Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Music
Music is as important to Seattle as coffee, computers or airplanes. The jazz
era produced Ray Charles, rock delivered Hendrix, and the ̓70s coughed
up crusty hard-rock merchants Heart. Then, in the early 1990s, a genera-
tion of flannel-shirted urban slackers tired of being ignored by the main-
stream threw away their ̓80s fashion manuals and turned up the volume on
their guitars. Suddenly, the city wasn't just exporting individual artists; it
had invented a whole new musical genre: grunge.
The Jazz Age
At its peak in the 1940s, when many GIs were based in Seattle, S Jackson St - in what is
now 'Little Saigon,' an eastern outpost of the International District - and its environs
boasted more than 20 raucous bars with music, dancing and bootleg liquor. Although the
city never rewrote the jazz songbook with its own genre or style, it provided a fertile per-
formance space for numerous name artists. Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Duke El-
lington all passed through and, in 1948, a young, unknown, blind pianist from Florida
named Ray Charles arrived to seek his fortune. Later that year, the 18-year-old Charles
met 15-year-old trumpeter and Seattle resident Quincy Jones in the Black Elk's Club on
S Jackson and the creative sparks began to fly.
Seattle's jazz scene had died down by the 1960s, when S Jackson embraced tight-
lipped sobriety, and the young and hip turned their attention to rock and roll (enter
Hendrix stage left). Benefiting from regular revivals in the years since, a small jazz
scene lives on in Belltown, where two venues - Dimitriou's Jazz Alley and Tula's - still
attract international talent.
Born in Texas in 1928, jazz singer Ernestine Anderson moved to Seattle at age 16 and
became a product of the fertile jazz scene spearheaded by Ray Charles and Quincy
Jones.
From Hendrix to Heart
Seattle lapped up rock and roll like every other US city in the late '50s and early '60s,
but it produced few rockers of its own, save the Fleetwoods (from nearby Olympia), who
had a string of hits from 1959 to 1966. No one took much notice when a poor black teen-
