Island jazzman Bruce Phares will celebrate his 70th birthday in November — and has a full month’s worth of concerts lined up that will have the whole island celebrating the occasion.

The good times will start rolling on Saturday, Nov. 1, when Phares hosts a star-studded “Jam in the Atrium” to close out the 2025 season of his beloved and long-running series at Vashon Center for the Arts.

The free concert — a departure from the Jam’s typical format of jazz trios and quartets — will fill VCA’s atrium with Afro-Caribbean drums, voices and horns.

Guests will include the Grammy Award-winning Trinidadian djembe player Richard Francis, also known by his stage name of Sanga of The Valley. After moving to New York City in the early 1970s, Sanga met the legendary player Babatunde Olatunji and spent 25 years in Olatunji’s band, Drums of Passion. He has also performed with such artists as Nina Simone, the Grateful Dead, the Neville Brothers and Stanley Jordan.

Also playing will be islander Gordy Ryan, who has played on multiple movie scores and more than 100 albums. He, too, spent decades playing with Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, and received a Grammy Award as part of that ensemble. He currently teaches Afro-Cuban music and plays in multiple bands, including that of Roger Fisher — the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Heart. Ryan’s wife, Zoe Ryan, an extraordinary talent of the African shekere, will also play at the concert at VCA.

Another guest, Ricardo Guity Blanco, was born in Honduras to the Garifuna people, descendants of African and Carib Indians who resisted slavery. He moved to the United States at the age of 7, and grew up steeped in the rich rhythms of his culture, becoming a prodigy under Olatunji. Throughout the years, he has performed with a long list of top African world music, Latino, blues and gospel artists.

Vashon players joining in the jam will include keyboardist Chris O’Brien, guitarists David Salonen and Steve Amsden, horn players Rich Person and Van Crozier and vocalists Melanie Salonen and Victoria Amsden.

Phares, the emcee of the event, will perform on the Northwest legendary “Toucan” fretless bass — an instrument featured this month in Fretboard Magazine and previously owned by Phares’ close friend, the late Chuck Deardorf.

It’s all part of a rollicking birthday month for Phares.

He also has an on-island jazz show scheduled to take place on Nov. 9, as the inaugural offering at “The Station,” a new event space located across Vashon Highway from Snapdragon.

On Nov. 14, he’ll play with the group, Tim Couldn’t Make It, at the Vashon Wine Shop in Vashon Village — a farewell concert for the band’s player, Rick Dahms, who will soon depart Vashon for the East Coast.

And finally, on Nov. 15 — two days before his 70th birthday — Phares will play a dream and career-defining gig, as the headline performer in a prestigious Seattle Jazz Fellowship concert series, sharing the stage with two legendary local players, pianist Randy Halberstadt and drummer John Bishop.

For more information on that performance, set to take place at the Fellowship’s jazz room at 103 South Main Street, in Seattle, visit seattlejazzfellowship.org. Find out more about the Jam in the Atrium show at facebook.com/groups/jamintheatrium.

A previous version of this article listed a wrong date for Bruce Phares’ concert at The Station, which will take place on Nov. 9, not Nov. 8. We regret the error.