Seattle music festival Bumbershoot postponed for another year

Fans of the Labor Day weekend arts and music festival Bumbershoot will have to wait yet another year, Seattle city officials said in a news release Friday.

Canceled in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19 restrictions, Bumbershoot will look different when it returns in 2022, the release said. The Seattle Center and nonprofit One Reel, which have grown the festival from its humble city-led beginnings in the early 1970s, said they'd be forming an exploratory committee to figure out the best way to bring the festival back.

The committee will look at the festival's history as a blueprint to reimagine it, which could mean getting back to its roots as an art and cultural festival -- in 1971 it started as the Mayor’s Arts Awards/Festival, a city-subsidized event and completely free to the public. In the past few decades, it's ballooned to a music festival with major acts performing in the Seattle Center and the former Key Arena. 

It used to resemble Northwest Folklife Festival more than the Capitol Hill Block Party.

In the last five years of its running, Bumbershoot was in a partnership with promoter AEG Presents. That ended in 2019, when one of the slated headliners, Lizzo, canceled and a steel barricade fell on attendants. When AEG declined to renew the partnership, it put the festival's future in peril financially.

"I have cherished Bumbershoot as our festival, and I look forward to working with One Reel to create a new version of it that will respect the success of the past and chart a new path for the next 40+ years," Seattle Center director Robert Nellams said in the release.

In the mid-1990s, Bumbershoot transitioned from a city-managed to nonprofit-managed event, by bringing in One Reel. Seattle City Council approved the terms and the nonprofit then presented the Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival at Seattle Center.

Over the years, hundreds of artists, musical groups and comedians have performed at Bumbershoot including SZA, Death Cab for Cutie, James Brown, Jerry Seinfeld, Lorde, Soundgarden, Tina Turner and more.