Wally Shoup's music is not for everybody, to put it lightly. But for those who have connected with it, the late Seattle saxophonist's free-flowing sound is pure, beneficent energy, and the man behind it was a powerful inspiration to young, adventurous musicians.

In improv-music circles, Shoup—who passed away on March 5—was a colossus of sound, visual art, and philosophical essays on music. On record and onstage, he worked with some of the underground's biggest and most inventive stars: Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Nels Cline, Bill Nace, Davey Williams, and others. Alongside those estimable collabs, Shoup's activities with fellow Seattle experimental musicians was prolific and profound. 

To celebrate Shoup's prodigious accomplishments, his comrades have organized three tribute concerts this weekend: August 23 at the Royal Room; August 24 at Kenyon Hall; and August 25 at Gallery 1412. 

Born in North Carolina in 1944, Shoup performed in several groups (including Ghidra, Spider Trio, and SYCH) and led his own combos in a recording career that spanned from 1981 to 2024. His catalog encompasses nearly three dozen releases, many of them now out of print and difficult to find. Streaming services do contain a fraction of them, including two of my favorites: 2005's Immolation/Immersion with guitarist Cline and drummer Corsano and 2007's Suite: Bittersweet with Cline and drummer Greg Campbell. These albums capture the full range of Shoup's playing, from melancholy mellowness to apocalyptic wailing. Another highlight is the 2011 SYCH album, Lunar Roulette, about which I wrote in The Stranger: "Somewhere in the interstices of free jazz, noise rock, and minimalist composition, Lunar Roulette harnesses a cyclonic energy that's inspirational."

Inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame in 2018, Shoup played a key role in founding the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, which became the world's longest-running event centered on improv music. (It's currently on hiatus after a 35-year run.) He also organized the Other Sounds concert series and was a tireless activist for unconventional music in the region. 

Slog is joining in the Wally love fest by compiling praise from the great man's bandmates and friends. He was lovingly called “a fire-breathing alto saxophonist” and “the kind of guy who would bring you a pimiento cheese sandwich and then tell you about his recent fascination with Townes Van Zandt.” I implore you not to skip the epic, perceptive, and loving paean at the end of this post by guitarist Bill Horist, the artist who perhaps knew Shoup best, outside of Wally's devoted partner, Shirley Wong.

Stuart Dempster (Deep Listening Band)

Wally Shoup was a one-off. I first met him when he had helped start a freeform band in Pioneer Square in the mid 1980s. I was not only listening, it turned out he wanted me to join in with the larger group. As I remember, that was the start of something that caught on. Wally, and the late Paul Hoskin (contrabass clarinet), later organized regular performances of the yearly Seattle Improvised Music Festivals. 

Later on I saw some of his art and was intrigued, especially because my wife Renko was an artist, and we both appreciated his work. Wally played regularly in lots of small groups, many of which he was the instigator. One of my favorites was the Campbell Shoup band—Greg Campbell and Wally Shoup—that included others. He also had some of his paintings on the wall at Seattle's Gallery 1412. 

When I could, I liked the opportunity to join in with several of Wally Shoup's "pickup" concerts or as part of larger groups that included him. Indeed, as a one-off, I appreciated his musicianship, humor, and his connection to many threads of improvisers. I liked his spirited playing and the encouragement he showed to new musicians. Godspeed, Wally. I miss you; we all miss you...

Jeffery Taylor (Climax Golden Twins, Spider Trio, Hound Dog Taylor's Hand, Wall of Sound co-owner)

Wally was the kind of guy who would bring you a pimiento cheese sandwich and then tell you about his recent fascination with Townes Van Zandt. He’d stop by [Wall of Sound] every few weeks and many discussions about the vagaries of music would ensue. As with any music fan with diverse listening habits, these discussions were wide-ranging. Aside from improvising together, these are the fondest moments I enjoyed with Wally.

Also, we both dug Ben Webster. Music and Seattle’s burgeoning experimental scene was the connection, and our kinship developed through improvising with Dave Abramson in our group Spider Trio. These sessions left an indelible imprint on my approach to playing improvised music, and I have Wally to thank for the instigation. 

Dennis Rea (Moraine, Stackpole)

I was introduced to Wally by Doug Haire in 1987, after I’d moved back to Seattle from a few years’ sojourn in New York to find that a vibrant improv scene had sprung up in my absence. Wally expressed a liking for my playing and recruited me for his early Seattle improv bands Particle Theory and Catabatics. The few gigs we played at counterculture cafes like Free Mars and the Cause Celebre were actually my first experiences playing completely unscripted in a live situation. I later returned the kindness by involving Wally in my exploded free-jazz band Stackpole, a rare exception to his usual insistence on leading his own bands or working in leaderless settings. (He didn’t last very long.) We also restarted and co-organized the Seattle Improvised Music Festival together for 10 years. 

What struck me about Wally was that he eschewed the austere, reductive approach that was then au courant in improv circles—what I refer to as “hair-shirt improv”—in favor of a more gutbucket, abstract-expressionist approach. While hewing faithfully to the pursuit of total improvisation to the end, Wally was wary of some of the genre’s sacred shibboleths, and was very much his own musician. The emotional punch of his playing, rare enough in the thin air of the free improvisation mythos, was his greatest strength. 

Greg Kelley (nmperign)

I first met Wally Shoup in Seattle in 1998 on the first cross-country tour by nmperign [Kelley's group with soprano saxophonist Bhob Rainey]. I was aware of Wally as a fire-breathing alto saxophonist and as an associate of LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams and their journal, The Improviser. I knew I would meet an acerbic, sardonic gentleman who may or may not view what nmperign was doing with some amount of skepticism and perhaps as a quiet, ascetic critique of the freewheeling aesthetic Wally was known for. But it became apparent in our discussions that these lines in the aesthetic sands were drawn externally and that we were both critical seekers. 

After that, I would see Wally when he played on the East Coast or on periodic visits to Seattle in the late '90s/early '00s. We didn't play together until 2009 at the Seattle Improvised Music Festival. On that trip, I spent a little more time with Wally than our previous fleeting meetups, which led to us playing some shows together on the East Coast in 2011 and continuing our extensive conversations about the state of the music locally and internationally. Wally was always interested in and keeping abreast of what was going on in the improvised arts. 

A month prior to moving to Seattle for work in 2014, I met up with Wally and Bill Horist on a pre-move exploratory visit and felt some sense of relief that I was not leaping into a void by uprooting from the East Coast for the first time in my life. When I arrived, Wally was quick to fold me into his world and introduced me to a number of different improvisers, including longtime associates and a number of younger, newer associates.

Though Wally had strong aesthetic convictions, his scope of musical interests was broad and he frequently sought out new voices to collaborate with. One of the last times we played together was a January 2020 recording session with guitarist Tom Scully and drummer Casey Adams, two younger musicians Wally knew would push him into new territory.

Wally had invited me to play a show in April 2020, but we all know what happened to that. The last time I saw him was at the end of May 2020, the day before I moved back to the East Coast. He'd just heard some mixes of the quartet with Tom and Casey and was excited about the results. We talked about the possibility of me flying back out for a record-release party, but that never did manifest. But these and many other recordings did and will manifest, so the music continues—as do Wally's many, many paintings. And the younger improvisers Wally collaborated with will continue their own collaborations, and the traditions and bucking against them will continue.

Jack Gold-Molina (Flame Tree, Fraktal Phantom)

Although I had known of Wally and his adventurous musical approach for years, I first met him at Stackpole's Earshot performance in 2001. I was blown away. Then Gregg Keplinger invited me to a gig that he and Wally were doing at the Sunset Tavern with Reuben Radding on bass. The trio was called Lost Valentine and they played so hard I was surprised that the windows weren't blown out of the club. It was all free improv jazz and it smoked. People's jaws were on the floor. I recorded that gig on my portable DAT recorder and then released it on CD. The album is called 1, 2, 3. The surprising thing is, it's one of the best free-jazz albums I have ever heard, but it hasn't sold well at all. Go figure! 

Wally was also a very talented painter and writer. He published a book called Music as Adventure. I highly recommend it to the true poet and improvising musician. His piece, "Countering the Con," is a classic of free-jazz literature.

We didn't always see eye-to-eye, but I respected him greatly. We didn't gel musically when we tried to play together, but I have listened to his stuff religiously. He was always one of the first people that I called when putting together a festival or a gig. Absolutely killer punk player, also. He really understood the depth of punk music and its relationship with free jazz and free improvisation. 

One of the things that he and I talked a lot about was that being true to the practice of your art means not selling out—your music, your friends, your allies, your personal integrity. There was none of that discriminatory bullshit with him. He reminded me of Lemmy—what you see is what you get.

Beth Fleenor (Samantha Boshnack Quintet, the Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble) 

I improvised with Wally Shoup a handful of times and was undeniably struck by his relentless energy in sound, and always had massive respect for him and his multi-disciplinary explorations. But the most personally impactful experiences I had with Wally were around the kitchen table in his visits with poet Margareta Waterman at Stephen Fandrich's Spitehouse—a long-time music and art-community home. It was so meaningful to me, especially 20 years ago when I was a young artist, to have the honor of experiencing and witnessing the palpable connection between these two longtime collaborators, who supported and challenged each other and danced through change over many decades, and always brought me into the conversation, respected as a peer rather than a “young artist” at the time. Pure inspiration for keeping going on this wild continuum that is music. 

Steve Schmitt (Diminished Men) 

Always been a huge fan and was saddened at his passing. I recall seeing him with Spider Trio in this dirty basement at a party that seemed to be in an abandoned house run by a bunch of sketchy punks.

I recall that at Vito’s one night with a full band, he played the Twin Peaks theme along with some other compositional pieces. I had only see him do out jazz, so I was pleasantly surprised when I heard him play compositional material with such passion. On YouTube is a low-quality video of Diminished Men playing on the floor at the Comet Tavern around 2010. And still to this day it’s my favorite clip of us [because] Wally sat in on this Kabuki-esqe number we still play, and just cranked up the cool factor for the song by many degrees.

Bill Horist (Ghidra, SYCH) 

I had the pleasure of meeting Wally Shoup in the mid '90s after moving to Seattle. Despite being deeply intimidated by the man, we struck up what ultimately became a quarter century of friendship and collaboration. I was deeply honored to be the guitarist in several groups with a musician who counted other string-slingers like Nels Cline, Thurston Moore, and Davey Williams as periodic bandmates.

The man I came to know, first as musician, then as a good friend, was a model of 20th-century rebellion. Growing up in the South, Wally began his step through the vale with formative dosages of film noir, Black music divined at night by transistor radio dial and later, the Beat writers. One could almost imagine him sauntering off the pages of a Pynchon novel—a character slipping through the fissures within the shattered ideations of plastic midcentury fever dreams (what, in his own words, he called "the big con"), into the Technicolor™ tightrope circus-world of radical and unbridled, self-reliant creation. A young insurance adjuster who pried his own eyes, and in an act of iconoclastic acrobatics, made a Gauguin-pivot into free jazz and primitivist art and slowly migrated West.

Wally was an adamant proselytizer for freely improvised music. His strong convictions about unrestricted creative freedom as agent of becoming touched every aspect of his life (his music, writing, art, curating, and working with children), and deeply influenced many of the people with whom he played. The influence of his formative years shone through in his elucidations about art and rebellion, as did his devotion to James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games, as well as the tarot.

Many of this soul-scientist’s insightful quasi-sermons revolved around the “cons” and the “games” of life and art—replete with the wry, indirect delivery of a true Southerner. Wally was here to play the game, and the game was, as he wrote in Music as Adventure, his short volume of essays, “…to consistently play with self-created boundaries rather than within given ones; to play not for the sake of winning or losing someone else’s game but to continue playing…” As with words, he spoke in sound, playfully glancing…feinting… always burning bright.

Wally’s playing was an encyclopedia of the incendiary. It was light, heat, and all its trailings and shadows. Without training, he had willed himself an endless fuel supply for a trademark searing, jet-piercing, steam-screaming that haunted a listener’s inner ear with buzzing difference tones like your brain had become an insect, humming along with his conjuration-concussions in brutal but rapt sympathy. Rapid flaming after-charge from Tommy-gun-double-tongue hocket rockets. Wave and particle yoyo in uncertain states—the equilibrium is no equilibrium. Quantum jazz-cum-Stooges dances with Beefheart in a brass fission reactor—a question to the answer of overhyped fusion. Then he’d let it cool in pools of velvet noir smoke, lazily drifting along the walls as the ear’s after-image evanesces into the warm void. Wavering pitch-embers pulse like after-set cigarettes and blink out, swallowed in their own oblivion. What remains as the silence returns is the glint of an old, ever-out-of-tune-in-the-upper-register-but-who-gives-a-flying-fuck-'cause-damn-that-was-hot, scratchy alto. The bell still glowing orange—a haunted cornucopia of fusillades.

Playing with Wally was always playing with the manifold iterations of fire.

One thing that cemented our years-long music connection and the half dozen records that resulted from it was that we shared a strong sense of that radical, creative self-reliance. Neither of us had any training on our respective instruments. We both, at our own points, decided that we would play the cards drawn for us by an unexpected oracle. A tarot reading that directed us toward an almost quixotic pursuit into one of the most recondite enclaves of the musical arts—and in the absence of any institutional or academic oversight whatsoever. Tapping the Tao, we called it our “uncarved block” approach.

Many groups and musicians have used the term “punk jazz” to describe their or others’ turn-of- the-century amalgams. While I like and was deeply inspired by music so described (hearing John Zorn’s Naked City was in many ways a life-changing event), I found that the description rang a bit hollow. In most instances, this punk jazz was created by highly skilled—and, more notably, schooled—musicians. One of my own formative steps behind the curtain of the “con” in the '80s was to just pick up an instrument, join a band, begin, and not get caught up in the learning of it; an approach that, in my aging conceit, and for better or worse, still feels more true to the spirit of punk.

In an arcane musical world where the lion’s share of players took the time to learn their instrument, whether by private lessons or PhDs, before moving beyond formal constraints, there were a few of us that precociously sidestepped painting the cow before assaulting the canvas with unrestricted color. My years working with Wally was an homage to that uncarved block, to the child within, to that spirit of punk jazz. Even, and perhaps ironically, in our long-standing “free-shred” trio Ghidra (with the Accüsed drummer Mike Peterson), it was Mike, the actual punk-rock drummer (and so much more), who knew way more about playing his instrument than we did.

Later in my life, my lack of knowledge had a profound effect on my confidence and dedication to playing as often as I had. After 20 years of playing guitar, I stepped back 10 years ago to actually learn how—and now teach. But Wally never equivocated, never blinked at the blinding uncertainty that can rise over any of our horizons. And that was and will continue to be an inspiration to me. Even though I know much more than I did, I seek the uncarved space and still play freely improvised music, completely forgetting everything I’ve since learned in the moment.

And that will be one of Wally’s ever-renewing gift to me. Equipped with radical self-reliance, Wally played and inspired us to play our own games—together. At length, he eventually earned well-deserved but often insufficient accolades along the way, his rough-edged, playful, and unstoppable force apparent to all. Even as he was awarded a “Lifetime Achievement” award by Earshot Jazz, his force was acknowledged when he was introduced with admiration to the crowd as “Wally Fucking Shoup.”

Wally was also an extremely fortunate individual. Living an uncompromising life as artist does tend to require strong and consistent support, and he certainly had it in Shirley Wong, his long-term partner, who believed in the value of his vision and without whom his life and death would have been much more difficult and dire. Radical self-reliance can only go so far, and Wally’s success cannot be honestly assessed without acknowledging and appreciating the years of unwavering and, at times, difficult commitment and sacrifice Shirley made on his behalf.

And, bolstered by such assistance, eventual admiration, and often awe, Wally played his game and countered the con in a way that was rare in its time and even more so now. A lifelong commitment to the uncarved block in sound, color, and word. And one more time, the words of the man himself, [from his book, Music as Adventure], “Anyone can improvise (refuting arguments that it’s elitist) but not everyone can continue to improvise.” Wally certainly did both with endless aplomb.