Comedian and grunge legend to perform in Quilcene
Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 19, 2026
QUILCENE — The Quilcene Lantern is pulling a double shift this weekend with stand-up comedy from Scott Losse on Friday and jazz sets from legendary drummer Matt Cameron the following night.
Cameron, best known as the drummer for Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, has spent nearly four decades touring globally, he has contributed to the recording of multi-platinum albums and helped define the sound of Seattle’s grunge era.
Losse performs Friday, Feb. 20. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the show begins at 6:30 p.m.; tickets are $10 in advance ($12.68 with fees) and $15–$25 at the door, all ages.
The Matt Cameron Trio and Wayne Horvitz Motel 7 perform Saturday, Feb. 21. Doors open at 6 p.m. and music begins at 7 p.m.; tickets are $15 in advance ($18 with fees) and $20–$30 at the door, all ages.
Event details and ticket links are available at the Lantern’s events page at quilcenelantern.com/events.
Friday night
Losse jokes about everyday anxieties, his tattooed look leading to the misconception that he gets in fights and his chihuahuas.
His 10-year-old chihuahua, Turnip, was acting off when he got back from a trip to Lake Tahoe last week. A visit to the emergency vet yielded more medication than he’d ever seen. Still unsure of the scope of Turnip’s condition, Losse had to go perform comedy.
“You end up just kind of going on autopilot for those ones. You get on stage and it’s kind of like you hit play,” Losse said.
People say comedy shouldn’t be therapy, Losse said, but it can be therapeutic. His comedy career started in a therapist’s office when his therapist asked him, seemingly out of nowhere, if he had ever considered performing stand-up comedy.
“He was like, ‘I feel like everything you say you try to make funny. Have you ever thought about doing stand up comedy?’” Losse said.
At the end of a weeks-long class at the University of Washington’s Experimental College, Losse performed a short set at the now-closed Comedy Underground in Seattle, where he did surprisingly well. It turned out to be a stroke of beginner’s luck, he said. He spent the following year crying in comedy venue parking lots.
Earlier iterations of his comic voice were more shocking, he said. He’s since found a way to be softer while still getting laughs.
“I never want to make the audience go, ‘Eww!” He said.
It’s hard to describe the positive energy you experience when getting laughs from some idea you thought about when driving, Losse said.
Growing up in Burien, Losse fits the standard white Pacific Northwest guy look. His tattooed arms and hands, T-shirt and beanie are wallpaper-wardrobe in Seattle.
Losse joked about his look in a Tacoma set. After learning in elementary school that wearing red or blue might get him in trouble with the Bloods or the Crips, gangs identified by those colors, Losse he developed a fear of wearing the colors.
But he likes wearing red, he continued. Before the show he expressed, to his wife, his interest and fear around wearing a red beanie to onstage.
“She’s like, ‘Scott, nobody thinks you’re in the Bloods, everybody thinks you own Death Cab for Cutie on vinyl’.”
Losse connected to the Lantern when owner Steve de Koch approached him following a set at Port Townsend’s Bishop Hotel.
Rural audiences are generally more fun, Losse said.
“If you get like an hour outside of (cities), people are just like, ‘Oh, you just came here to have a good time,’” he said.
Readers can view some of Losse’s standup on YouTube, but he is most known online for his Instagram reels, one of which has almost 8 million views.
Saturday night
Cameron has been busy working on a new Soundgarden record. His drum parts are mostly complete. The band had been working on the record when singer Chris Cornell died in 2017. The record will likely come out by the end of the year, Cameron said.
Cameron’s appreciation for jazz goes back to his childhood, when he connected heavily to bebop greats like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans.
“When my trio first got together, the idea was to play a loud version of the Thelonious Monk tunes,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve always wanted to do over the years.”
Cameron’s trio includes himself on drums, Ryan Burns on keyboards — organ, Rhodes, synth and piano — and Jeff Harper on bass.
“These guys are just total virtuosos,” Cameron said. “You can throw anything in front of them, and they’ll play it.”
His set will include a few of his original compositions, a few by Burns and jazz standards.
Cameron was connected to the Lantern through jazz composer Wayne Horvitz, whom he has known since the mid-1990s. Horvitz previously played at the Lantern’s flagship Tarboo Fest, and Lantern owner Willem de Koch has played trombone in Horvitz’s ensembles.
In addition to his trio’s set, Cameron, Burns and Harper will join Horvitz and other musicians in their set.
“Wayne kind of puts together different ensembles depending on the gig,” Cameron said. “He’s always writing for whoever’s in the band, so it’s never really the same thing twice.”
Burns and Harper are core collaborators in many of those configurations, he added.
It’s been a long time since Cameron has performed in a rural Washington venue. Growing up in Seattle’s music scene, he and his cohort played everywhere they could. Prior to major label attention, he remembers going to shows and then heading to after-parties near the Rainbow in the University District, where many musicians who would later become globally known gathered.
Soundgarden was the first of those bands to be picked up.
“I was just really excited to spread the news that we had this music that we were really proud of,” Cameron said.
Decades later, Cameron reflected that longevity in creative work has been about being surrounded by artists who explore their own interests and about continuing to stretch-out in new directions, something that playing with the jazz trio helps him do.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com
