Music of Seattle
Seattle also became an important stop for vaudeville tours, put on by large chains like Pantages and Considine; the city also produced a major attraction in the exotic dancer Gypsy Rose Lee.
The Seattle jazz scene included Jelly Roll Morton for several years in the early part of the century, as well as Vic Meyers, a local performer and nightclub owner who became Lieutenant Governor in 1932.
[4][page needed] Early musical establishments of the "classical" vein included the art school founded by Nellie Cornish, which saw residencies from both John Cage and Martha Graham, and the Seattle Symphony, which gave its first concert in 1903.
Police officers also tolerated an after-hours jazz scene, based in Chinatown, Seattle and including most famously the Black and Tan Club.
This period produced a few local performers of note, including Ray Charles, who recorded his first single and made his debut television appearances and radio broadcasts in Seattle, and Bumps Blackwell.
Harry Everett Smith was a college student in the 1940s when he found a number of recordings of folk music about to be recycled at a Salvation Army depot.
[7] Changes to local regulations in 1949 prompted a shift from "private clubs" to "restaurant-lounge combinations" which "didn't support much in the line of creative nightlife"[citation needed] and even helped to drive out the city's jazz nightclub scene.
The city also became the major center for recorded popular music in the Pacific Northwest, and had the first American pop hit from the region with the Fleetwoods "Come Softly to Me" in 1959.
Though most of the regionally important bands in the 1960s were dominated by white men, Seattle also produced a few female country rock performers, most notably Merrilee Rush and Bonnie Guitar.
Seattle's most famous musical export is Jimi Hendrix, who began performing in the city but did not gain a national reputation until moving to England.
The earliest local alternative music scene was based around a gay glam theater group called Ze Whiz Kids, one of whose members, Tomata du Plenty, became a fixture in New York before returning in 1976 as part of the Tupperwares with long-time boyfriend Gorilla Rose; Blush described this as the first punk rock in the area.
[10] The first punk concert in Seattle was the Tupperwares backed by the Telepaths at the grand premiere of Pink Flamingos at the Moore Theater on New Years night, 1976.
Following The Bird, local punk centered around an old theatre called The Showbox, where touring bands from Los Angeles, New York, London and elsewhere played.
The opening of the Gorilla Gardens venue changed that by offering two separate shows at the same time; as a result, both hardcore and metal were frequently played on the same nights.
The softening of relations between the two groups helped inspire the look and sound of grunge,[citation needed] a term allegedly coined by Mark Arm of the brief joke band Mr. Epp and the Calculations who gained some local notoriety.
[12] Local music author Clark Humphrey has attributed the rise of grunge, in large part, to the scene's "supposed authenticity", to its status as a "folk phenomenon, a community of ideas and styles that came up from the street" rather than "something a couple of packagers in a penthouse office" dreamed of, as well as Seattle's isolation from the mainstream record industry.
Seattle grunge as national fare declined within a few years, however, beginning with the suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994[17] and ending with Soundgarden's breakup in 1997.
[18] During the 1990s other forms of music also existed, including bands such as the Posies, Kill Switch...Klick, Faith & Disease, Sky Cries Mary, and Harvey Danger.
Seattle has also become an established home of influential hip hop music, with Sir Mix-a-Lot and Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces being followed by the likes of the Blue Scholars, Macklemore, Common Market, Oldominion, Jake One, Lil Mosey, THEESatisfaction, DoNormaal, Gifted Gab, Travis Thompson and Clipping (band).
[32][33] DIY labels like Help Yourself Records[34] and the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art[35] led the promotion and curation of many emerging PNW acts in this time such as Versing, Dude York, The Moondoggies, and Chastity Belt (band), with other significant bands like Great Grandpa and Special Explosion emerging onto the national indie music scene in the late 2010's.
