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Behind the Scene Interviews

Behind the Scene: Seattle Music Commission Chair Reese Tanimura

Formed in the late-aughts, the Seattle Music Commission is a committee within the Seattle city government focused on advocating for the improved health of the musical and creative ecosystem.

Dan Ray May 18, 2021
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Behind the Scene: Seattle Music Commission Chair Reese Tanimura May 18, 2021

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo by April Jingco

At Dan’s Tunes, we work to bring you a comprehensive picture of the Seattle music scene, and musical artists are a big part of that. But, an album doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a whole host of people to bring a musician’s vision to life. In this series, “Behind the Scene,” we’re taking a look at all of the people who are integral to the process of making music that you probably haven’t heard of before — from producers and radio DJs to vinyl cutters and photographers. Our goal is to make the series both educational and a resource for artists looking to expand their teams. Today, we’re chatting with Seattle Music Commission Chair Reese Tanimura.

Formed in the late-aughts, the Seattle Music Commission (SMC) is a committee within the Seattle city government focused on advocating for the improved health of the musical and creative ecosystem. The Commission works closely with the Office of Film and Music (OFM), another city office committed to growing the creative ecosystem. Current Chair of the SMC, Reese Tanimura, has served for two three-year terms alongside her role as Managing Director of Northwest Folklife, an organization focused on promoting multigenerational arts and the organizer behind Seattle’s Northwest Folklife Festival.

I sat down with Tanimura to talk about what SMC has accomplished in her two terms, what she hopes the next commission will accomplish, and what resources SMC brings directly to musicians. Below is our interview, edited for length and clarity.

You do a lot. Give me a rundown of your resume.

I’m a musician, but that’s something that unfortunately has taken a back seat in the last couple of years. Being an executive occupies a lot of time. But I’ve played in a few bands. I have a bluegrass band called Lavender Lucy. My friends and I did an all non-binary Nirvana cover band called Heart Shaped Boxes. My most recent project was a studio project with my friend, Sal, and we’re called trashyQ panda.

And then, Folklife’s festival and all of our year-round programs. Most recently, we’ve partnered with the city and several other arts organizations on an internship program for young people to get paid experience in different parts of the creative and cultural industries, everything from visual art museum work, to archival preservation work, to filmmaking, to digital equity. 

With the SMC, this is my final year. I’ve been on since 2015 — two terms. I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about the music ecosystem and all the ways our sector intersects in driving economy and community change. Also, all the ways that [artists] have been undervalued and trying to reclaim an understanding of what arts and culture does not only for the economic wellbeing of a region, but also for people’s mental health and having communities to belong to.

I worked for a little while for Rain City Rock Camp, which [focuses on the] empowerment of young people, primarily femme and non-binary people, in using music as a tool of expression and empowerment.

What is the Seattle Music Commission?

When we’re fully seated, we have 21 seats to try to catch a diverse and well-rounded representation of parts of the music industry and ecosystem in Seattle. We have folks that are musicians. We have folks who run non-profits or events. We have folks who have been with record labels. Some of the initiatives that the commission has been involved in is the music in the airports program, which started with Gigs4U. There’s also been some work down on the waterfront with Gigs4U. Before a lot of revision happened in our streets, there was a program that we did with SDOT about priority parking for musicians in front of venues so they could actually pull up and unload and not be trying to find some random spot.

Why is the commission not fully seated right now?

The last year’s been hard. There’s a lot that the city government has been focused on. Half of our seats are mayoral appointments and half are city council appointments. The direct committee that we’re attached to is headed by Tammy Morales, and I’ve had a direct conversation with her about getting our nominations up in the pipeline before they start another budget season. We’re particularly under-seated, but that also gave us a chance to revise our process. We had an open nomination period, so people could submit themselves or colleagues.

What else has SMC been working on?

One program that has gone through the time I’ve been on the commission is the music career days. We did roadshows, going into different high schools to talk about careers. The industry evolves at a pretty quick level, and it’s always been like, you learn when you get there. You’re scrambling around trying to figure out all these things on the fly. [SMC has been doing] more intentional work — through training in high schools and connection to Seattle colleges — around pathways to actually build those skills before you’re trying to DIY everything.

For example, [if kids] don’t know there’s such a thing as music and arts journalism. It’s something that’s important to creative communities thriving. If you look at cities that have more robust support from government, there’s also media attached to it. That’s something the commission has been grappling about — what it means not having dedicated media. There’s a big hunger for people to understand what’s out there. So the career days are about introducing young people to the variety of options to be involved in.

Our internship program started out as the commissioners making spaces at their places of work or with their networks for interns. It was well received, but it was really only serving three or four youths. I was always trying to be like, “How do we scale this? How do we make sure some experiences are paid?” Now, we’ve had about 30 interns between last year and the beginning of this year going through these different experiences. In the current condition, workforce development is a big thing to make sure we don’t lose people from the industry. Maybe you can learn other parts of the industry that will help you bolster your skills and also give you access to income. That’s a focus of recovery.

We’re seeing more and more how interconnected things are, how much of an ecosystem it is, and how we have to [educate] young people that this is a possible pathway as well as something we can continue to create new jobs and new opportunities in. [In doing that], how do we support spots of high concern, like cultural spaces and venues? How do we make sure that if some of those things are attritioning or disappearing during this time that it’s not just a loss and that there’s some way to renew? [We’re] looking at different business models that potentially will be sustainable into the future, like the venue co-op model coming up in Hillman city, Black & Tan Hall.

We’re also talking about the economy generally and how automation has been highly accelerated. So the question is, “What’s the unique skill in today’s marketplace?” It’s creativity. It is a uniquely human-centered trait. So at the same time, we have this moment of opportunity. We may find career paths that we never imagined if we’re open to the possibility of not just going back to what we thought was normal in 2019.

What are your responsibilities as chair of the commission? 

I work most closely with our liaison, Alex Rose, who works between arts and OFM to keep track of what the committees are doing. I check in with the two committee chairs: Our Youth and Community committee and our Advocacy and Economic Development committees both have chairs. Our vice chair, Sharlese Melcalf, and I connect on things we want to focus on.

We usually have a bi-monthly schedule, but last year we started upping our cadence of meetings to monthly. There’s so much going on, and our sector is in a bit of crisis. A lot of the work we do is trying to bring information to the [city] offices about what they can do staffing wise. Several of our commissioners are on WANMA and NIVA. 

The Youth and Community committee was talking a lot about digital equity. Our young people were not equipped to be remote. Schools were lagging on their ability to equip those young people. A lot of digital equity work has been going on for many, many years. The city has been working on this idea of, what would it look like to have the internet as a utility? What are some of the things beyond just getting equipment or getting connected? What are some of the things young people and musicians are facing in the space of digital equity? The state has made some very big commitments for digital equity and navigation and access. It’s necessary for every single industry to assess how [digital equity] particularly affects the populations they serve.

What’s SMC’s biggest accomplishment while you’ve been chair?

Our commission has been open to how we can cross the silos of the different pieces of the world. When we talked about digital equity, it wasn’t only about creative equity but really thinking about at the base level: How are people surviving in these systems? In that intersectional structure, artists — especially artists of color — are often deeply at the heart of those systems that have been least accessible to capitalization, fair pay, and support systems.

It’s also important that we continue to recognize that artists have been doing organizational work for mutual aid for the community. The thing to grapple with is how to fund that work. It’s all underlying work to change social structures that need to really be changed. Bringing more of that voice to the table has been an accomplishment.

What’s something you wanted to accomplish but didn’t get done?

The systems that support artists need to be re-evaluated and valued in a different way. There’s very little regulation in pay equity. I don’t know if regulation is necessarily the answer, but there’s very little uniformity about what artists get offered. What’s good about it is it’s an organic conversation. A lot of folks are talking more about it amongst themselves and asking, “What should we be asking for? What are the things we want?” 

The hard part is that it isn’t something that’s widely recognized or known. There’s a lot of missing safety nets for gig workers and particularly for artists. We need to make sure that artists can afford to live in a city where we want to be creative and support innovative culture. We know how much of a gap there is between what folks need to not just survive but be in a state where creativity is at the forefront. We have the capability in our city and our region to be more proactive and creative about that. It’s going to take a full force effort, not just from creatives but also from industries that have used a lot of our resources to offset the Zoom fatigue of being stuck at home. I’d love to see more traction and greater speed applied to that conversation before we launch back into in-person events and have no time to discuss that underlying structure. 

In 2008, SMC proposed a 2020 vision. What was that vision, and was it achieved?

To be really honest, there were parts of that vision I can’t say we’ve achieved. We often talk about the fact that the industry wasn’t in good shape in 2019. A lot of folks think the pandemic derailed everything, [but] there were issues that drove our economic disparity generally that were either reflected or driven in the same way in the music industry.

So did we hit those things about making a better place for artists? It would vary depending on the artists you asked, and many artists would say affordability is still an issue in our region. Rental prices are shooting off the charts at a rate that nothing can keep up with except for maybe tech. At the same time, older artists who’ve been in the region since the sixties and seventies are not getting paid differently for the gigs they’re doing in 1980-something and then here in 2019. 

The pandemic did derail some things. You saw some arts organizations who were operating on a par or venues that had started to find ways of interlocking business. That definitely got thrown out of whack. But I would say that fortunately we were already in the process in 2019 of reevaluating how we’re looking at nightlife, musicians, and all of those parts of the ecosystem and industry that looked a lot different in 2019 than they did in 2008. 

What resources can the Seattle Music Commission and OFM provide directly to musicians?

The mixer has been a great space for professional development and networking. Come with questions and plug in. Knowing who we know or who we don’t know and what the issues are out there always helps the commission and the offices think more robustly about the ways that we’re advocating and connecting our community. 

What can we expect from SMC?

I’m really excited to see what musicians have cooked up to try to do new things for themselves, like Shaina [Shepherd]. It shows a lot of the power and ingenuity that our artists have. How can we be watching those things to see what we should be doing in the future?

To learn more about the SMC, sign up for OFM’s newsletter, email seattlemusiccommission@seattle.gov, or contact Tanimura directly at reese@nwfolklife.org.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).