Concert Venues

Summertime in Seattle is music season. Festivals and concerts are everywhere, with some of the biggest names in music on the list of performers. Take a look at this sampler of events that the city has to offer. Once you listen to music in Seattle, you’ll be talking about it for years.

Seattle Music Fest
This famous music festival takes place at Alki Beach every summer, and showcases both emerging and established artists for the benefit of both club-hoppers and families all over the region. Admission is free, thanks to the Northwest Programs for the Arts, which also supports the preservation of public art and the development of new musicians, among other things. Three days of free music at a local beach with mountain scenery nearby is hard to beat.

The Experience Music Project
This is actually a museum exhibit at the Seattle Center, but it is also a unique celebration of diversity in popular music. Permanent exhibits of the EMP include the Guitar Gallery (the history of the guitar), Northwest Passage (the history of regional music), and Sound and Vision: Artists Tell Their Stories (video interviews with musicians). One of the special exhibits, Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound, features interactive displays on sound effects and sound mixing to give visitors a sense of how innovative Hendrix really was. It really is an experience.

Summer Concerts at Marymoor Park
Home of the Mountain Music Festival, Marymoor Park in Redmond offers an open-air music event, with padded reserved seating near the stage and graded lawn seats spreading out over the other 50,000 square feet of grass, where picnic baskets are welcome. The beverage court even ditches the usual plastic cups in favor of biodegradable cups, setting a great example of eco-friendly waste management. Their annual concert line-up presents performers from various genres, so everyone can see something they like at least once during the summer.

Seattle Chamber Music Society
Listening to chamber music, one can thoroughly enjoy the classics without being overwhelmed by the full orchestra. The Chamber Music Society centers its local concerts around Summer Festivals in July and August, and a Winter Festival in January, with family concerts planned especially for children. Due to scheduling issues and artistic license, no two concerts are alike, with various combinations of selected string and wind instrument virtuosi performing works from all the great composers. Every concert is a new musical adventure.

Bumbershoot: Seattle’s Music & Arts Festival
l imagine this festival as an umbrella that brings all the artists together under it. Bumbershoot is another word for umbrella, and the vision which the festival promoters had for that umbrella has blossomed into one of the biggest music and arts festivals in North America. Every Labor Day weekend, around 150,000 locals and tourists gather at the Seattle Center to soak in the atmosphere of performing arts, visual arts, and literary arts, with a little local food added for flavor. It’s like seeing 100 concerts for the price of one.

The Gorge Amphitheatre
The Gorge in George, as it is affectionately called, is a large contemporary amphitheatre with one of the finest views available to concert-goers. The stage is right in front of the Columbia River Gorge, and the scenery alone helps to explain why this was voted best major outdoor concert venue by the readers of Pollstar magazine for nine years. The Gorge Campground is available to everyone before and after the concert. Pack for any type of weather, and have a great time!