50 Most Influential Musicians

Photo: Courtesy EMP

Ray Charles

Feeling stifled at 18, Ray Charles Robinson asked a musician friend to pull out a map to locate the big city farthest removed from Florida, where he’d come of age. Although, as Charles later recalled, “the bus ride’s a bitch,” the eventual cross-country journey to Seattle laid down a pattern, foreshadowing an attitude of restless adventure that would take the man who became known as the “genius of soul” across countless musical barriers. A following quickly gravitated to Charles in Seattle’s Jackson Street jazz scene. He formed a group called the McSon Trio and played piano and vocals, channeling Nat King Cole and Charles Brown at the Rocking Chair, a popular after-hours club of the era. Reps from Downbeat Records got wind of Charles and flew up from LA to record his first release in a tiny Seattle studio. In the spring of 1949, Charles (under the name of his trio, misspelled the “Maxine Trio”) hit the charts for the first time with his song “Confession Blues.” The Emerald City also landed Charles a musical soul mate when teenaged trumpeter Quincy Jones began showing up at gigs, eager to trade ideas. Charles was already proving himself, to borrow a phrase from his famous definition of soul, to be “a force that can light up a room.” His planet-shaking hybrid of gospel and blues would become just one of his many musical legacies. —TM

Because of him… Pop music got soul.
Now hear this: “Confession Blues,” the Seattle recording that was Charles’s very first, is available on The Complete Swing Time and Down Beat Recordings 1949–1952.

John Cage

John Cage liked to remember a lunch he had one day with Cornish College of the Arts colleague and abstract painter Mark Tobey—or rather, the adventure of walking to lunch, which became protracted over several hours because of Tobey’s insistence on stopping to look at every minute detail along the way. Cage himself spent his life paying attention to what he called the “unsuspected beauty” of the world around us. In the process, he not only transformed how music could be made but totally redefined what could be considered part of the art form. “All sounds are useful in music,” he once said, “if they occur in music.” (Or in silence, which he proved in 1952 with 4’33", the entirety of which involves not a single note but rather the unsuspected beauty of a “quiet” room—and its ambient noise—for four minutes and 33 seconds.) The Los Angeles–born Cage spent a pivotal part of his mid-20s at Cornish as a dance accompanist and teacher in the late 1930s. While there, he invented his famous prepared-piano technique—nuts, bolts, and other objects were placed between the strings so as to radically alter the instrument’s timbre—and played around with variable-speed turntables, hitting on ideas that presaged the world of electronic music. His one-man revolution spurred on kindred souls (composer Philip Glass, consistently curious rocker David Byrne) long after his death in 1992. —Thomas May

Because of him… The musical expression of the avant-garde wove itself into the language of everyday life.
Now hear this: “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” creates a sonic geography out of turntables, frequency recordings, piano, and cymbal on the import CD Credo in Us.

Dad Wagner’s Band

Amid all the corruption and rough frontier living during Seattle’s first decades, the musically inclined started hankering after possibilities beyond impromptu cedar-stump dancefests. Volunteer bands began cropping up until the city finally claimed a bona fide professional bunch widely known as Dad Wagner’s Band—a testimony to the charisma of its leader, Theodore H. Wagner, who arrived in 1889. Though very little is known about this musical pioneer’s pre-Seattle days, his time here remains memorable: Dad Wagner assembled an impressive brass and woodwind ensemble of some 30 members that sported a Chief Sealth logo on their booming bass drum and outnumbered even the nascent Seattle Symphony. Both a concert and a marching band, they regularly charmed the public from a floating dock at the lakeside pavilion which Judge John McGilvra built in Madison Park for vaudeville shows and dances. They remained a fixture for some three decades. At the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which celebrated the lifestyle of the Pacific Northwest—held between June and October 1909 on the current site of the UW campus—Dad Wagner’s Band was one of the featured performers. Wagner was lauded at his death, in 1933, as a force that could “unite people for music.” —TM

Because of them… The city began forming a musical identity by boasting its first professional ensemble.
Now hear this: Think of Dad Wagner and his influence this Christmas while marching to the animated uplift of “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” on the recently released Happy Holidays from the Husky Band.

Death Cab for Cutie

Rock music has always been the domain of outcasts—tortured artists, bad boys, womanizers. And usually those outcasts offered at least some modicum of danger. Yet over their 10-year career, Bellingham’s Death Cab has made the stage safe for the bookish, shoe-gazing nerd. Behind thick glasses and packing a few extra pounds around his belly, front man Ben Gibbard wields a voice that sounds like he’s politely asking you to pass the salt from the bottom of a well. When television shows like The O.C. needed music to make their characters “hip,” Death Cab was at the forefront; they offered up their songs and watched album sales climb. Suddenly mixing art and commerce wasn’t selling out—it was a smart business decision. And when Death Cab left Seattle-based label Barsuk for Atlantic in 2004, a nation of knitted cardigans watched in anticipation. The band’s ensuing album, Plans, went platinum and garnered a Grammy nomination. A parade of previously indie groups like the Decemberists followed their lead to major label paydays. Not that any of this was calculated. Dreamy, heart-on-sleeve alternative rock is a hard sell in a musical landscape dominated by braggadocio rap and disposable pop. But a small nation of nerds continues to worship at the altar of Death Cab for Cutie—their most recent record, Narrow Stairs, debuted at number one. —Bart Blasengame

Because of them… Indie rock is now a whispering, introspective geek’s game.
Now hear this: Though they can rock when they choose to, nothing tells the band’s story better than the heartfelt voice and guitar work on “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” from Plans.

Stuart Dempster

He was trained as a classical trombonist but he’s better described as a “sound gatherer” prone to recording in unusual acoustical environments. He’s become a respected figure in the world of avant-garde music while teaching at the University of Washington since 1968. He’s also credited as the man who brought the didgeridoo—a hollowed-out eucalyptus log played by Australian aboriginal people that produces a low-pitched rhythmic drone—to North America (though our didgeridoo is now more likely to be made from a black plastic pipe). Traditional aboriginal musicians perform solo, often accompanying a singer, but Dempster’s students in the UW ethnomusicology program began playing as a group, mixing the Australian methods with Western style. As those students went on to teach elsewhere, more such groups started up and still others were beguiled by the unusual instrument. —JR

Because of him… The didgeridoo found a new sound in North America, and North America found new sounds in unexpected places.
Now hear this: “Morning Light” and “Didjerilayover,” both on Dempster’s 1995 CD Underground Overlays in the Cistern Chapel, were recorded with 10 trombones, didgeridoo, and conch shells inside a water tank at Port Townsend’s Fort Worden.

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Published: December 2008