Finn Hill Jazz ensemble, live jazz music Seattle, Kirkland and Bellevue WA.

About Finn Hill Jazz

Kay Bailey - Vocals. As a child, Kay grew up in a home filled with the passion of song. Her father’s jazz records rang from room to room. Classic artists including John Coltrane, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis excited and soothed her throughout her youth in Cleveland.

Her “Poppo” loved his music. With a voice like Billy Eckstine he sang along and sang alone but he was always a little too shy to really finish a song. Now, at age eighty four, when he comes to hear her sing, he sits quietly and waits for me to call him up to the mic to sing a song with his daughter. He still knows all the words.

She has been singing in the Seattle area for the past five years. Her venues have included Cafe Campagne, Pacific Place, The Pampas Room, the Sorrento Hotel, and the Wellington Tea House. Although her performances still feature a strong representation of the early jazz classics, more and more she is also including a more eclectic mix of music from artists like Van Morrison, Leon Russell, Dan Hicks and Lindsey Buckingham and Norah Jones. She loves to sing and there is a big world out there full of passionate song writers creating new classics for future generations to discover. She loves bringing great music to audiences of all ages.

Karin Kajita - Piano Karin is an accomplished jazz and classical pianist who studied the piano formally for sixteen years. Her teachers through high school included Corrine Berg, Willard Schultz and Professor Neal O’Doan of the University of Washington. Karin continued her studies with Professor O’Doan at the UW and earned degrees in music and piano performance. She studied jazz with Jerry Gray and jazz arranging with Professor Bill Smith at the UW.

Karin was awarded two Milnor Roberts scholarships and two Bainbridge Music and Art Foundation scholarships. She is the recipient of a 2006 Artist Support Grant from Jack Straw Productions. Karin is the leader of the Karin Kajita Jazz Quintet and performs at local festivals including Bumbershoot and the Evergreen State Fair. She used the grant to produce the quintet’s third CD, “Letting Go”.

Karin maintains a busy schedule performing and teaching in both idioms. She has played professionally in Seattle, New York, Denver, Wichita, Canada and Salt Lake City. She has done five tours of Japan, playing and singing in hotel lounges. She has performed for Crystal and Norwegian Cruise Lines in northern Europe and Alaska.

Karin has performed weeklong engagements on the Queen of the West, a paddlewheel boat on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. She has had extended solo engagements at the West Coast Bellevue Hotel, the Woodmark Hotel at Carillon Point, Seattle Hilton, Seattle Westin, Seattle Sheraton and the Alexis Hotel.

Karin is a featured performer in the Atrium at the Washington Mutual Tower in downtown Seattle. She plays frequently at Picolino’s Italian Restaurant in Crown Hill. Other venues include the Sorrento Hotel and Ricky’s in Shoreline.

Peter Rockas - Tenor Sax. Peter, a native of Seattle, began his musical career by pounding on table tops at local coffee joints at the age of thirteen as he accompanied the music du jour on the jukebox; this led to bongos and congas. At the age of sixteen, after the girl he was interested in told him she liked the sound of a saxophone, he bought his first tenor sax and began playing professionally in local groups that same year. He didn’t get the girl but he got all the safe sax one could ever hope for…BaDaBoom Kush!

He has work on an eclectic array of projects over the years from Blues to R&B to R&R to Jazz to Jump Blues and a few stints with experimental theater and now in Finn Hill Project. His contribution to FHP is his stuffy, but loud and overbearing, tenor sax playing.

Did I tell you about the time a Priest, Imam, and Rabbi, all tenor sax players, walked into a bar?

Oh! OK. I'll save that for another time...

Will Stump - Bass. Will also started out young as a musician studying violin at eight years old. He took up the viola some years later and majored in viola performance in college and studied music in Europe. He has played with a number of symphony orchestras. But his musical career has been spiced by playing jazz since he was a teenager when his musical awareness became seasoned with Dave Brubeck; Getz and Gilberto; Miles Davis and the rest of the jazz greats of the day. He's been playing it ever since.

Will has had the pleasure of playing with Dick Blake, Art Pepper, Mel Brown, Dean Hodges.

Keep up with the latest from Finn Hill Jazz. If you would like to know more about Finn Hill Jazz drop us an email and we will add you to our mailing list. If you are interested in booking an engagement please contact Will at
425-786-7442.