- Hello, and welcome to Everyday Northwest.

I'm your host, Stacy Nelson.

We have a great show lined up for you today including Washington State's first farm to table distillery, an artist who gives new meaning to hands on, and finally a bit of Zonky jazz, celebrating music from a bygone era to the here and now.

Sit back, relax and enjoy learning about what makes Everyday Northwest so great.

(upbeat music) - [Don] One thing about fly fishing, at least in my life is that I if I'm on the water doing the thing, I can pretty much silence the rest of the world.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] An inspired fly fishing expedition leads to blazing trail in a new industry, Dry Fly Distillery spirit of adventure and fearless pursuit of innovation has launched a micro industry in Washington state and produced a unique offering for spirit lovers across the US.

(upbeat music) - It started very simply with really one piece of paper and we have this idea and then we vetted out what parts could and couldn't happen and had to deal with legislative and operational and laws and stuff that made it either complicated.

I guess you can think of that way or kind of fun actually, too.

I love Spokane.

I've traveled throughout North America and I always loved coming home.

So I wanted to do something that at least in my mind supported my love for Spokane and was part of our community and took advantage of all the great things we have.

It really was trying to take this group of resources that told a story about Spokane.

And that was kind of the starting point.

We made distilling an agricultural practice because the whole idea was if you're going to be a distillery in the state of Washington you should use these amazing resources from our state.

And that should be the basis.

- Well, Dry Fly was founded with that ethos of using the great ingredients that are grown right here in our backyard and across the country in the culinary scene there's been a large movement to farm to table.

And so farm to bottle is basically that same concept, that if you're going to make a product and you're gonna call it craft and it's gonna be the best it can possibly be then you need to make that product yourself.

You need to put your heart and soul into it.

You need to make the decisions that result in that final product.

And I think that Dry Fly does a tremendous job of that and credit to Don starting with that philosophy.

I think it's grown across the country and there's many of our peers that follow that same philosophy now but Dry Fly was really one of the first to embrace that and run with it.

(upbeat music) - We believe that shortcut is not the right answer.

Taking the time, we talk about persistence and patience and things like that which are fly fishing attributes that really apply to this business as well.

It just, you can't cheap time.

- I came from the wholesale business and I was Dry Fly's distributor for several years there heading up to 2017 when we sold our distribution company.

And I was looking for something new to do and Don called and asked if I would entertain-- - I sucked him in.

- Yeah, entertained buying Kent Fleshman out.

And so Kent was ready to retire and wanted to sail off into the sunset.

And so I looked at the Dry Fly brand and I thought, well, this is just a great brand.

And there's so much growth potential here that this looks like a nice challenge for me.

So I jumped in and we started kind of building out our distributor network.

We're in 40 states now with a pretty good flow of product.

The canned cocktails, which we introduced in 2019 have been a great innovation.

We sold 50,000 cases or thereabouts last year.

And so it's been a nice counterpart to our spirits.

It's helped raise the awareness of our spirits across the country and maybe reach into some younger demographics that might not have been as familiar with our spirits but were drawn in by our canned cocktails to begin with.

So we still have a lot of growth potential ahead of us.

And I think, we've got our eye on 50 states and we have a small amount of international business that we do as well.

But I think the next few years are gonna be pretty amazing.

And that's, hence the new facility here is basically built to support the increase in sales.

We've been stressed, stretched, I should say to the max at the other facility to try and keep up with the volume.

And so this will solve a lot of problems for us.

It'll also allow us the ability to put a lot of whiskey down for the long haul and if you're gonna be successful in the whiskey game it's all about building deep inventories of older whiskey.

And this facility will enable that as well.

So I think we're in a really good spot and headed to an even better place.

Our pilot still, the small still allows us to do things small batch gin or do custom gin where we have consumers that come in and blend their own botanicals.

And then everybody walks out with two bottles of their gin with a decal on the side of it.

It also allows us to test out new ideas on a small scale like maybe new flavored flavors of vodka or maybe new flavors of vodka that end up in canned cocktails or innovating with other types of gin.

There's just a whole lot of ideas that this facility will allow us to explore pretty easily actually.

With the new distillery I mean, we really added more of a hospitality factor to it than we ever had before, so they could try the canned cocktails and they could buy all those packaged goods to go.

We've taken that another level up here with a full kitchen with a restaurant, full menu.

We have an event space, which is basically the bar from Dry Fly one.

We brought over and rebuilt upstairs.

So it's really cool because it kind of hearkens back to our history over there.

And it makes a great really warm event space that overlooks the stills.

- [Don] Hey, this building's a unicorn for us, right from, if I was to sit and we were to gather architects and engineers together and try to decide how do you build a distillery at this sort of volume, you would build a building just like this.

- In terms of location.

It's right in the middle of downtown Spokane, we talked about the, obviously it was gonna be a step up in overhead and rent for us, but in terms of, if we wanted to buy outdoor advertising it would cost us more to buy billboards than it would the increased rent to be here on the corner with all of our tanks and equipment along these windows and the signage up above.

And just thousands of people that come by here every day.

So the location is just like Don said, it's a unicorn.

Not only was it built for manufacturing it's also a beautiful building and it's at a location that gives us exposure.

We couldn't get anywhere else in Spokane.

And so I think it just worked out to be the perfect fit for us.

- I think we've always had, Terry talked about our vision and our ethos and our culture.

And this is the best personification of that.

We built these windows for people to look out here and wanna understand that, like, it's all done here.

There's no smoke and mirrors here.

It's all right here.

And I encourage our staff and try to do it myself of walking down and seeing people staring out here.

They have a question, they want to come up.

Maybe sometimes they just wanna take a picture but people wanna know.

And this is such an amazing place to do a five minute walkthrough with someone and they don't have that choice.

They can't go to a distillery in Kentucky and most people have never been in a distillery and there's no weird magic science here.

It's all just a bunch of tanks and stuff but they all pretty much understand where we came from.

And I think the community celebrates along with us.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator 2] From paint on her hands to adventures in vans Christina Deubel is truly connected with the natural experiences in life.

See how her love for nature is transferred from her mind to her fingertips creating work in vibrant color and expression.

(gentle music) - I was raised on 500 acres so I spent my childhood running around in the woods and playing with animals and fishing and all that stuff.

(gentle music) So that created the monster that is me chasing the wild all the time.

(gentle music) My van's name is Wilma Pearl, which is named after my grandmother.

So my grandma was a little wild and crazy and her retirement plan, my grandfather died when he was pretty young.

So my grandma's retirement plan was to get a white van and an Airstream and travel around the country.

(gentle music) And she never got to do it.

So now she gets to do it in the form of Wilma Pearl the van.

(gentle music) I've been painting professionally since 2011 and way back I did a project with my son and he was maybe like eight at the time.

And I got a big seven foot canvas and we just got messy and played with our hands.

And I hadn't done it again for a decade until this year.

I picked back up painting with my hands again instead of using my paint brushes.

And as soon as I did my first one which was a bison painting, I was like what have I been doing?

I just wasted 10 years using paint brushes.

Cause clearly my hands make things way more magical and it's way more fun.

(gentle music) When I was little, I thought I wanted to be a vet and I did some job shadowing at a vet clinic and realized that I do not like blood.

So now I'm finding a much happier way to interact with the animals.

(gentle music) I think my pieces have a super emotional element to them and to be able to I think I can express myself a lot better being able to touch and squish and feel the canvas and interact with it much differently than I could holding something between me and the actual canvas.

(gentle music) One of my favorites I did a mural at the mountain bike park here.

And at one point I left to go run an errand and came back and there were people just standing there.

And they were saying, I was trying to figure out how you were doing this, what you were using.

And I started painting while I chatted with them and they were amazed that it was done with my fingers.

(gentle music) A major theme in my artwork, I love light.

I love that juxtapose of light and dark.

So like sunsets and vibrant colors, wildlife, flowers all of that, I can just soak up in nature and it's such, it's just my place, I love it out there.

I have done some, like where I've hung my canvas on a tree and been out there painting in the wild.

And that's been fun as well.

(gentle music) It feels more like almost dancing with my canvas of I get to be moving and interacting and feeling the rough texture and the squishy paint and everything about it I just love.

I had somebody ask me the other day how I choose my colors.

And the answer is purely emotion based of obviously they're not realistic colors and it's totally just based on feeling and my mood that day.

And it's been so much fun.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator 3] "Zonky" is a song written by Fats Waller in 1928.

♪ You don't say ♪ Who are you to know what I'm trying to say ♪ ♪ Pipe down you (Zonky continues) It's about a dance and a party and about letting go of whatever might be bothering you.

(upbeat music) (audience cheering) - Thank you jazz band.

♪ Get a dime against the donut ♪ Other dance dances, they may come and go ♪ ♪ But when you do the Zonky ♪ You will want it to stay - That's "Zonky", sounds a little bit like "Inspector Gadget" though, doesn't it?

- So with "Zonky", we wanted to do something just a little bit different with the band, some little bit more wild, some a bit more unhinged.

♪ When they bring back musically ♪ ♪ Whew (audience cheering) (upbeat music) - [Garrin] The Zonky Jazz Band started years ago back in 2006 as a band called the Viktor Navorski Swing Band.

Robert Folie and I started the band and then we created "Six Foot Swing" with Heather Villa.

(Six Foot Swing playing) After six months or so we decided to move on.

We started Hot Club of Spokane in June of 2007.

The Zonky Jazz Band is basically a spinoff of the Hot Club of Spokane.

(La Vie En Rose playing) - So we were just getting started.

We didn't know anybody in the jazz community.

We were just trying to get the whole band going and our real goal we thought maybe at someday playing at Ella's.

- [Garrin] We reached our goal to play at Ella's pretty quickly.

But in the early years of the band we started a jazz festival called Think Swing at Ella's supper club with the help of Tim Barrons and Leslie Ann Grove.

- I'm Christina Crawford and Entertainment Northwest is at Ella's supper club in Spokane.

And my guest today is Garrin Hertel.

And he was the innovator and the promoter of Think Swing.

Welcome, Garrin.

- Thank you, thanks for having me.

- Oh, it's a pleasure.

- So you wanna know how it happens?

- I do.

- Well, we can-- - Everybody else does too.

- [Garrin] We brought five bands from New Orleans the first year including Washboard Chaz and the New Orleans Jazz Vipers.

- [Reporter] Man, I love this stuff going all the way back to Louis Armstrong and before, these folks are genuine a couple of genuine New Orleans musicians.

- [Garrin] Their bassist is a good friend of mine.

Robert Snow.

He's a fourth generation New Orleans musician.

- [Robert] Guys we're not on tour.

This is a one off only for Spokane.

This is a one time only, thanks to Garrin man.

Garrin put all of this together.

I met Garrin playing with another famous guy from New Orleans Eddy Boparis.

He says, what can I do for you up here?

I said, man, why don't you try to see if you can hook us up with some gigs.

We get up to that area, maybe we can get a gig or two.

He said, let me check on it.

Two days later, he called me back and he said, man, I'm thinking of this festival.

Six months later, we playing it.

(band playing) ♪ In my backdoor someday - So as a band we treated Think Swing like a professional development event.

We basically just watched all those bands up close and learned as much as we could.

The biggest year of the festival was 2008 and we had some big names in jazz and swing in Spokane, including Matt Munisteri, Bria Skonberg, Casey MacGill, Hot Club of Cowtown with Whit Smith, Hot Club of New Orleans.

- [Robert] What an incredible find, this is amazing Garrin, thank you.

- [Garrin] One of the highlights for our lead guitarist Steve Bower was a jam session with Andreas Oberg.

- Okay so we were having a gypsy jazz jam with several good guitar players.

One of them being Andreas Oberg, and I think he was just being polite and not overplaying and just not having a good time but just letting other people take leads.

And I wanted to hear him play.

I wanted to hear him do something extraordinary.

So I did some kind of a quick run that perked his ears up and looked around and said, oh all right.

And then he took off and really played well.

And that was a delight.

- So with Think Swing really was probably the first time we realized we could do something and we started seeing what we could possibly do as a band.

- Part of the fun and enjoyment and value was personally is to play with these other really good guitar players.

- [Garrin] In the years that followed the festival we started researching local jazz history and that's when the band's mission started to come into focus.

We hope that through all our shows, people will learn more about Spokane's own legacy as a jazz city.

- You know, it wasn't the backwater that you might suppose four national railroads came through Spokane and that brought a constant new flush of Bobbi acts and music and cultural differences.

- [Garrin] Our first jazz history project is what we call a live music documentary film experience called "Now You Has Jazz" that show features documentary film clips and live music.

And it all celebrates the lives of Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and Al Rinker.

All of whom came from Spokane.

Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey especially made it big and influenced the world of jazz pretty significantly.

- There were several weeks in the 1937, 1938 where four of the top 10 songs were by people from Spokane usually three of Bing's and one of Mildred's.

I would think that if you were a musician in Spokane in the 30s, you gained a lot of confidence knowing that this is the scene that had produced these two stars and including one who was basically the biggest star in the country and maybe the world at the time.

- Well, recently the Zonky Jazz Band's working on a Mildred Bailey tribute album.

- Right from the tippy top.

A one, two.

- [Garrin] And we're recording all of Mildred's best dance music.

We're hopeful that all the dancers across the country will be excited to dance to Mildred's music.

(upbeat music) - So we've been finding with local dancers and other ones across the country, they're really getting into the music but they're also really enjoying the stories behind the songs that we play.

- [Garrin] Our first show as the Zonky Jazz Band was a local dance event called Inland Empire Shuffle.

We've really invested a lot of our time and energy shaping the band for dancers.

We're also hoping to give people an on-ramp to Mildred Bailey's music.

If they hear us and they like it we hope they'll go check out Mildred's original recordings and maybe learn more about Mildred Bailey.

(audience cheering) - Thank you everyone.

- You can catch the Zonky Jazz Band every third Tuesday at 8:00 PM at the Lucky You Lounge in historic Browns edition.

- [Crowd] One more time, one more time.

One more time.

(audience laughing) - We hope you enjoyed today's show.

We look forward to sharing more sight and sounds, beats, treats and flavors in our next episode of Everyday Northwest.

- [Narrator 2] Learn more about the sight, sounds, beats and treats of life in the Pacific Northwest through Art Chowder Magazine, subscriptions and more information are available at www.artchowder.com.

Financial support for Everyday Northwest provided in part by BECU, people helping people, www.becu.org.

Also Historic Flight Foundation at Phelps Field in Spokane, experience history in motion, www.historicflight.org.

And also the Art Spirit Gallery in downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho celebrating 25 years of quality, imaginative and inspiring art.

Theartspiritgallery.com.

(upbeat music)