The producer The producer The producer

When Terry Morgan’s company, Modern Enterprises, produced The Police’s second-ever Seattle show in 1980, the team had to improvise. En route to the Showbox Theatre, the band’s equipment went missing, and the stage at the venue—which also doubled as a Jewish bingo hall—was too small. So Morgan borrowed gear from local musicians and extended the stage with bingo tables, cobbling together a wobbly platform that strained to support the band as they rocked out.

It’s just one of hundreds of wild stories Morgan recounts from his decades as a talent manager, producer, musician, artist and general guy-who-does-everything in the Seattle arts and music scene over the past five decades.

“Terry Morgan is virtually peerless in our Seattle music scene,” says Kate Becker, a cultural community leader in the office of the King County executive. “His immeasurable contributions over the decades have made our city better, song after song, event after event. We are lucky to have such an accomplished impresario bringing his brilliance to our music and festival landscape.”

Terry Morgan, an event producer, keeps an office near the Seattle Center.

Morgan began booking shows in the 1970s as a student arts director for the Associated Students of the University of Washington. But he started earlier—at age 13—organizing gigs like school dances and VFW events in Oak Harbor, where he played guitar and bass.

One of the few Black families on Whidbey Island, the Morgans had limited access to Black culture. Morgan found inspiration in his extended family, which included actor Sidney Poitier and tennis legend Arthur Ashe. “Just watching what Arthur did with his life and voice guided me in the direction that I took,” Morgan says. “We took different paths, but his perspective made me more aware of things from an early age.

“When Poitier won an Academy Award, I was in elementary school. To watch Sidney continue [in his career] made me cognitively aware as a teenager in an isolated community. When I moved to Seattle, my reality became as big as I wanted it to be,” and Morgan’s dreams were in reach.

As an African American studies major at the UW, Morgan, ’76, studied widely outside his major, learning video art from art faculty Bill Ritchie and electronic music from Glenn White. “Music and electronic art all just melded together,” says Morgan. The young musician played in the UW Jazz Band for a few quarters and met Kenny G, ’78, during his first year. Through his involvement with the band, Morgan connected with music faculty Joe Brazil and accepted a role working as his TA. In Brazil’s classroom, Morgan encountered legendary guest artists who visited Brazil’s class, like Dizzy Gillespie and Joe Henderson.

Morgan holds a photo of himself playing the guitar as a teen.

After graduating, Morgan worked with video artist Jack Buchans, a disciple of Nam June Paik, the father of video art. Buchans had built a Paik-Abe video synthesizer, a primitive electronic tool that blends images and distorts colors. With Buchans, Morgan began developing music projects using recordings by Young Scientist, a synthesizer trio that Morgan also helped manage.

Soon he was producing events around Seattle. One early booking was punk band The Blackouts at the UW’s Ethnic Cultural Center Theatre—on the same night the Dead Kennedys played Washington Hall. Even so, Morgan’s posters and promoting pulled in a sizable crowd.

It was a cutthroat scene. Rival promoters would tear down his posters, forcing him to hustle harder. Eventually, Morgan joined forces with Carlo Scandiuzzi, Jim Lightfoot and Mike Vraney to form Modern Productions, based in the historic Terminal Sales Building. They promoted acts from the West Coast and Europe in venues from Vancouver, B.C., to San Francisco. “The acts would come in from England,” Morgan says. “They’d go to Vancouver first. And Seattle was their first U.S. show. We worked with the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver and started promoting some of our own acts—my approach was to build bands by affinity.”

Still in his 20s, Morgan returned to the UW to study systematic musicology. Under the UW ethnomusicology program founder, Robert Garfias, he explored African and world music through the lens of culture.

“Music was a reflection of culture and its traditions, an evolution of art as a way of life,” Morgan says. “It was religion and ritual. The concept of ‘griot’—where the stories of a people were kept alive [by oral historians] in song—led to me thinking of punk rock as a living tribal entity.” Musicians were its modern-day griots.

Morgan pulled away from his graduate studies as his career promoting punk rock took off. Also in the 1980s, he booked Bumbershoot, bringing in artists including Bobby McFerrin, Diane Schuur and k.d. lang.

He approached the Seattle Center with the idea of an annual Black music festival, which launched in 1981 and is still going strong as Festival Sundiata. Morgan brought Gil Scott Heron, Mighty Sparrow, Burning Spear, Branford Marsalis and Bill T. Jones to the annual event. “I focused heavily on bringing African influence and African American artistry together,” he says.

As grunge took hold, Morgan shifted to managing alternative rock bands like The Posies, The Young Fresh Fellows, Hammerbox and the Walkabouts, the latter of which was on the Seattle-based Sub Pop label. He produced the Out to Lunch concert series (now Downtown Summer Sounds) for the Downtown Seattle Association, curating lunchtime performances five days a week at various parks and venues. “My goal was to showcase as many local acts as possible, plus some national acts,” he says.

By the 1990s, Morgan was producing major events that drew thousands. The 1992 Ultra Lame Fest with Sub Pop brought Mudhoney, Seaweed, Supersuckers, Pond and Earth to the Paramount Theatre. Morgan’s work with the venue led to producing and promoting more shows like the Nine by 90 Festival, which featured Alice in Chains, Beat Happening, Love Battery, The Posies and the Walkabouts. In 1998, he brought Roberta Flack to perform at the grand opening of the Pacific Place mall.

In the early 2000s, Morgan produced music for large civic events, including the Seattle Center’s first Oktoberfest and Ivar’s Fourth of July celebration at Myrtle Edwards Park. He ran the Ivar’s event for 15 years bringing in artists like Bo Diddley, Nancy Sinatra and Chris Botti.

For the past 20 years, Morgan has focused more of his attention on his own work with musical partner LeRoy Bell. Bell was a songwriter for his uncle’s company Mighty 3 Music, which popularized the Philadelphia International Sound. (Bell’s uncle, Thom Bell, died in 2022 and will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.) Bell wrote songs for artists ranging from the Delphonics to Elton John and had a strong interest in performing. Morgan and Bell formed a rock and soul band and have toured with BB King and opened for Etta James, Sheryl Crow, Al Green, Joe Cocker, Michael McDonald, The Doobie Brothers, Van Morrison, Steve Miller and Huey Lewis. At Morgan’s urging, Bell auditioned for—and landed a spot on—the “X Factor,” the British TV music competition. The performance caught the attention of Universal Music in South Africa and led to an invitation to perform in Johannesburg with Zahara, the country’s top-selling artist.

Today, Morgan still produces a few events and serves on the Washington State Arts Commission. For the past two decades, he has produced the concert series at University Village. The Volunteer Park Summer Series returns this year in its fourth iteration. In 2018, he launched the Borealis Festival of Light, a four-day projection mapping event and art festival that lit up Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, drawing audiences of 120,000.

One of Morgan’s largest audiences was for the Space Needle’s 2020 New Year’s Eve digital light show.

During the pandemic, Morgan produced the Space Needle’s 2020 digital New Year’s Eve show, which aired on KING-5 TV. Inspired by a dream—and grounded in his background in video and digital art—it featured 10-minute psychedelic animation telling the story of life starting with the Big Bang. The show was the highest-watched New Year’s show in KING’s history with 1.3 million viewers.

Though embedded in Seattle’s music and arts scene, Morgan and his wife, Judy, moved to Lake Forest Park in 1999. One of their neighbors was famed science-fiction author Octavia Butler, who chose the community for its walkability. “She was very shy in person,” says Morgan, who occasionally offered to drive her home. “On one of those occasions, she asked me to come in. We chatted and she told me what she was working on.”

Since Butler died in 2006, Morgan and his neighbors have worked to honor her importance to contemporary culture. Two years ago, they renamed her street Octavia Butler Boulevard. Now Morgan is organizing “EarthSeed—Celebrating Octavia E. Butler” at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on June 23. The event will celebrate Butler’s birthday with lectures and video presentations. Morgan hopes to involve area arts organizations to inspire dialogue and deepen engagement around Butler’s ideas. “When people gather together around a shared passion, their synchronized consciousness becomes a psychic energy that’s universal,” says Morgan. “And that amplifies the experience.”