Hey Salseros!!
We are can­celling salsa tonight due to the unsa­vory weather con­di­tions. Sooo, it means that if you want to dance, maybe you can do it in the com­fort of your own home.
Join us next week to enjoy another week of Salsa Fri­days, and don’t for­get that Cam­bal­ache Salsa will be per­form­ing live Feb­ru­ary 3^rd backstage!!!

On Decem­ber 1, The Sea­sons lost an impor­tant friend. Jan­ice Gilley was one of our very ear­li­est vol­un­teers, begin­ning 6 years ago, and remained highly ded­i­cated until just before her unex­pected pass­ing at age 62 — only two and a half weeks fol­low­ing a diag­no­sis of lung can­cer. Vol­un­teers are The Sea­sons’ life blood, and Jan­ice didn’t mind a last-minute call, didn’t mind com­ing two nights in a row, han­dled gra­ciously and will­ingly each and every task. For me as Vol­un­teer Coor­di­na­tor, Jan­ice was a dream.

The reces­sion put her career in real estate titles on hia­tus, so with her many skills, Jan­ice not only “temped” in a vari­ety office set­tings, but also became an ardent hiker and accom­plished dancer! You may have seen her at our salsa nights, ball­room danc­ing, line danc­ing, or in last year’s Memo­r­ial Follies.

Colleen Angel, another tire­less Sea­sons vol­un­teer who is pic­tured on the left in this photo, often worked with Jan­ice, and writes “She was always such a lady, and so gra­cious, poised, and pro­fes­sional. She took her vol­un­teer work very seri­ously and was won­der­ful to work with at The Sea­sons. I’ll really miss her! ”

We cer­tainly do.

Jan­ice Ann Gilley
August 30, 1949 — Decem­ber 1, 2011

Sea­son for suc­cess at Yakima con­cert venue
By Pat Muir
Yakima Herald-Republic
YAKIMA, Wash. — It was a scene from a big­ger city. Peo­ple arrived at the venue en masse, groups of twenty-something hip­sters hud­dled on the cold side­walk smok­ing cig­a­rettes while a vital con­tem­po­rary rock band pre­pared to take the stage.

It was Dec. 3, and The Sea­sons Per­for­mance Hall, which started six years ago as a jazz and clas­si­cal venue, had com­pleted its trans­for­ma­tion from esteemed but finan­cially depen­dent niche music hall into an all-purpose music venue with finan­cial prospects to match its cul­tural cachet. The crit­i­cally lauded Seat­tle band The Cave Singers was play­ing, and hun­dreds of peo­ple paid $15 to get in. It was a stark con­trast from a year ago.

“This whole year was very tran­si­tional,” said Ellie Strosahl, the venue’s direc­tor of oper­a­tions. “In the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary, I really didn’t know if we were still going to be a viable organization.”

The Sea­sons, which began under the own­er­ship of the Strosahl fam­ily busi­ness, United Builders, had never been self-sustaining. It became a non­profit orga­ni­za­tion in 2009 so it could qual­ify for Yakima County tourism fund­ing, which it received to the tune of $333,650. Even then United Builders sub­si­dized the venue finan­cially, said Pat Strosahl, Ellie’s father and a co-owner of the company.

But the eco­nomic down­turn and United Builders’ own finan­cial chal­lenges made that increas­ingly dif­fi­cult, forc­ing The Sea­sons to regroup.

“A lit­tle more than a year ago, it became obvi­ous because of the strug­gles of my com­pany that we would no longer be able to give the kind of foun­da­tional sup­port to The Sea­sons that we’d been giv­ing,” Pat Strosahl said.

That meant the orga­ni­za­tion would have to push harder for dona­tions but it also meant the music pro­gram­ming would have to start bring­ing in more money. Rock ‘n’ roll was increas­ingly added to the mix, as was blues, even an Elvis imper­son­ator. It wasn’t exactly what the Strosahls envi­sioned when they started The Sea­sons, but it worked.

Elvis packed them in, as did up-and-coming Selah prod­uct Cody Beebe, who sold the place out ear­lier this month with his band The Crooks. Mean­while, impor­tant con­tem­po­rary bands such as The Cave Singers and Portland’s Blitzen Trap­per, which played the venue in July, raised The Sea­sons’ pro­file region­ally. The county grant money helped ren­o­vate what is now the venue’s back-room per­for­mance space, fea­tur­ing a full kitchen and a bar.

“A lot of the suc­cess came from changes in the busi­ness model,” Pat Strosahl said. “We had to seek out other types of pro­gram­ming that would have direct audi­ence impact in Yakima.”

To him, those sorts of shows are a finan­cial neces­sity that allows The Sea­sons to con­tinue what he calls its “deep com­mit­ment to clas­si­cal music and jazz.” Pop music isn’t his thing.

But to Ellie Strosahl and younger music fans in Cen­tral Wash­ing­ton, the expanded pro­gram­ming meant oppor­tu­ni­ties to see top bands with­out trav­el­ing to Seat­tle or Port­land. She and facil­i­ties man­ager Nick Orlando — the only two paid staffers left after lay­offs a year ago — reached out to the sort of bands that don’t typ­i­cally come through towns as small as Yakima.

And they’ve pro­moted those shows relent­lessly, often at the ground level. Orlando spent the week lead­ing up to The Cave Singers show vis­it­ing bars with stacks of tick­ets to sell. And Ellie Strosahl got kicked out of a Los Lobos con­cert at Yakama Nation Leg­ends Casino last sum­mer because she wouldn’t stop hand­ing out fliers for the upcom­ing David Hidalgo and Louie Perez con­cert at The Sea­sons. As a result, the venue had more sell­out shows this year than it had in all its pre­vi­ous years com­bined, Ellie Strosahl said.

Nei­ther she nor Orlando is paid as a full-time 40-hour-a-week employee, but both put in more hours than that, she said.

“It’s def­i­nitely worth it for me,” she said. “I love my job. There is a lot of pres­sure, but it feels impor­tant. You get to see a lot of things tak­ing shape, where before we had poten­tial. It feels great to have some success.”

That sort of effort — not just from Ellie Strosahl and Orlando, but from Pat Strosahl, who has taken the lead in com­mu­nity fundrais­ing efforts — has allowed the venue to main­tain its com­mit­ment to jazz and clas­si­cal. There are fewer of those shows now, but there wouldn’t be any if the venue hadn’t trans­formed itself, the elder Strosahl said.

“That com­mit­ment, while it was still there, had to take a back seat to a wider range of pro­grams that I think has been good for The Sea­sons,” he said.

The venue’s clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming jewel, its annual Sea­sons Fall Fes­ti­val, has sur­vived and is thriv­ing thanks in large part to for­mer Yakima Sym­phony Orches­tra con­duc­tor Brooke Creswell, who took over that week­long event on a vol­un­teer basis this year. The fes­ti­val added a jazz com­po­nent along­side the con­duct­ing and com­pos­ing work­shops and con­certs and, accord­ing to a report Creswell sent sup­port­ers this month, hit its atten­dance goals for the first time ever. More impor­tantly, it made money. All of the pre­vi­ous five Fall Fes­ti­vals had lost money.

“Brooke Creswell is a hero to me,” Ellie Strosahl said.

Her father was equally effu­sive in his praise for Creswell, an early booster of The Sea­sons. The Fall Fes­ti­val man­ager ide­ally will become a paid posi­tion again; it’s about a $30,000 job. That Creswell did it for free demon­strated a com­mit­ment to build­ing some­thing impor­tant in Yakima. The fes­ti­val drew con­duc­tors and com­posers from across the coun­try as well as from Mex­ico and Spain this year, and it could grow into a real incu­ba­tor of inno­v­a­tive clas­si­cal and jazz music, Creswell said.

“It’s the one thing The Sea­sons does that really has poten­tial for national impor­tance,” he said. “And it’s not only about The Sea­sons. It’s doing some­thing that has some stature beyond county boundaries.”

That is pos­si­ble, he said, because the venue found a way to sur­vive. Fur­ther, Creswell doesn’t mind that the focus has shifted to include pop music. If The Sea­sons books good bands, that just helps increase its stature, he said.

“It’s like Duke Elling­ton said, there are two kinds of music: the good kind and the other kind,” Creswell said.

That’s in keep­ing with the new mis­sion of The Sea­sons, Ellie Strosahl said. It’s not to pro­vide out­stand­ing clas­si­cal and jazz but out­stand­ing music.

“Change is hard, and it has taken some inter­nal strug­gles,” she said. “But at this point it’s def­i­nitely an atmos­phere of col­lab­o­ra­tion. We all feel we want to be reach­ing out to all the dif­fer­ent parts of the com­mu­nity. … It’s a place for com­mu­nity to come together.”

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509–577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.