The enemy-turned-ally trope has long sparked box office success. And on the hockey rink, adversaries have lately been doubling as lovers. The Seattle jazz scene can now offer its own spin on this storied plot arc: Northwest high school rivals turn into New York buddies, form an avant-garde brass quartet and earn their first Grammy nomination.
The protagonists are trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and trombonist Andy Clausen, who graduated at the top of their jazz bands at Garfield High School (Mulherkar) and Roosevelt High School (Clausen) in 2010. Both of those bands attended the New York City finals of the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Competition. Garfield triumphed. Mulherkar and Clausen returned east in the fall to attend The Juilliard School, teaming up on the bandstand after “homesickness” inspired them to start a group.
Fifteen years on, Clausen said The Westerlies — which now includes trumpeter Chloe Rowlands and trombonist Addison Maye-Saxon — spent 2025 touring “as much as we ever have” on the back of their excellent album “Paradise,” which sees the quartet translating 19th-century shape note singing (historic American choral music) into jazzy, occasionally extemporaneous horn blowing. “The music we make,” Clausen said, “the stuff we’re doing, it feels pretty far from the mainstream. Fame, in that lens, has never been our goal.”
Still, the band has garnered significant critical acclaim over the past decade and a half, none of greater magnitude than their first-ever Grammy nomination this past November. Clausen found himself watching a YouTube broadcast announcing the 2026 nominees. Just in case.
“It happened very fast,” he said. “Our category took like five seconds. It was almost so fast where I didn’t believe it. I had to go back and rewind, and say, ‘Is this real?’”
It was real. The opening track of “Paradise,” the frenetic, ostinato-fueled “Fight On,” had earned a 2026 Grammy nomination in the category of best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella. Clausen and Mulherkar can still scarcely believe it, even as they discuss wardrobe options for the forthcoming L.A. festivities. “I got a text from Andy in all caps,” said Mulherkar of the nominations aftermath. “It was impossible to know whether (a Grammy) was ever attainable, given that we’ve never been nominated before. But I will say, we were proud of that record.”
Mulherkar and Clausen both understand that the Grammys are a complicated, even apocryphal measure of status in the jazz world, a signifier that vaults immediately to the top of your C.V. even as the televised awards show channels a brittle strain of pop culture that, these days, has practically nothing to do with jazz’s place in American culture. “But at the end of the day,” said Clausen, “the Grammys are a voting process by members of the Recording Academy who are industry professionals. So from that perspective, to be nominated by our peers, and folks in our field, feels like a tremendous honor. That recognition is meaningful.”
“Fight On” is an arrangement of a tune from the historic American shape note songbook “The Sacred Harp.” That songbook is written for choral performance — bass, tenor, alto and soprano — and lends itself to arrangement. Although The Westerlies are a brass band, Clausen said, “We think of ourselves sometimes as a string quartet.” Mulherkar wrote the initial parts for “Fight On,” after which members of The Westerlies began tinkering with their lines through live and studio performances.
“The fact that the nomination came in best arrangement felt very fitting,” Clausen said. “At the end of the day, everything we do is arranging. Whether it’s rearranging pieces for our music, or arranging our music around vocals, it’s about rearranging things to be as personal to us as we can make it. That’s been true since the beginning.”
Even better, the category’s other nominees are artists whom The Westerlies are proud to measure themselves against. Cynthia Erivo, of “Wicked” fame, earned a nod for “Be OK.” Saxophonist and composer Remy Le Boeuf was nominated for his Nordkraft Big Band arrangement of the Thad Jones jazz standard “A Child Is Born.” And Charlie Rosen’s 8-Bit Big Band punched their ticket with a take on the video game tune “Super Mario Praise Break.”
Mulherkar and Clausen have long known Le Boeuf and Rosen from the New York scene; they’ve apparently been texting back and forth since the nominations came out. “We’ll save the trash talk for the red carpet,” joked Clausen. “Whoever wins, we all feel like we’ve won, because three of the four of us are New York creative musical pals.” (The fourth, Erivo, is a clear winner in many formats this year.) “The main thing we’re excited about is the hang,” said Clausen. “We know a lot of people who will be there. And there are events all week long.”
Mulherkar drew a parallel between the award nomination and the band’s very first gig, at Columbia City’s Royal Room, where Seattle pianist and composer Wayne Horvitz gushed over the group’s interpretation of his compositions. “Wayne was more excited about the band than we were at the time,” said Mulherkar. “A nomination from the Recording Academy feels similar. It’s encouragement from people who are mentors and peers of ours. It says, ‘You guys are on to something here. Keep going.’”
Speaking of Seattle musical mentors, 2026 finds The Westerlies releasing two albums of music by longtime Seattleite Bill Frisell, who earned a Grammy nod himself last year. Frisell lives in New York now, but called Seattle home for three decades of his storied career.
“Bill was writing music every day during the pandemic,” said Mulherkar. “A lot of sketches. He wrote so much music that he wasn’t actually playing all of it. So we approached him and said, ‘Would it be OK if we read some of these?’ And he just sent us everything.”
The Westerlies’ take on Frisell’s pandemic-era “sketches” will appear in a March release. A second album, out in the fall, will feature choice arrangements from Frisell’s extended catalog. Some of this music will be performed at the annual Westerlies Fest, scheduled from April 8 to April 11 at local venues. “It’s been a longtime dream of ours to do a project of Bill’s work,” said Clausen. “His vast journey through American music, that spirit really influenced The Westerlies. His (1996) record ‘Quartet’ was on repeat in the touring van.”
The touring van might come in handy later this year. But from New York City and Madison, Wis. — where Mulherkar and his wife recently moved to raise their two young children — Los Angeles is best reached via plane, especially because the Grammys dovetails on three Westerlies performances with vocal phenom Silvana Estrada in Mexico City. Regardless of what happens at the award show itself, Clausen and Mulherkar will take it in with wide eyes and an open sense of adventure. Now, about those wardrobe options.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
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