Seattle Jazz: A Brief History

Jazz is America’s greatest artistic invention.  The term covers a sprawling and complex form of music that encompasses Blues, Dixieland, Swing, Bop, Cool, Free, Fusion, and all points in between.  Jazz is an urban music, and the urban centers that contributed most to its development are well known: New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and of course, New York.  But jazz happens everywhere.  Gifted musicians not in those major cities were still obsessed with jazz’s interplay between freedom and discipline, rawness and sophistication, emotion and intellect.  Those veteran players made great personal sacrifices to keep the flame alive, plying their trade in small clubs, coffeehouses, and lounges far from the cultural and critical mainstream.  They may not show up in the standard jazz histories, or the pages of Down Beat, but they are the heart and soul of American jazz.  A perfect example of this can be found in the story of jazz in Seattle.

Seattle might seem like an out-of-the-way place for a story about jazz, but it was, and is, home to a vibrant scene with a vivid history.  Major talents like Ray Charles and Quincy Jones first found their voices here.  Ground-breaking artists like John Coltrane recorded live albums in Seattle clubs.  Seattle-based sidemen backed Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Harry James and many others on national tours.  Ernestine Anderson, Diane Schuur, Floyd Standifer and Larry Coryell have called Seattle their home and national artists like Julian Priester, Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell and Gary Peacock  chose to settle here.

But the roots of the scene go back to the teens and twenties and flowered with the jazz players that found themselves stationed in the Northwest during World War II and the Korean conflict.  African-American musicians played the clubs and honky-tonks around the bases at Fort Lewis and the Bremerton Naval Shipyard, and the after-hours joints in Pioneer Square and along Jackson Street in Seattle’s Central District.  Jam sessions at the Negro union hall (the Musician’s Union was segregated) proved to be a magnet for white players who wanted to sit in with guys who could give them a late-night master class on American jazz.  The color lines seemed more loosely drawn in this remote location, giving Seattle an interesting integrated scene early on.  In the middle of that scene stood brilliant but under-recognized artists like Jabo Ward, and Oscar Holden, a teacher and mentor to nearly every local jazz player of the time.  These roots of connoisseurship and mentoring are still reflected in the jazz culture in education here, highlighted by the amazing jazz programs at Garfield and Roosevelt High Schools, Cornish College of the Arts and the University of Washington.

Though Seattle had long been on the circuit for the major big band tours, it was the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 that began to open the doors for local jazz artists, with repercussions that reverberated through the sixties and seventies.  New venues were created and influential national and international stars started showing up with increasing regularity – even though one major musician finished his Seattle run by commenting that he was looking forward to getting back to the States.

Seattle artist Woody Woodhouse discussing the Seattle's rich and vibrant jazz heritage