Why, then, one might reasonably ask, write the history of jazz here?
For those of us who live in Seattle, the answer is easy. To learn more about who we are, we look back at who we were, hoping to find clues to our identity. We know, for example, that Quincy Jones and Ray Charles rose from among our ranks. Does this tell us anything about who we are or who we might become? Is there something about the music these people have made that reflects us or our city? For northwesterners there is also the issue of cultural hegemony. Western American history, and certainly West Coast jazz history, seems always to have been written by people for whom the West was at best exotic and at worst an inconsequential footnote. Even West Coast jazz, acknowledged as a bona fide aesthetic movement, has been largely interpreted as a kind of aberration, a diluted form of the real stuff happening back East even though Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus were every bit as much West Coast figures as Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, or Chet Baker. This, then, provides an important ration
