Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and Helen Gillet give the West 18th Street Fashion show a soundtrack

The focus of the annual West 18th Street Fashion Show is, as always, the designs spotlighted on the runway. But a dramatic soundtrack elevates those designs.

This year, the musicians in the backdrop are fully prepared for the frills and the drama that come with high fashion. New Orleans-based cellist and improviser Helen Gillet returns to the show for the second time, and she’s joined by Oklahoma jazz pioneers the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and saxophonist Mark Southerland, who is also the show’s co-executive producer.

Ahead of Saturday’s West 18th Street Fashion Show, The Pitch called Gillet and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey co-founder Brian Haas to get their perspective on this nontraditional gig.

The Pitch: You each perform strong, very modern, jazz-oriented music. How are you planning to make your music fit the West 18th Street Fashion Show?

Gillet: I played the West 18th Street Fashion show a few years ago, so I’ve had a taste of making my music fit the runway. But I will say that this year is going to be very exciting because I’m going to be collaborating with other musicians and adapt some of my songs with them. I’m sure I’m going to be having fun improving, collaborating and feeding off the energy of the designers and models. It’s going to be the more, the merrier.

My music, much like Brian Haas and Mark Southerland, we’re used to operating on charts with musical compositions that are preconceived but have a lot of flexibility and room for improv. And my music is similar. I use a pedal to loop layers and come in and out of different timings. There’s a lot of room to add more layers, more tension, to stretch a part out, adding a change of color to a certain time and feeding off the cue of the runway. So there’s a lot of flexibility there.

Haas: What Jacob Fred does is really, really malleable as it is. We play a lot of really traditional jazz festivals and rock clubs, and it’s really over the map. Some cities, it’s a really conservative, more traditional jazz thing. Some cities, we only play rock clubs. So we’re really open to instruction, you know? And Southerland is going to be playing with us the entire time, and we just did four shows with him during Jazz Fest in New Orleans, so we’re all synced up with the concept [of the fashion show]. And, you know, he played in Jacob Fred for about two years. But really, we just have to let Mark boss us around, and he’s really good at that.

The star of the night is not necessarily the music in this case. What does not being center stage mean for you, and how do you take the focus — the fashion — and match that with music?

Gillet: I’m an improviser and a classical musician trained on a master’s degree in classical performance, and you learn, as a classical musician, that the supportive role — sitting in an orchestra — is when you’re reading a part of the whole puzzle. And then, when I branched out into jazz, I learned how to improvise freely and really listen, because you have to listen to everyone else onstage with you. It involves a lot of taking the forefront of a solo and being aggressive, but also a lot of it — most of it — is supporting and listening and creating music that makes sense with everything else that is going on around you. And I just translate that to other disciplines as well.

Haas: I think it’s going to be a lot like playing for dancers, and in some ways, that kind of goes back to playing for punk clubs and rock clubs, and that goes to keeping your eye on the audience and watch if they’re dancing or what they’re doing. And if they’re dancing, you need to keep them dancing.

And when it comes to the models and the actual garments and the fashion itself, you know, what Jacob Fred does is really reactive and empathetic, and it’s really exciting for us to be able to play for someone else’s concept, and play at or toward someone else’s concept, because what we do is so improvised. I imagine that what we play is gonna be very reflective of the outfits that are coming out onstage.

What are you most looking forward to about the event?

Gillet: Every June, I long for the fashion show. I’ve really fallen in love with that whole energy. I love how the street gets transformed and all of a sudden it’s a platform, literally, for beautiful art. And I’m just looking forward to discovering and supporting these designers and their art. I’m in true awe of human beings who can design fashion and make it come to life.

And, of course, I also really love playing music with Mark Southerland, and I’m really looking forward to collaborating on tunes that I’ve never played before. And musically, the challenge of taking my very established solo show and sort of turning it on an angle, you know, it always opens up new ideas for me as an artist to do that.

Haas: I’ve been keeping up with it for years via Peregrine’s [Honig, creative director] Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, and it just seems like an incredible spectacle. And Kansas City has become such an incredibly progressive Midwestern town with its own identity, its own theme. And we’re just looking forward to getting to play with Helen and Southerland, who are both two of my heroes. And it’s fun to be able to come in and serve someone else’s concept for a change instead of pushing our own.