. While he briefly participated in the program, he ultimately went on to complete a masters in public administration and a doctorate in education.
From there, he worked in education and held several roles at nonprofits. Most recently, he served as executive director of Children’s Alliance, a children’s advocacy organization. There, he advanced policy and legislation to fund early learning, address youth behavioral health and support working families.
As with his early jazz experiences, he said his success in that role — and in all his community work — stems from his ability to actively listen.
“Both in my school board experience, as well as at Children's Alliance, we spent a lot of time actually engaging in community, trying to figure out, what do people need," he said. Rather than coming in with pre-determined ideas, he tried to spend time listening.
Blanford is only two months into the role and he has already begun that listening process in earnest. He’s engaging community stakeholders and crystallizing his vision for the organization moving forward, which currently centers on deepening community and artist engagement while supporting the organization’s long-term sustainability.
“It is developing. I've been in the role for two months, so it's not…I'm not going to make any big statements. But I really want to realize the potential of the organization,” he said.
‘Actualizing’ Earshot
As with any arts nonprofit, sustainability and growth are predicated on funding. Blanford is experienced in that department.
While jazz only accounts for a fraction of overall record sales in the U.S., Blanford is cautiously optimistic, despite cuts to federal arts funders like the National Endowment of the Arts.
Blanford’s plan is to become less reliant on festival ticket sales and find more private benefactors who really care about the music, which, with a successful background in fundraising, he is confident he can do.
“I know that ticket sales are important, but we'll never be able to survive just on ticket sales. And so we've got to find some benefactors that care enough about jazz and are willing to invest in it,” he said.
Through meetings with community stakeholders and his own research in the last few months, Blanford has discovered a few other gaps he’d like to address to help Earshot Jazz expand.
A regular attendee of Earshot and other jazz festivals, Blanford’s realized that Earshot Jazz is “punching below its weight” in terms of jazz festivals in major urban hubs.
“Cities that have jazz festivals that are a similar size have much more art that they're producing and presenting to their communities, and so we've got to figure out a way to actually scale up so that we're reaching our potential,” he said.
By “more art,” Blanford means delivering more music and nurturing and incorporating other components of what he calls the “jazz lifestyle," like wine.
Blanford is also focused on making the organization and festival more inclusive of women and people of color — and anyone else who may not feel welcome in jazz.
“I think there are a lot of jazz fans that have been put off for one reason or another by our organization. So, really trying to rebuild relationships and figure out ways to get people to have a sense of co-ownership of the organization,” Blanford said.
A new chapter
For Blanford, that inclusion goes beyond audiences to the way he will approach booking musicians for the festival, in collaboration with Earshot’s Festival Programmer and Talent Buyer Halynn Blanchard.
While Earshot is known for its broad conception of jazz music — including many bands that might be considered genre-blending or jazz-adjacent — Blanford sees even more potential for diversification, particularly through the presentation of more artists of color, women, locals, and youth.
“I know that there are lots of schools all around the city that have jazz programs that are in, you know, different [financial] states, trying to figure out ways that we can really rebuild the pipeline of people aspiring to be jazz musicians," he said. "So that it's not just middle class kids, but kids of all stripes that have the opportunity."
Blanford describes his transition into this new role as an “unfurling.” He is embracing the responsibility that comes with the job, as well as the opportunity to reimagine a beloved local arts organization and get to know the community.
This is also a fortuitous and extra-celebratory year for him to begin his first official role in jazz, as several of the music's most iconic progenitors celebrate their centennials in 2026. Earshot Jazz plans to celebrate these milestones during the festival in the fall.
“We should be announcing the festival lineup pretty soon,—” Blanford said. “It's going to have some elements of the celebration of the centennial of Miles Davis and John Coltrane that I'm very excited about. It's a great way to start off this new role.”
