Choir singers will perform a free concert on Saturday, March 11, that manages to celebrate cultural diversity while being at the heart of Ballard heritage. The Market Street Singers will perform their concert "Shilshole on the Pacific Rim" at the Nordic Heritage Museum that evening.

Concert organizer and Market Street Singers founder Chris Vincent hopes the concert will engender a sense of community with neighbors spanning the Pacific Ocean. But the appeal to recognize diversity in the global community could also work closer to home, as Ballard itself sees its traditional identity churn with an influx of new people, spurred by development and housing booms.

"There's a lot of music that really speaks to being in a community," Vincent said. "Music is the universal language."

The City of Seattle kicked in a $14,000 grant to help fund this and other concerts performed by the Market Street Singers much for that reason. Garry Owen, a project manager for the Department of Neighborhood's matching fund program, says applications to fund concerts and other creative arts are not as common as the traditional uses for neighborhood awards, but says artistic community efforts are right in line with the funds' mission; fostering a sense of community.

"Art is key to building a greater sense of community. There's our culture and there's culture from other countries. And there's an interesting mosaic all over Seattle of people relating to existing art or bringing something with them that they want to share," Owen said.

Singers have been preparing for the concert for several months, including practicing singing in seven languages. The concert will include songs sung in native Samoan, Hawaiian, Maori, Spanish, Japanese, English and an Ecuadorian dialect called Quicha. There will also be a piano accompaniment, a didgeridoo and Hawaiian dancers,

The 40 plus members of the Market Street Singers perform traditional choir music as well as more eclectic material, such as Native American songs and selections from the Beach Boys. Vincent says variety is the essence of the concert.

"You wonder, if we're singing in the Samoan language, how much connectedness can you feel? But we hope to show there is a certain humanity - a certain connectedness between people through that music," he said.

For Vincent and a number of other choir members, the Market Street Singers themselves are a product of that fusion of diversity and community heritage they hope to articulate in the concert.

One choir member, Linda (Olason) Trautman, puts the H in Ballard heritage. With Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian roots and being in the second of three generations of Ballard High School graduates, Trautman remembers the days when the passport to Ballard came in a can.

"When I was a kid, they said you had to have a can of snuff to get into Ballard. That's the expression," she said referring to a catch phrase born from the Scandinavian penchant for chewing tobacco.

But Trautman thinks carrying the torch for Ballard's heritage doesn't always need Scandinavian hands. The current migration crossing the ship canal into Ballard brings changes she likes, for the same reason she likes to sing with the mix of people in the choir.

"Ballard is becoming so much more culturally friendly, now" she said.

Another member, Terrell Aldridge, sees the choir as a community within the community.

"Ballard is really the first place I've found that has a neighborhood community and the choir is a big part of that," she said.

A transplant from the garrulous southwest, Terrell found Seattle's brand of brittle kindness isolating when she moved here. Ballard was the exception to that rule.

"I get that sense of a real neighborhood here, even if I bring a lot of other cultural influences," she said.

And merging cultural influences, old and new, might be accomplished with a common dialect - one that collapses the pacific rim, Seattle, Ballard and Nordic heritage, at least for a short time one evening, into the same room.

"There is some universality about music," the Department of Neighborhoods' Owen says.

"This [concert] is anther medium that brings people together. Art is like a meeting place."

The Market Street Singers' free concert, "Shilshole on the Pacific Rim", is on Saturday, March 11 at 7:30pm at the Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 NW 67th Street. More information call 297-3228.