By KORRY KEEKER
JUNEAU EMPIRE

Little Big Band will headline a two-band, one-play gala the evening before Celebration begins.

The band is a new eight-piece, Seattle-area group conceived by Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary and blending funk, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, Native music, spoken word and performance art.

The event "Raven Brings Box of Delight" also will feature Smokehouse, a five-man rock band led by Juneau rocker Archie Cavanaugh; and "Gunakadeit," a new work by Juneau playwright Ishmael Hope. The party starts at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 31, at the Alaska National Guard Armory building at Whittier Street and Egan Drive.

The event is sponsored by the non-profit Artsteam Cultural Resources, www.artstream.net. Admission is $15.

The show will end the day-long NW Coast Artist Symposium, for which more than 100 artists from Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Coast are expected.

"A lot of Celebration focuses on the music," Singletary said. "We wanted to show that there are Native people that also work with contemporary music."

The night will begin with a presentation of Hope's "Gunakadeit," arranged and directed by Jim Simard and with an original score by Juneau and international composer Stefan Hakenberg.

The 30-minute play, about a man who transforms into a sea monster, is based on a story told by Katishan to ethnographer John Swanton in 1904. A version of the story was published in 1909 in "Tlingit Myths and Texts."

"Gunakadeit" stars Hope, Lily Hudson, Allan Hayton and Victoria Johnson. Hope debuted the play Feb. 23 at Resurrection Lutheran Church and recently won an Individual Artist Award project grant from the Rasmuson Foundation to develop the work. He will take it to Washington, D.C., this November to perform for one week at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and another week at schools around the area.

Little Big Band will play its first show May 27 at the Day Break Star Native Cultural Center in Seattle in preparation for opening Celebration.

Singletary, a bass player, has been playing in original Seattle-area bands since 1980. He's best-known for his glass art these days, but music is his first love. He began assembling Little Big Band three years ago after writing some soundtrack material for a video documentary.

"We used that as a jumping-off point to put a more structured band format together," he said. "We wanted to use R&B vocals and sort of dance-funk rhythms and spoken word with poetry and performance art."

Singer Star Nayea (www.starnayea.com), a songwriter and actress, lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and sang on "Sacred Ground: A Tribute to Mother Earth," a compilation that won a 2005 Grammy for Best Native American Music Album.

Flute player and Tlingit performer Gene Tagaban is well-known in Juneau as a storyteller. Southern California performance artist James Luna, a Luiseno Indian, is considered the old sage of the group. He and Tagaban tend to speak about the ways in which Native people are perceived.

Trumpet player James Rasmussen, a Duwamish, is a well-known jazz player and teacher in Seattle. Singletary and guitarists Maurice Caldwell and Keith Montgomery played in a band called Ironing Pants Definitely, that drew a fairly large following in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Singletary also has played with drummer Terry Maloney.

Little Big Band performances include traditional Northwest Coast masks and stage props. A few of the songs have rap-style rhythms derived from the Tlingit language. Most of the material is based on a funk-dance rhythm, with rhythm and blues vocals.

The band hopes to record an album this fall.

"We've been concentrating on this project for the past nine months, but there's a long history with some of us," Singletary said. "Stylistically, we understand each other. We're using Native themes, and in some cases rhythm and blues styles, to showcase a slightly different perspective of Native music. It sort of embodies the best of all styles, because its rhythmic dance and soul, and rock and jazz and it's so musically complex."