Building Music Communities: thinking global & acting local

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Instead of a single guest, we'll have three segments dealing with the importance of local music scenes. Our first guest is Shane Shapiro.

Shane is a thought leader working at the intersection of music, culture, and urban policy. His book, "This Must Be the Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better," came out last year on Repeater Books. Shane has defined a new way to think about the value of music and the creative economy in cities and places.

He's the founder and chairman of Sound Diplomacy, a global research and strategy consultancy that demonstrates the impact of the creative industries on community development and economic growth. He's also the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Global Center for Music Ecosystems. He collaborates with leaders and policymakers to foster policies that lead to social and economic development at the local, national, and global levels.

LP: I'm very curious about your work and excited to talk with you. Could you set the table for me: could you explain an economic consultancy in the context of the arts?

Shain Shapiro: An economic consultancy in the context of the arts is the same as an economic consultancy in any other context.

It's more challenging to demonstrate the pure economic value of arts and culture or a particular discipline of arts and culture and then attribute how to grow that value or make decisions related to whatever discipline is more equitable. Regarding arts and culture, emotional decisions often trump evidence-based decisions because people think with their hearts rather than their heads.

I feel everything should be quantifiable in one way or another. It doesn't mean that it's only of economic value, but everything should be treated with an understanding of the economics around it. To me, the role of an economic consultancy in the arts is to dig deep into whatever art form and try to create data that explains the value of the art form in relation to other things and then explains how to grow or expand or make decisions based on evidence rather than emotion.

LP: Who's typically engaging you to perform the work? Is it the municipality? Is it the developer? Is there a typical use case?

Shain Shapiro: With Sound Diplomacy, we have three or four different types of clients. First are cities themselves that are trying to make decisions representative of the local community, so they're trying to create economic data around a particular art form.

Second is the economic development community. Like any other workforce or talent development initiative, they're usually the most active client. They're asking: Are we going to build something new? Are we going to renovate something existing? Are we going to invest in a particular part of town or sector? So, we provide the data to make those decisions. The third would be tourism. How do we grow or manage tourism?

LP: And particularly in the middle two, in the EDCs and tourism-driven inquiries, are those typically public-private partnerships now?

Shain Shapiro: Yes, for the most part. I wish there were a standard approach because my life would be much easier. But when I started doing this, we didn't have a client, so we had to create one. Most EDCs are public-private partnerships. Whether they're a chamber of commerce, an economic development corporation, or some hybrid of the two, they're usually membership organizations of companies, like a chamber.

Plus, they receive money from the public sector through direct investment from the state government or a levy or tax. Tourism boards tend to be funded through hotel bed tax receipts. Again, this is a generalization, but their objective is usually to increase hotel occupancy and the ancillary spend around hotels—restaurants, transportation, that kind of thing.

Our clients tend to come to us with questions that often have little to do with music or culture directly. It's how do we retain the talent we're educating in our university, or how do we attract a particularly educated group of people to come and work here, or how do we deal with community-based issues like violence, classism, or racism? Music and culture may not be the single solution to any of them, but they're part of the solution to all of them.

Having an evidence base and a data framework creates a sense of structure, making decisions more equitably because they come from a place of data rather than policy-based evidence-making versus evidence-based policymaking.

LP: Could you compare and contrast your work at Sound Diplomacy with what you're up to at the Center for Music Ecosystems?

Shain Shapiro: Sound Diplomacy is a for-profit economic consulting company similar to what I described. A client comes to us with a problem, and we help solve it.

Like any other economic consulting company, such as KPMG or Ernst & Young, we focus on music, culture, the arts, and the nighttime economy. But it's very similar regarding the type of work we do. That's around economic impact, feasibility studies around real estate projects, and policy analysis—delivering work for profit to its clients.

The Center for Music Ecosystems is a nonprofit that gives everything away for the benefit of everybody. It's a global research nonprofit that commissions research for the public good about how music can help solve problems in places. We tend to think about how we can incorporate music more into bigger issues: economic growth, climate action, sustainable development, and things like that. Whatever research it commissions, it gives away.

Sometimes, Sound Diplomacy and the Center work together. The Center doesn't have economists; Sound Diplomacy does, and that's the core difference. The client base is different, or donor base for the Center, because it's a 501(c)(3). The Center tends to bring in money from global organizations like the United Nations or pan-government agencies like the European Commission. We produce research they support involving other parties and then publish it for everybody to read. On the other hand, Sound Diplomacy delivers economic analysis to a client to solve a particular issue in a specific place.

They're meant to work together. There are some things I can't do at Sound Diplomacy and some things I can't do at the Center. The whole point is to create as much data and evidence as possible, satisfy clients and their objectives and projects, and try to create a global canon of research that I hope helps people in the future.

LP: What is the concept or reality of a music city? What does that mean in the context of your work or the constituencies you work with?

Shain Shapiro: I think it's a misunderstood term, and maybe I'm partly responsible for that.

My definition is a city that takes music seriously, deliberately, and intentionally in all its forms and functions. It doesn't matter about the size of the city or its branding. It's really about data, evidence, and policy. It's a city that collects data to understand where everything is, how it fits together, how much it's worth, what the deficiencies are, and how music relates to other things like workforce development, tourism, and community development.

Then, it makes decisions based on that data. Some music cities focus more on branding or tourism. Some focus more on workforce development. It's about treating music as seriously as you would treat anything else.

It's not about making music special or elevating it. It's about creating an evidence-based structure to make better decisions about the city that then impact music. I'm always thinking about how music can be like a nail in search of many hammers, rather than a hammer in search of many nails.

I think about how music can be inserted into solving bigger problems by focusing on its external value as much as we focus on its internal value. Expanding, growing, and investing in one's music industry is part of it, but it's not the sole means to an end of making policies related to music cities.

I hope that over time, we will see healthcare systems incorporate music more, and education systems incorporate music more, not just to have more music education but to have better total education. I hope the evolution of music in cities and places will evolve into that, but every place takes it in its way.

We often focus on things we can see, so there's a focus on live music and festivals. You can't see intellectual property. It's one of those things that I think is just beginning to take hold, and I hope it will continue to expand.

LP: Something else that comes up is this notion of music in place. I talk to a lot of artists who bring a perspective about place, either where they're from and the music that informed them, or where they go to seek inspiration, or to record in a certain environment, or to collaborate because they hear a sound in an area that is important to them. The notion of music in place as it relates to your work can be very specific and indigenous. You talked about how a music city could highlight its organic historical musical roots or be manufactured, for lack of a better way to say it.

We will make the broader notion of music important to our economic development or cultural life because it attracts businesses and keeps our best and brightest here. As you pursue a new project, are you looking for the essence? How important is it? I don't want to say authenticity because I think that's a tricky word and judgmental word.

Shain Shapiro: Very tricky word.

LP: A policy-driven decision isn't necessarily inauthentic. It could be very authentic when existential, but I wonder what you think. On the Venn diagram of policy, business, and culture, what's your way in when you think about a project?

Shain Shapiro: It's always policy, I'll be honest. We don't get involved in questions around the perception and reality of how people view their own community. Everyone's version of their own music city is their own. This is when we get into trouble when decisions are made based on someone's personal experience, which may not be another person's experience.

I can't think of another word, but in the most general sense, the authenticity of a place is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone has their own version of it. I treat music apolitically or agnostically in this context.

I go in; every genre and discipline doesn't matter to me. Music is music. When we say music, I tell clients it's whatever you want it to mean. And whatever you want it to mean is valid, but it's not the only definition of music. We live in a world where certain genres are prioritized; other genres are criminalized.

We have a very limited understanding of the breadth of musical experience—everything from a drum corps to gore metal and everything in between. We try to be very careful not to get involved in that. But at the same time, it's important for it to be very analytical and agnostic so the data speaks to everybody as much as possible.

I don't want to devalue someone's personal experience of a place or how they feel about music in their place. However, they feel it is completely valid. We're going above that—and I don't mean that hierarchically—to hopefully produce data that speaks to everybody.

I don't tend to get involved like Nashville versus a city like Huntsville down the road, which doesn't have as much musical history. They're the same to us. A city is a city; a place is a place. It's all about the data, not about the feeling.

LP: Huntsville's fascinating to me, partially because I have friends who were part of that development with the amphitheater. But I'm also intrigued by Huntsville as a representative of what a modern American secondary or tertiary market could look like.

It was fascinating to learn about your firm's work there. In hindsight, it makes sense that it would be much more programmatic and policy-driven to take that canvas and put something on it. I wonder if these other cities are revitalizing. Is that a thing? Is there a move to these secondary and tertiary market cities where there's a return to vibrancy?

Shain Shapiro: I think so. It's hard for me to speak definitively, but general trends show we're all looking for cheaper places to live.

Places like Huntsville, Tulsa, Indianapolis, or Cincinnati—these types of cities in the US that are not difficult to get to or are close to big cities—may not be New York, Chicago, L.A., or Austin, but I believe these mid-sized cities are competing more post-COVID for creative workers than they were before. I don't have a huge amount of data to back that up off the top of my head.

I just see that you can have a cultural and creative career in those places or have a better chance of it, probably compared to five or ten years ago, because there is often more infrastructure. Obviously, it depends on what you do, but communicating with people is relatively easy.

And if you live in the middle of the country, you're not far from anywhere compared to living on one side. That's definitely one of the arguments from these cities' EDCs and talent attraction professionals—Huntsville's an hour and twenty minutes from Nashville and an hour and forty-five minutes from Atlanta. If we can offer you our version of a high quality of life with a cultural offer that keeps you entertained, then I'm sure people would see it as good a place to live as Nashville or Atlanta. And then you're considering maybe spending 90 cents on the dollar compared to Nashville.

That was one of the arguments for building the Orion at the beginning: if you're going to attract the best and brightest to Huntsville, you need a facility to attract the best and brightest to come and play there.

LP: In the work specifically with Sound Diplomacy, is it all inbound or are you identifying markets or regions that you feel are ripe for this sort of music and culture tip-of-the-spear work that you do?

Shain Shapiro: From a business development point of view, we're constantly surveying and exploring where we think our work will be most impactful and who would be most interested in chatting with us. We've been doing it for a long time, all over the world, so you learn where certain trends are occurring, whether political or economic.

But in terms of predicting, not really. I liken it to this: it doesn't matter if you're the fastest car in the race if there's no racetrack. So, focus on building the best possible racetrack, and then the cars will come. That's where my mentality has always been. It's not about us, it's about the work, but even not about us doing the work, it's about the work happening. The more places that are engaged and want to do the work, some will gravitate towards us.

But if there are no places that want to do it, right? So, most of the focus over the last ten years has been on building the racetrack. And we've seen new cars come. There are people doing this that aren't us. Many communities do it on their own, in their own way. Good and bad, to be honest. But we're seeing now that the focus on building the racetrack has given us quite a bit of understanding of what cars we should target.

LP: What's the flywheel after you work or after your initial work with a community? What markers would you look at over time to say, you know what, the impact was made, or the impact is being made now, and it's starting to achieve the objective?

Shain Shapiro: To be frank, It's similar to any other economic analysis. There's some stuff that you really struggle to quantify, such as whether people are happier. Are they going out more? You can quantify that. Are they enjoying the music or cultural scene in the community more? Is it bringing people together?

It's kind of hard to understand, especially from afar. Still, you can quantify the number of jobs, you can quantify the economic uplift, you can quantify the multiplier effect, and the indirect economic benefit that music, culture, or whatever would have on the community. You can count new pieces of infrastructure or investments that are made. So we do all of that. In every community, we are keeping a record of what's happening.

LP: Shane, thank you for your work and time today.

Shain Shapiro: No, well, thanks, Lawrence. I hugely appreciate it. It's a real pleasure. Thank you.

Up next is trumpeter, composer, and producer Thomas Marriott, a force for jazz on the West Coast. Thomas has worked with artists as diverse as Maynard Ferguson, Charlie Hunter, Ivan Neville, and hip-hop pioneer Deltron 3030. A leader on fourteen of his own albums, Thomas is the youngest inductee into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame. He is the founder of Seattle Jazz Fellowship, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to promoting jazz music and jazz culture in Seattle.

LP: I don't want to spend a ton of time in the way-back machine in the distant past, but I wonder if you could tell me a little about the Seattle you grew up in. What was going on then culturally? What did you have access to? Just sort of paint a picture for me. You know, the city's changed so much, the options available to visitors and citizens have changed, and I'm just curious, what was your Seattle early on in life?

Thomas Marriott: Early on in life, as a teenager, I could just take the bus down to Pioneer Square and hear some of the masters at work. Some of the old-timers were playing. And they were really accessible to anybody who could show up. There was no cover charge, and nobody hassled us.

It was safe. Yeah, there was always that element in the street, but at the same time, the people in the nightclub would sort of keep an eye on me and my brother when we would go down to the New Orleans as teenagers and check it out. A little later, I moved out of my folks' house when I was eighteen. My rent was $275 a month, and I could make that much gigging on the weekend, and I could park my car right in front of the club or take the bus without feeling like it was dangerous or anything like that.

Not that it's dangerous now, but it's a little different vibe than it was. Seattle was a lot more laid-back and blue-collar. A lot less affluent. And I think the change in the city has affected the city culturally. But I know that there just were a lot of people at work. There were just a lot more gigs, a lot more gigs that paid money, and there was cheap rent. It was easy to be an artist and kind of do your own thing here. I think that's one of the things that's changed.

LP: Something else, I read an interview with you as part of preparing for our time together, and you were talking about the role of jazz education, how you can have jazz music and you can be a musician without the formal education part, but you can't have jazz education without the music—without living it and breathing it and sort of doing it.

It's really interesting to be able to pursue that with you. I'm curious. Could you unpack just a little bit about what your musical training was and, as a corollary to that, what you were going to school for? Was there an alternate universe for Thomas Marriott at one point?

Thomas Marriott: Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the music sort of found me at a pretty young age before I even picked up a trumpet, to be honest. And so, I've been on this path for a long time, which has brought its benefits and complications. Some assets and liabilities are attached to that.

However, as far as my education was concerned, my grandparents were professional musicians and music teachers. So my first education on my instrument was from my grandfather and my father, who also played. So they taught me a lot about music and how to play the instrument. Starting at a very young age, my grandfather would say, "Come upstairs and put your mouth on the tuba and make a noise, or play the trombone, or here's a saxophone, try this violin." There was sort of a musical petting zoo that I grew up in.

My dad was a huge avid record collector, and his jazz record collection was off-limits to my brother and me. So, of course, that's what we did, we messed with Dad's records. And I think at first we were just really captivated by the names. Monk. Dizzy. Bird, Nuke, Hawk, Rez, and we just thought it was funny, you know, "Salt Peanuts" by Dizzy Gillespie. We'd just play that over and over again, just crack up, but that break that he would play on "Salt Peanuts" always blew my mind. And so I wanted to learn how to do that.

I started taking it very seriously in junior high school. I went to junior high school and didn't have much music or jazz program, but the music turned me on. I started going to hear live jazz and Floyd Standifird every Wednesday. I became a regular at the New Orleans in Pioneer Square at about the age of about fourteen.

I went to Garfield High School and played in the band. I got to go to Europe, played at the big jazz festivals, met Quincy Jones, met Miles Davis, George Clinton, and many famous musicians, and it was like, this is for me. I was gigging starting in high school and played my first paid professional gig my sophomore year of high school, something for Jay Thomas, a local jazz hero around here.

A few months after that, I got a regular gig at The Speakeasy every other Friday with some older musicians. They were in their mid-twenties, and I was about sixteen or seventeen, and we started playing there. It was in Belltown. It was an all-ages spot. They had a piano. So we were there for five or six years. I learned how to play on that gig, learn tunes, and work with others. Toulouse was also right down the block. So, I would always be going over there to check out what was happening there. There was a lot of cross-pollination on the block at that time.

But my folks were definitely of the mind of "No, you're going to college." So, I was recruited by Roy Cummings to go to U-Dub, who was the head of the program at that time. And so I went to U-Dub to study jazz studies. It was kind of an interesting experience because a lot of the students in my high school were much more accomplished jazz performers than the majors at UW. And the big band, frankly, was just a lot more swinging in my high school than it was at the college.

So I started looking for opportunities to go on the road, starting in college. I think part of staying in Seattle then was that I was busy working. Going to a conservatory, I just didn't have the money to go to Juilliard or anything like that. And I don't know if I had the grades for it either, but I was working. I was getting a real bandstand education. I was plugged in. I knew all the cats. They knew me. I was getting called. I was busy.

I started working in the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra on the trumpet section, sitting next to Floyd Jay and Edley, and that was really an education. Going to the jazz club every week was a real education. But then I went on the road with Maynard Ferguson and did that for about a year and a half. And when I got off, I moved to New York. There, I won Carmine Caruso's trumpet competition and other things. And then in New York, things kind of took off from there.

So, I mean, I have a good balance, I feel like, of the academic and traditional ways of learning. It's impossible to have a career, and it's impossible to get better without the benefit of community. You know, you can't do this by yourself. It's not music in a vacuum; it exists in a community.

The community here in Seattle has changed over time. It's changed everywhere over time. That's what communities do. But the jazz community in particular has had a really noticeable difference now than it was twenty or thirty years ago, in a way that I think has been detrimental to the music.

So, if you hear me talking about community, it's because community is the vehicle by which we will uplift jazz music, and that's true everywhere. Community is always the vehicle that uplifts jazz music, and every community is local in the music. I've benefited from engaging and playing with musicians in other local communities for the last fifteen or twenty years.

I'm a local musician. I'm not playing at the Blue Note in the Village Vanguard and stuff like that. I play at Smalls when I go to New York, a community spot. When I go to Philly, I play at Chris's. It's a community spot. The big names don't play there. I don't have that kind of career. So I engage and rely on the help of local communities, many of which are much stronger than ours.

And I just think about what they have that we don't and what we have that we don't anymore that still exists in other places. There are some basic deficiencies in our community in Seattle that persist in other places. And that's why they have more healthy and vibrant jazz communities at the local level. As I said, every jazz community is local, even in New York City. There are lots of amazing, incredible players. Nobody outside of New York really knows about it because they're local musicians. They play all the time in New York. They don't really have any reason or need to come out here.

LP: One of the other things that came up in reading other discussions with you was that you talked about Seattle not necessarily having a thriving jazz community. However, it has some of its seeds, and the work with the Jazz Fellowship and that other people are doing will hopefully get us there, in air quotes for listeners. I'm curious, what are the hallmarks of a jazz community? And if that's too broad of an answer because it has to change, what would be the hallmarks in Seattle where you'd say we made progress?

Thomas Marriott: The way that I look at it is, what are the hallmarks of a healthy jazz community? That's what we want. There are a lot of hallmarks of poor jazz communities, and we can talk about that. But what are the hallmarks of a healthy, vibrant jazz community? Not a tough question at all. There are a few key elements, and we're trying to achieve these things with the Jazz Fellowship.

The main one is a venue, a dedicated space for jazz. We don't have that, but all these other communities do. So, I think having a venue that's a dedicated space for local jazz is probably the primary hallmark of a thriving jazz community. Where we used to have many operating concurrently, we now have none. That's a huge problem.

Another part of it is elders and mentorship. We don't really have that either. And a lot of the elders in our community, the Buddy Catlets, the Hadley Calamans, the Floyd Stanifords, they passed on. And I think they took their responsibility as elders in the music a little more seriously than the people who are now the elders, who were middle-aged when I was coming up and now are older. They're still trying to get theirs, and I think they maybe never felt like they arrived and that they're not necessarily in a place to be telling anybody anything, but they are. And I think it actually is their job to keep everybody else in line, musically.

When you have young musicians who play too much, it's really helpful to have one of the older musicians say, "Stop doing that, don't do it that way." Or when you do something they like, give them your approval. That's the way to do it, we don't really have that so much. Part of it is that everybody in Seattle is kind of a little sensitive, maybe, about feedback, but also, this is a place where everybody wants to do their own thing. They don't want to hear from anybody else about how to do stuff.

So I think mentorship, having some elders and a younger generation of musicians open to it, and seeking the knowledge of elders are also things that we don't have so much in this community.

So, a dedicated space and mentorship are among the other hallmarks, and I'd say one of the other hallmarks is gigs that pay money. And it seems obvious, but in a lot of other places, musicians can actually make a living playing music. Jazz musicians can make a living playing jazz. It's impossible in Seattle. You could have every jazz gig in town, work five nights a week, and make less than $30,000 a year. You're not going to live in Seattle on that.

So teaching, playing other kinds of music, and working a day job are all necessary requirements in Seattle. There are no full-time performers, and that's a real problem as well. So how do we incentivize that? How do we incentivize excellence? What is the impetus for any musician to write that big piece of music, to rehearse that band? To get it together and make it really sound excellent. Why? So you can debut it somewhere and pay everybody $20. That's an awful lot of work to get nothing out of it. So you might do it once, and then that's the end of it. You're probably not going to go to that effort again.

So, there's no brass ring to strive for. There's nothing to grab. There's a ceiling that people hit pretty much right away in their careers here. We have a lot of mediocrity here, and a lot of the mediocrity is really held up as an example of what we should all be doing. And I think part of that comes from a desire to be inclusive, and I appreciate that, but I also feel like some of the musicians have abdicated their responsibility over the music.

In other words, where's the accountability if you get up on a bandstand and sound bad? There is none. That's not true in other places. If you get up on a bandstand and sound bad, they're going to tell you. You know, that still exists in a lot of places. It doesn't really exist here.

LP: What are the conversations that you're able to have then? And just to be a little bit more specific, that's some true talk right there. And I wonder, can you have these discussions and are these widely agreed upon concerns and views? Or is Thomas Marriott out in the wilderness? Ranting and raving about these things, and no one's listening. Are your peers and colleagues saying, you know what, this is a call to arms? These are real issues. What do we do? It's fascinating. It's such a straight articulation of needs, which could ultimately lead to prescriptions and next steps. How do your peers and colleagues receive this?

Thomas Marriott: I think that in general, they agree. I think we all know that the bar for jazz music in Seattle is kind of low, but I think in the mean, it's not that good. Why would it be good? There's no place to play.

You only get better by playing on the bandstand, and if there are no bandstands to play on, who's ever going to get better? How do the people who are at the top stay sharp? How do people at the bottom work their way up? There is no mechanism for that. When I talk about those things, I think the people in the community greatly recognize them.

I don't know how many people in the community listen to me when I say that, but I know those who agree with me do. I think it's a small group of folks who are interested. And this is true in every community. It's mostly made up of jazz dabblers who play a little jazz and teach jazz, but they're not trying to be expert performers. It's not really in their larger scheme. You know what I mean? They're content to play a little bit here and a little bit there. And that's cool. I mean, you know, to each their own. Not everybody has to strive to be the best; that's okay. But for those that are, there are scant resources for you in Seattle.

And I believe I know what the prescription is. And I believe I know how we can get out of it. But it does take participation from everybody. And I'm not sure that Seattle is a place where everybody is really interested in participating.

LP: It's interesting because I have versions of this conversation with people in other cities, maybe related to jazz, perhaps not, certainly associated with the arts more generally, and to widen the concentric circles to all kinds of causes and what I would broadly call like public affairs types issues. And it seems particularly difficult on the West Coast. I talked to people involved in launching nonprofits and community organizing in the arts and music. The tension seems to be there's more money sloshing around these cities than ever before. Still, there seems to be a real generational difference between the money made and earned and the wealth created now versus some idyllic good old days when there was more of a sense of community stewardship investment in the local community.

I mean, just to be very pointed and direct about it, much of the finance and tech money is being accumulated and amassed instead of investing in communities. When it is invested, it's invested in things like, how do we go to Pluto? (laughter) Not how we get our children to be responsible, creative citizens. Is that in the mix for you? Am I putting words in your mouth?

Thomas Marriott: You're not putting words in my mouth. As Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and other cities have become more affluent, the rent has increased. And when the rent goes up, musicians have to leave. That's just historically true. Everywhere. And you're right. The way that the cities have become affluent, I think, is maybe what you're putting your finger on.

In Seattle, and I think this is true, like you said, on the West Coast, the tech money has led to more affluence, but it has not necessarily led to more culture. And in fact, it has had a stifling effect on culture. When they do spend money and when I see philanthropy towards music, I see jazz education being funded at every level in Seattle. I can't speak to other places, but jazz education is funded for elementary school, junior high school, high school, and college, as well as for the adult beginner and the adult amateur.

And when I say at the high level, I mean millions and millions and millions of dollars. But there is no money for jazz music. There is a need for jazz education, and we have two parallel industries, the jazz education industry, and jazz music, which are not much of an industry anymore. I think jazz education is an obvious way for philanthropists in our community to say, "I'm doing something to help the arts. I'm doing something to help jazz music," which maybe they are a fan of, or perhaps they see it as a worthy cause, and that's cool.

But, I mean, if we wanted to fund classical music in Seattle, we fund the symphony. We don't fund classical music education. Maybe we do, but we also fund the symphony, the ballet, and the opera. Where is that infrastructure for jazz music? Not to mention that, for the most part, those are European art forms. Jazz is an American art form. Where is the money for jazz music, specifically local jazz music? And I would say that there isn't any. Well, there is now, I'm not going to lie. Our fundraising at Seattle Jazz Fellowship has been pretty good. So there is money for jazz music, but we're just turning on the tap.

LP: It's really interesting. So many different things come up for me here, and I'm hearing some of those comments. You know, I think of going to New York from Connecticut as a younger person and going to museums and galleries and openings and jazz shows and experiencing art up and down the levels, it was entertainment, but it was, and it was fun and interesting and stimulating. But just to be frank, it was also so as careers and lives developed. It was a signifier in a way that I don't see that necessarily on the West Coast. I don't see people excited about like, I'm going to go, I want to develop an aesthetic. You know, it's like, I don't know.

Thomas Marriott: No, I know. It's gotten more affluent, but it's just gotten more bougie because instead of saying, "Hey, let's go check out some of that jazz," it's like, "I'm going to spend my $500 and see Pearl Jam. You know, I'm going to spend my thousand dollars to see Taylor Swift." And that's cool. And you get bragging rights for like, "Hey, I got a ticket to the big show, and I spent the money." And I think it's more about spending the money than it is about the musical experience for a lot of people.

When I play at Smalls in New York, people just go out. I mean, I lived in New York for a number of years and people just go out to hear jazz and see weird cinema just because it's so readily available. They go to the music because they have something to do. And, of course, nobody wants to spend any time in their tiny little hot apartment, so you get out.

People go out more, and I think here, we're like, we get really comfortable inside our pads, all the comforts of home, never have to leave. In fact, you don't even have to go to the club; you can stream their show and pretend that you've supported those artists. Yeah, I definitely agree with you.

Just because there's money does not necessarily always mean there's going to be well-supported arts because there's money. Look at SFJAZZ. They built this incredible institution to music in San Francisco. And it's even named after that city. SFJAZZ. Think of any San Francisco-based jazz musicians that have headlined in their big room the last time they've been open.

LP: Incredible.

Thomas Marriott: Very, very few. If any.

LP: Yeah. It's fascinating.

Thomas Marriott: How can that be?

LP: I think about that a lot, I think about that venue, yeah.

Thomas Marriott: SFJAZZ has nothing to do with SF. Do you know what I'm saying? Except for that's where it exists. And for the folks that have donated to that institution, they don't care. They have their name on the little thing when you walk in the door. That's what they care about. I helped build this. And that's great for them, and I appreciate what they're doing, and we need institutions like that. But it can't be the only thing that we have. Because that's saying that the only people allowed to make a living are the people at the very, very, very top.

The 1 percent of jazz artists who make it to that level in their career. Yeah. Which is a really small number of people. And I don't begrudge them their living; they have to play too. But so do the vast majority of us. So if you're me or any other local regional jazz musician, you want a gig in San Francisco, you're going on tour, you're never going to make ends meet. You could play the Black Cat, and they might pay you $800 for your band. It's not going to go very far. You know, it's local pay everywhere.

And the way we think about funding the arts has to be more local. If we're gonna really have a scene, if we're going to have a community, if the arts really matter, look at PNB. They have a whole school dedicated to dance in addition to their professional dance season. Yeah. That's great. That's wonderful. We could use something like that. We have jazz education, but let's face it: most of those institutions don't crank out professional musicians. It's not their point.

But for most people, it's something to do to get together with people and hang out. That's great. That's the whole purpose of music. But I don't think this will churn out the next generation of jazz artists. But look at all the jazz education there is in Seattle. How many professional musicians have it turned out that have been able to maintain a career longer than five or ten years? Yeah. Not that many.

LP: Well, and to your point, without the other pieces, we're just, even if we were churning out jazz musicians, we'd be bleeding them away to other places with more opportunities.

Thomas Marriott: And we are. Those really gifted kids from those big programs don't stick around here. The ones that we want to stay move away because the perception is that there's nothing here for them. They have to move away if they're going to increase their learning and opportunities. That wasn't true when I came up here.

There were plenty of opportunities to learn and grow pay, dues, and do all those things. I still think that there are. You have to really seek it out. Moving away, obviously, is an easy thing to do.

LP: So you've taken action, essentially, in various evolving forms over the last several years. You've articulated some of the hallmarks of a scene. You've articulated some of the problem statements. What are you doing? How are you doing it? And how's it going?

Thomas Marriott: What are we doing? So in 2020, I started thinking about what we are coming back to. Our scene was kind of in shambles, and it looked like there was not going to be a dedicated space for jazz moving forward. There would be some clubs that had some jazz some of the time, but no place that would pay anybody a professional wage.

So, I started the Seattle Jazz Fellowship. We started thinking about it in 2020, wrote our mission statement and what we are about, got some board members, and formally incorporated it in January 2021. Later that year, in October, we started producing shows and began with a series. And the point of the series was to just get people into the idea of let's just hang out. Bring the music back in person. Let's allow the musicians to play where they can make a buck.

So, the mission of Seattle Jazz Fellowship is to build community. That's the first tenet of our mission. The second one is to increase mentorship or to provide access to the mentorship cycle—to incentivize excellence and lower barriers to access jazz for musicians and listeners alike. So, if you are a teenager who loves jazz, where do you go to hear it in the wild?

You know, where do you go to hear the real thing? I had lots of opportunities to do that. They don't really exist now unless you go to Jazz Alley and you got to drop $120 bucks. So that's not accessible to most people for the most part. So we have to make excellent jazz available to the public, younger musicians, and anybody else who wants to hear it.

So if jazz at the high level only exists for wealthy people, we'll never have more jazz music here. It's just kind of a no-brainer. The Seattle Jazz Fellowship works by having three fundraising streams. They are grants, corporate sponsorships, membership, and private donations, so I guess that's four.

You can attend all our events for free if you purchase an annual membership. Your name is on the list. You just say your name to the door person, they check you off, and you come in. And if you don't have a membership, it's a $20 suggested donation. If you got $20 bucks, that's great. If you have a dollar, great. That's fine too. If you have nothing, that's fine too. So we're not giving it away, but we are making it by suggested donation, and we're offering the musicians and the artists an opportunity to do their best work in front of a meaningful audience for meaningful pay.

For the audience, we're providing a regular place to find the music. And it doesn't matter who's playing. It's always going to be good. And so we see that people come back over and over and over again because it's not about this artist or that artist. It's about the music. And I think that's something that's kind of got lost. A lot of musicians these days are very careerist. You know, it's me, me, me, me, me all the time. And that's cool. That's promotion. And that's how the game is played. But we have to be careful. Are we using jazz to aggrandize ourselves? Or are we aggrandizing the music through our work?

And I see a lot of organizations and institutions in Seattle that use the jazz term or the jazz label or the jazz name to further other agendas that don't really have anything to do with the music. We really just are focused on the music. Making it a place where people can come and listen, and musicians can come and play.

So, we ran the series seasonally in 2021 and 2022. So six weeks in the summer, six weeks in the winter, six weeks in the fall, and paid out about a hundred thousand dollars to musicians in the community. We raised about that much money.

LP: Wow.

Thomas Marriott: In January of 2024, we moved into our own location. So we were previously doing these shows at an art gallery on Capitol Hill called Vermillion, which was great for us to build our membership base and get people used to the idea of coming to hear the music. Now we have our own venue. It's a pop-up. We have a rent-free lease. I have a one-year rent-free lease and pay the utilities. There's not a lot we're allowed to do in this space except for what we do, but I have a key and can come and go as I please and do whatever I want.

So we have our piano, drum set, PA, and fifty chairs, a little bar selling beer and wine, and live jazz on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. We host listening sessions with Julian Priester. We have jam sessions for all ages on the weekend. And we're looking at expanding our programming because right now we've raised about half a million dollars for our Seattle Jazz Fellowship and I would say 80 percent of that goes right into the pockets of musicians.

So we're paying musicians well. We do a lot of double bills where we have a musician who's younger paired with a musician who's older or somebody who's more traditional paired with somebody who's more experimental, mainly so they can be in the same room together. When I came up, I knew all the musicians in town regardless of what stripe of jazz they played. Now, when I talk to some of the younger musicians, they don't even know who Phil Sparks or Bill Anschell is, and these guys have been around here a long time. They don't even know them. So, how do we get them to know them?

Since musicians don't hang out as much in Seattle as in other communities, that part of building community is really big for us. So we double-bill a lot of our gigs so that we have that fellowship actually happening. It's a shame that we have to kind of engineer that. To be honest, we tell people who want a booking, don't email us, don't call me, come in. I keep the calendar behind the bar at the venue. If you want a gig, you actually have to show up.

The problem is, if we don't start supporting our own art form and don't support each other as musicians, we're never going to get anywhere as a community. The way we incentivize that is by, again, these double bills, but also we tell musicians if they want to get booked, you got to come in. You got to make it to somebody else's show. You got to hear somebody else. You have to be willing to buy what you are selling.

Again, it seems like common sense, but we don't have that here. And in a lot of reasons why. I had one musician that I really wanted to book. I was like, "Man, I'd love to book you, but you got to come in." And he's like, "I can't come in because I have to teach. I need the money. I can't really afford to take that two hours off." And to me, I'm like, that's the price you got to pay for being an artist—to give up that teaching income once so that you can have a gig that pays a real paycheck. That's what it takes. Otherwise, we're always going to be a community of teachers first, musicians second, and artists third.

It starts with us, it really starts with us. So what are we doing about it? How do we build community? We build community by showing up, but there has to be something for people to show up to. And when there's a little jazz here and a little jazz there, it's very hard for people to know when and where to show up. And I think we have full houses, but I would love to see more cats. It would make a huge difference because it's our clubhouse. And I think many people are just not interested in that or unable to just for financial reasons. It's cyclical.

LP: How do you feel about the Pioneer Square neighborhood? Given its history and context, is that where you'd want to be? Or are you neutral? Do you just want a space? Like, I'm fairly curious about that location.

Thomas Marriott: Yeah. So it's definitely a conscious decision. It's where we want to be. And for a lot of reasons. One of the things we always talk about is why the jazz community in Seattle is so white.

LP: Yeah.

Thomas Marriott: Part of it is, it's Seattle. Seattle's a very white city. But also, a lot of the music happens in the North End, the white part of town. So, if we are, again, part of our mission is to make the music accessible, well, we need to bring it to where the people are.

Pioneer Square is extremely accessible by light rail. It's very centrally located. It doesn't really feel like any person or any group's territory. It's kind of a neutral area for everybody. It's also very much the historical jazz district of Seattle. And may even be going that way again, with Alan Thistle, Underbelly, Fred Holmes Gallery, and Seattle Jazz Fellowship. That's all regular weekly presentations of jazz within a three-block radius. And there's only more coming. To me, we have the opportunity to really create the jazz district again, in Pioneer Square.

Also, you're looking for empty storefronts, and there's a lot of them in Pioneer Square.

LP: Yeah, there's that, yeah. The last couple of art walks I went to there felt good. Like, I was like, wow, there's some vibe. Like, there's some funky stuff going on. It's not uptight art galleries that are precious and inaccessible. Like, it was fun. It was really, it was a vibe on the street. There were people.

Thomas Marriott: A lot of young people. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, and they've worked really hard at that. For many decades, Art Walk has been going, and they offer free parking and all of that. And it's a vibe. It's a big party.

LP: Yeah. It's exciting. The most unfair question. Are you an optimist? Are you optimistic? (laughter)

Thomas Marriott: About what? (laughter) I mean, I'm going to be honest, man. We're in a public forum, and I feel obligated to say I'm optimistic. It depends on what day you ask me. I'll be really honest. That's fair. Sometimes, I feel really optimistic when the house is full, there are a lot of cats, the music sounds great, and there's money in the bank.

LP: Yeah.

Thomas Marriott: I don't feel so optimistic when the audience is empty, and the music's not very good. It's sometimes hard to see the forest through the trees. So, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but I feel, to be honest, starting Seattle Jazz Fellowship, I thought we'd run it for a couple, three, four years, kind of get the ball rolling again, and then that'd be it. I didn't really think that we would sort of be the stewards of the community. I didn't want us to.

LP: You're building an institution, let's be clear.

Thomas Marriott: Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, the fundraising has been quite robust, so I keep waiting for it to run out of money so I can step away from it, but it doesn't really seem like it's going to run out of money anytime soon, so I, there's a lot of optimism with that. You know, what, we're looking at doing a fellowship festival in February, a three or four-day festival with a bunch of different events. Yeah, we're doing what we do, you know, I mean, I'm just going to keep doing it until the money does run out, kind of like playing the trumpet. (laughter)

That's the old joke, jazz musicians, I'm just going to keep doing it until the money runs out. I guess that's it. That's true with the Seattle Jazz Fellowship. At some point, I will step away, and somebody else will take it over. While I'm committed to it, I do look forward to that day because so many jazz institutions suffer from the person at the top being there too long.

And they outlive their usefulness to the organization. And if it's really a sustainable organization, can it thrive without them? I definitely want Seattle Jazz Fellowship to continue without me. I'm a musician first and foremost, which cuts into my ability to be an artist. That said, it's not like my phone is ringing off the hook. There just aren't that many gigs in Seattle, so it hasn't been that much of a challenge to juggle both things.

But as we grow, as I get busier, there will be more conflicts, and more staff will be required. We have the money to do all that, though. So yeah, I'm optimistic. And also I'll be honest, like I've now heard pretty much every local musician play. I hosted the jam session at the Royal Room for three years and the few hundred jazz events we've done.

And yeah, I'm not super optimistic about the level of musicianship, to be honest, you know, for jazz. Some incredible musicians are working in Seattle. But as far as the jazz community, it's still kind of small. In Seattle, we've expanded the definition of the music to include more people and more music for survival. We've had to. What flies as jazz music in Seattle would not fly in other cities because they have more robust jazz communities, which only put up with certain things.

We're fighting against the forces of academia, you know, I don't mean to say it nefariously. Still, what academia teaches in the community sometimes, we have to unteach to really make it authentic. And I guess what I mean is this notion that I just play with my friends, and that's sufficient. I'm out of school, so I'm just launching a career with my own band, and the idea of like, learning to play with a lot of other people, and make them sound good, or know their music, or whatever, and be versatile, and still be yourself, like those skills are just not really taught.

Jazz education can teach us about the notes, but music is not the notes. It's the community but also the feeling of why we play jazz music. We don't do it for the money. It doesn't mean we don't want to make a living, but why do we do it? Well, we do it for the spiritual rewards. The Fellowship is one of those spiritual rewards, that feeling of togetherness, the ungendered feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood. It's probably one of the highest spiritual rewards we receive as musicians. If there are no spiritual rewards and money, then why are we going to do it?

Thomas Marriott: Maybe on a more metaphysical level, Seattle Jazz Fellowship is more interested in ensuring that those spiritual rewards are still present and exist. I don't know any classrooms where they teach that. I've only learned that on the bandstand from other musicians. In that sense, we get a lot of. I see a lot of super accomplished musicians coming out of school and writing a lot of hard music, but the way they present the music is like a classroom.

It's like they're giving a recital, like lots of pages and pages of music that they didn't really learn that well, so they're like really reading it hard, you know, glued to the music stand. They're gonna tell you all about the music before they play it, so you don't get to make up your own mind about it or discover something of your own.

And so the way that the music is presented stems from academia as well, and I think that in and of itself is a deterrent to a lot of people. When people think about live music, it's not an experience where music stands are involved. Unless they're going to the orchestra, and I think for jazz, we've come into this thing where like the more music you can write and the more notes you can put on the page, the better your music is, and I don't think that's true at all.

It may be better for the musicians, but the listeners don't care how many notes you wrote on the page; they just want to know how you've made them feel. They want to have left feeling something. You can write a thousand notes and make people feel something, but most people don't, to be honest. So that's one of those things I think we have to unlearn, unteach people. This music is really about togetherness, not the notes.

We end with my chat with Seattle House Mafia. A DJ trio playing deep house, tech house, and progressive house music. DJ Sang-Do, Phil Anthony, and Paul Velocity share their tales from the history and current state of Seattle's dance music world.

LP: Paul, can you tell me, for thirty seconds, who you are and what your background is in Seattle? Are you from Seattle? How'd you get here, if not?

Paul Velocity: Yeah, sure. That's a lot to get through in thirty seconds. But yeah, briefly, the accent is from London, England. I moved to Seattle in 2015. And I've been involved with the house music scene my whole life as a DJ, as a producer. I've even put on events before. And through moving out here, I found that other people share my passion, Sang-Do and Phil, who are also joining me today.

LP: Why Seattle for you?

Paul Velocity: This was a move for my full-time employment. What we do for me specifically is more of a side hustle. It's more of an elevated hobby, let's call it that. In order to pay the bills, I worked for a well-known travel company in London. And there was the opportunity to move to Seattle, and I took it. I didn't have anything holding me back, I needed to refresh my scene, I needed a different outlook on life, and it was an opportunity that just came at the right time.

LP: Gotcha. Thank you. Sang-Do, may I ask you to do the same?

DJ Sang-Do: Yes. I was born in Seoul and raised in Honolulu, and then most of my life was spent in Seattle, mostly in West Seattle. Then, I started going to raves in 1993, which featured house music, breaks, and trance. And then, in 1996, they started DJing at parties, raves, and sometimes clubs. And still going strong.

LP: Great, thank you. And Phil?

Phil Anthony: Yeah, similar to Sang-Do, from the music side of things, I was born and raised in Seattle. Actually, I grew up in Kirkland on the east side. In the early 90s, I was very involved in both the grunge music scene from a spectator perspective and the dance music scene at the same time.

So, in the early 90s, not only were there organized raves, but there was also a scene for break-ins, such as old empty warehouses. We backed up a U-Haul truck with a sound system and a generator and just turned it into a full night of dancing, lights, fog, and music, again, as Sang-Do said, breaks, house, techno, drum and bass. It was really like no rules back then. Since then, I have been involved with dance music in one way or another, and I have been a DJ since '97.

LP: Wonderful. Thank you for that. So I think with that context, I might direct the first question at you, Phil, just given your longevity here and in the scene. Could you tell me a little about how did house arrived in Seattle? And more broadly, how did house travel in the early days? How did something going on in Chicago and emanating from there, how did the underground work back then?

Phil Anthony: I think San Francisco and Chicago were large influencers regarding house specifically. So I think the West Coast house music scene started in the Bay Area, LA, and Seattle. It spread from there and, like a wave, came across. At the same time, house music was also very strong in Chicago. So you saw this convergence of Chicago and West Coast house music early on.

And Seattle was where the waves crashed, right? But also, you saw things happening in Vancouver, BC, north of us. So Seattle's been in this cool kind of weirdo corner of the world that we've seen dance music, house music sort of crashing us and expose us to all these different kinds of areas.

And then Sang-Do will even tell you coming from Honolulu, like there was a scene out there, and there still is. So before the internet, it was mixtapes, and there were companies later in the nineties, like Groovetech. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but Groovetech was an online record store, and they also had a 24-hour live-streaming radio station, video, and audio using Real Player.

So, some ex-employees from Real Networks were running that far ahead of their time, but that was also a significant area of exposure for just dance music in general.

LP: What was happening here in the early 90s? You mentioned grunge and some of the, even the anecdotes you told sound very similar, like people having warehouse parties or pop-up shows or just finding spaces at a time when there was much more space in this region, to sort of guerrilla-style an event. What were the formal venues, and who were the supporters or the ecosystem? Was there radio support, was there press, were there record shops? Could you paint that picture a little bit?

Phil Anthony: Absolutely. So, first, from the scene perspective, on the club side of things, I think my first real experience, and I may or may not have been of age at this time, we're just going to leave that there, but there were, so for instance, the Weathered Wall started a night called Lemon Twist.

Lemon Twist was three floors of drum and bass, acid jazz, techno, house, and then, gay, straight. Whatever you could imagine in the 90s was happening one night in this venue, and it was super eye-opening. At the same time, the grunge scene was going crazy as well, like '92 and '93, and then there were a ton of record shops. Platinum Records, there was Zion's Gate, there was—Sang-Do, help me with a couple of the other, I mean

DJ Sang-Do: My favorite, Exotic Imports

Phil Anthony: The Exotic Imports, like there and Groovetech again, was an online record store, but you could actually pick up the physical media. And then I remember even Cube 93, which you may be familiar with, they even had electronic dance music shows. So, they almost supported the rave scene directly or indirectly through these dance music shows. And then there was another radio station, 1,07.7, the End.

Who also had dance music hours happening, so there was radio support, record stores, and clubs doing new and innovative things. Showbox, uh, Showbox Market had Electro Lush along the same lines as Lemon Twist at Weathered Wall. That was the other amazing night that was happening weekly on Saturdays.

So there, there was a ton going on. You could literally go out every night and find something. And I almost had a calendar where I would go out Monday night to Victor's or Tuesday night to Victor's. And then Wednesday would be some other venue, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you, and then even Moe's, which you may be familiar with or now Neumos.

They had a Sunday night, which was still probably my favorite night in existence, called Mofunk, the sweatiest, dirtiest, down-and-dirty acid jazz night you could imagine. And if you didn't go there, you could go to Flammable, the longest-running house music night on the West Coast.

And at the time, that was at Rebar. Now it's moved up to Chop Suey since the sale of Rebar. So, there's a huge, long historical legacy of how this city has supported dance music, culture, and the dance music scene, whether directly or indirectly.

LP: Was it an entirely local scene, or were national and international DJs coming through at that point?

Phil Anthony: I think you had national and international DJs starting to come through, and I think because there wasn't that easy exposure to SoundCloud or MixCloud or the internet or YouTube, they would bring a flavor of whatever region they were coming from. So if you had a DJ coming from Baltimore, for instance, you could get like this really hardcore, gritty booty house, or you have somebody coming from the UK.

Again, a totally different sort of flavor. So they were coming in internationally, but I was also a very strong local scene.

LP: Alright, Sang-Do, what's the scene you walked into as a younger man?

DJ Sang-Do: To finish the loop on radio stations, I also wanted to mention C89.5, the holy mothership of global dance music radio that still exists today, to our friends and allies.

Phil Anthony: Absolutely, good call.

DJ Sang-Do: And in the early 1980s, they had things like Nocturnal Transmission, I still believe they do. But there were amazing DJs. My favorite mixes were folks from Canada, such as Mark Farina, playing progressive and breaks, followed by advertisements of underground raves happening and a phone number. And then that's it because if you call the phone number, there are more instructions, which makes it fun.

LP: Yeah. You mentioned, I guess, '95 or '96 when you started to wade into the scene. Is that right? Did I get that right in your introduction?

DJ Sang-Do: Yeah. In 1993, when I got a car, I started exploring the city and went to this legendary underground club called the Underground on University Ave. And that's where we all became friends with everybody. There were DJs here. Yeah. Namely, I got inspired to mix well, with Brian Pember, DJ BPM. And then followed by folks like Michael Manahan, who is part of the Cascadia events.

Yeah. For the most part, the important DJs were from the West Coast. The big folks were always Mark Farina and Doc Martin.

Phil mentioned ElectroLush. It was a Saturday night at Showbox Market, and it started getting bigger, and more people began supporting it. That's when I started seeing folks like Paul Oakenfold and Paul van Dyk that we could afford to pay and fly in and pay, mainly by other crews such as USC, who threw many great raves, Freak Night, and Parties at the Gorge. Yeah, I think that's how it all happened.

LP: Click back just a half a step or so. When we talk about calling the phone number and getting the location, getting the directions, getting more information, and sort of the underground rave scene here, call it early to mid-90s, like how big was the scene? Was it 200 people? Was it 1,500 people? Can you get a sense of what was going on here? You know, how big?

DJ Sang-Do: They were all amazing. It doesn't matter how many patrons attended. For example, I remember going to a Delish House on Rainier, and it might have 50 people, but the people were great. They were high-vibing, with great energy, to events at the NAF studios. Or various rave, production, and promotion companies with [name redacted]. I can go up to, like, 4,000 to 6,000 people. As Phil mentioned, it's almost every night.

LP: Wow. Yeah. At that time, did you ever have a sense of where these people came from? Did you know that the scene was that big? Was it a surprise to say, "Good God, there are thousands of us."

DJ Sang-Do: Yeah, I think people who are even more underground started doing this during the wave era in the eighties, which helped pave the way. But for us who raved in the nineties, this explosion and this discovery all happened at the same time.

So there'll be so many small or large parties, we would attend and make new friends. Discoveries of new genres all at the same time were magical because like-minded folks were discovering this high-vibrational music all at the same time. It didn't matter who was playing and what was playing. You just knew you could go somewhere and you could be anything. You could be from all walks of life and are pretty much accepted. Because we're all really dancing to the same frequency, and that is so special.

Phil Anthony: I was just gonna make one mention. So, Sang-Do mentioned NAF Studios a couple of times. And, Lawrence, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Marc Studios, but here's a fun fact: I think Alice in Chains filmed "Man in a Box" in NAF studios. I don't know how many great albums and songs were cut in NAF studios from the grunge era. So again, we're talking about this kind of wild convergence of dance music and grunge music and the same sort of the same building being used for wholly different purposes. Still, amazing output came from NAF studios back then. I just wanted to bring that up.

LP: Did you guys find that people moved between those worlds?

Phil Anthony: Yeah, for sure. I definitely did. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think there was good money to be made to run sound in the color box at Pioneer Square. I probably paid one thing, but running sound at a 5,000-kid rave with three rooms, it's probably a whole nother payday. I don't know for sure, but that would be my guess. (laughter)

LP: Yeah, that'd be my guess too. So, Paul, all this is going on, and I'm so intrigued by the London element. My first trip outside of the States was in the mid-90s, and I went to London with a friend of mine. I was living in New York at the time. We had a friend who was an expat, so we had somebody to stay with. On one of our first nights there, he said, "I gotta take you to the Blue Note. There's this crazy shit going on there." And it was, you know, one of the drum and bass nights.

I didn't come really from a consciousness of that scene. My interest or knowledge of electronic music was much more like an ambient, like Bill Laswell sort of inflected New York downtown and a Brian Eno type thing. And man, what a night. Whenever I talk to anybody in London at that time, I feel like I get that knowing nod and wink of "Oh, so good you made it to one of those Blue Note nights," like, just a special time that people there remember fondly. While these guys were having these experiences here in Seattle, what was going on for you in London?

Paul Velocity: Yeah, pretty much a similar experience in terms of the underground connections, the texting the phone number, the calling the number, getting the directions at the secret parties, out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. That was going on. I mean, the music was very subdividing. So I was, I got into house music a little bit later. I'd say probably very late '90s or early 2000s. And there were, at the time, a lot of sub-genres going on. I was into drum and bass, UK garage, and house music.

Before that I was into happy hardcore, 4-beat, it was just like a natural progression for me. And even with drum and bass, there are so many different sub-genres. You know, you've got liquid drum and bass, jump-up drum and bass, and that's just under one category. So, having such a diverse range of sub-genres within each of the different categorizations of music led to very diverse production in the UK, and the sound was spread using physical media, as Phil mentioned, there was a lack of internet, lack of SoundCloud, so in order to hear and listen to music, you had to actually physically be there.

And so that's what these underground parties provided. It provided a way for producers to cut acetates or white labels and get their music out to a very small select audience. It allowed people who were in the scene to go and listen to this very cutting-edge music that was happening. And we didn't realize this at the time, I don't think, but we were part of the movement. We were part of the industry. By helping this music to evolve and so that the scene you know it very similar like we have Ministry of Sound, we had Heaven, China White, we had a number of large clubs in London, some more well-known than others, different sizes going on but it was a different vibe you know the one.

There weren't phones out; there weren't distractions. People were there for the actual music. If we look at what James Hype is doing today, he's calling on the events he's attending to have a mobile phone ban to get people back to focusing on the music and having a good time.

When I first started coming into house music and understanding what that scene looked like, we didn't always have our phones out. We were there for the music. Listen to some amazing stuff. And even the production quality of how music back then versus now, like music production, has advanced so much today. It was a lot more expensive and difficult back in the earlier days. And so there's more of a raw sound.

And that's definitely what I gravitate towards. And I think that's why the underground scene that I was very fortunate to be a part of is part of my history, and I'm very proud to belong to it. And it's just that raw, unfiltered sound of people coming together for the love of music, for the passion. I believe it was Sang-Do saying that everyone was coming together as one, unified by the music. And that, yeah, something very special.

LP: So I wonder, as someone who's been sort of here for a long time and has been in the scene for a long time, do you have any thoughts or comments on like the health or the state of the electronic music scene here today? Is it vibrant? Is it alive? Is there a future, or are you just keeping it going? Like, I'm very curious about that.

Phil Anthony: It's interesting, and, again, this is coming from my own set of experiences, but I think we're all mature enough to know that good old days are, are, they're subjective, right? And as long as you're involved and offering something back, they were a moment in time, but they're not the only moment to hang on to. So, the real surface-level answer is that COVID was very rough on dance music in general because it did not allow people to get together in person.

LP: Yeah.

Phil Anthony: On the other hand, a lot of people started with Twitch, and guys like me who had dust collecting in my studio, all of a sudden started doing music again, right? And I think the same story is true for thousands and thousands of folks, with our experience, our age, kind of that group. So yeah, I feel like there's a resurgence now.

We have some amazingly talented DJs in Seattle and the surrounding area. We have some amazingly talented producers. I feel like Seattle has always been an uber-creative scene. There's a ton of talent on the production side and on the performance side. And then, there are people taking shots at other things.

For instance, I never envisioned hosting an interview show myself, right? I thought it'd be cool to get into the podcast thing because I spent a lot of time during COVID-19 listening to podcasts, like trying to find other places to focus my energy. And here we are. We took our shot and are starting to have some momentum and success, teaming up with like-minded folks, which also happened because of COVID and how COVID forced isolation on us from those larger circles.

From my observation, you know, okay, we call our early mid-90s, early 2000s, the golden era. But I think there's a massive resurgence and a variety of things that require more music exposure. Everything's not so focused on one crew or another crew like people are trying new things. People make content, whether in person or online. It's just a really exciting time in general.

So there's a lot of cool things going on, and I'm also like the eternal optimist about where the scene's going, and the one thing I'll say that's shifted for me is I'm much less competitive than I was as a young man when it comes to gigs, for instance. But I'm also much more open to supporting the community and creating something that platforms other people and helps expose other people to larger audiences.

That's a huge thing for me, and I didn't realize how much that fed my existence until we started formalizing things we do with Seattle House Mafia. So yeah, to answer your question, awesome time to be in the area for dance music, and there are also awesome things that a lot of different people are doing to bolster that.