Garfield High School (Hendrix and Quincy Jones)

Garfield High School at 400 23rd Avenue in Seattle's Central District has produced two of the most significant figures in American music history, though neither of them attended at the same time and neither graduated. Quincy Jones was a student at Garfield in the late 1940s, where he played trumpet in the school band and began forming the musical intelligence he would later deploy as composer, arranger, and producer across six decades of American popular music. Jimi Hendrix enrolled at Garfield in the late 1950s and was there long enough to absorb some of what the school had to offer before dropping out.

Hendrix spent his teenage years in the Central District, moving between addresses as his family's circumstances shifted. School was peripheral to what actually interested him: he was playing guitar obsessively from around the age of fifteen, working through the sounds of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Chuck Berry by ear, in the bedroom, in the way that self-taught musicians learn. Garfield had a music programme but Hendrix's education was largely self-directed. He dropped out in his junior year.

The school continues to operate and lists both Hendrix and Quincy Jones as notable alumni on its official materials. It is a functional public high school in a neighbourhood that retains much of the African-American cultural character that shaped both of them — the Central District was Seattle's historically Black neighbourhood, and the music, churches, and community that sustained it formed the backdrop to their earliest musical experiences. There is no dedicated marker for either alumnus on the exterior of the building.