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Tylar Sutton
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Tylar Sutton
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Tylar Sutton
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Tylar Sutton
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Tylar Sutton
The audience sways their heads to the music. They keep the beat with taps of their feet. They sing along to the songs and mm-hmm to the stories in between.
It’s a nod to a great and a celebration of enduring classics.
Over 125 people gathered at Faith Fellowship Church on a December evening to hear Reggie Scott and Co. perform selections from Nat King Cole’s repertoire.
The diverse audience spanned generations and skin colors. And yet. Over the course of a couple hours, everyone could connect to Cole’s music while relating to similar shared experiences.
“Everyone found their place and perspective to relate to Nat King Cole and his music,” says Sheryse Henderson, lead pastor of Faith Fellowship Church. “My kids knew some of the songs like ‘L-O-V-E,’ ‘Unforgettable’ and ‘The Christmas Song’ from current commercials, so they were singing along. My mom remembers those songs being played when she was growing up.”
Henderson says the classic tunes hold up because everyone was able to identify with them in their own way. “It was a tool to bring the generations together.”
Today, jazz is alive and well in Akron. Thanks to talented musicians, nonprofits and commercial developers, jazz is finding a new sound and a fresh audience in this modern age.
Image provided by Summit Memory Project
In the midcentury, jazz pulsed through Howard Street. It was the city’s first main business thoroughfare.
Akron was home to African-Americans migrating north to look for work in the growing rubber industry. In a segregated Akron, Howard Street especially was a place where black-owned businesses — barbers, doctors, grocers — could prosper. It was also a destination for jazz.
From the 1930s through the ‘50s, there was the Silver Leaf, Rhythm Bar and Green Turtle Hotel and Cafe, among others. Akron saxophonist Jim Noel, 91, spent his 20s at jazz clubs along Howard Street, playing Thursdays through Saturdays with his band the Four Deuces, often until 2 a.m.
“It was quite a time,” Noel says. “We’d take a break and go up to another club to hear other musicians playing. Then we’d come back and play at our club. The next intermission, we’d go someplace else. It was just that way all weekend.”
Amid segregation, Howard Street was lined with white- and black-managed jazz clubs that drew crowds of all races. The music was so hot that people left their differences at the door. In an Akron Beacon Journal article, Duke Ellington Orchestra singer and Akron transplant Dolores Parker Morgan said that Akron was more accepting of blacks and whites mixing in clubs than anywhere else in the country.
“White musicians would come down and sit in with one another,” Noel recalls. “Everybody got along. Probably the music did it.”
Akron became a stop on the touring circuit for some of the nation’s leading stars, such as Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. Local acts such as Joe Bradley and Waymon “Punchy” Atkinson also made their way onstage.
“It was a good place to come because there was always somebody here from out of town,” Noel recalls. “It was a fun time.”
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Image provided by Summit Memory Project
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Image provided by Summit Memory Project
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Image provided by Summit Memory Project
There was a lot of jazz and even more talent. But like the improvisational music genre, Akron’s tune changed over time.
The Howard Street population slowly dispersed to other neighborhoods as the flagging rubber industry dwindled. It left empty storefronts and eventual urban decay and blight.
In the 1970s, a portion of Howard Street was demolished near downtown to make way for the Innerbelt highway and a modern superblock. The freeway bulldozed the city’s rich jazz history and furthered racial divides, separating black and white neighborhoods.
Losing Howard Street’s jazz clubs also meant talented musicians no longer had a place to play. The touring circuit shifted to Cleveland.
“The jazz scene in Akron was dry for a long time,” says Barberton trumpeter Jack Schantz. “There were no places to play, no good-paying gigs.”
After graduating from The University of Akron in 1979, he packed his bags and toured for the next decade. Leaving was the path many local jazz players took.
“The general scheme of things was you would get your education, get your jobs together and then leave,” Schantz says. “You’d go to New York, Chicago or Las Vegas, and try to make it there.”
He grew tired of being on the road and returned to Akron to play private events, teach at area universities and join the Cleveland Pops and Cleveland Jazz orchestras. He went back to school to get his master’s degree and eventually landed a gig as the coordinator of the Jazz Studies program at his alma mater in the late ‘90s, after his mentor, Roland Paolucci, retired.
In that role ever since, Schantz makes sure to teach students where jazz came from.
“Part of their education is to go back as far as possible, all the way back to Louis Armstrong, and build from there,” Schantz says. “We’re all coming out of the same tradition.”
Schantz has taken that advice lto heart, learning from some of the brightest stars of Akron’s past. He took in as much as he could from playing with the likes of Paolucci and Bob Fraser either onstage or in jam sessions.
He performed on a bill alongside Noel, Atkinson and others in Cascade Locks Park Association fundraisers called Hot Jazz on Howard Street in the 2000s aimed at preserving and creating awareness of Akron’s rich jazz history. While many efforts to record stories of players from Howard Street’s prime fell flat, a “Hot Jazz: The Legend of Howard Street” record with songs and interviews from vets including Noel was released in 2005. Other stories may be lost, but the spirit of those musicians lives on in the next generation.
“Without that foundation of older guys in Akron, I wouldn’t have come along,” Schantz says.
photo by Tylar Sutton
The rhythm that faded out for so long has turned into a crescendo over the past five years.
Schantz started seeing the path of local jazz musicians shift in October 2014, when developer Tony Troppe opened Blu Jazz, giving regional and national musicians a place to play. In its first year of operation, Blu Jazz earned a spot in DownBeat magazine’s annual list of top jazz clubs in the world.
“Blu is the center of gravity,” Schantz says. “A whole generation of guys left, but they came back a lot quicker. And some guys didn’t leave — they stayed in the area and tried to make a living here. The existence of Blu has been huge.”
His former student, pianist Theron Brown, has been instrumental in bolstering the scene since he moved to Akron in 2005. Over the years, he has seen a new crop of rising artists who are taking more responsibility for their music.
“We’re carrying it on, but it is different. We’re changing that culture, and we’re in the thick of it right now,” Brown says. “I don’t think any of us can do it without each other.”
Jam sessions at Blu Jazz let artists build these relationships and foster fresh talent.
“It has helped me learn that we have a lot of leaders here like Tommy Lehman. He plays all over Akron and has a couple of bands. You can expect the room to be full if he’s playing,” Brown says. “Blu has actually got me closer to people like him. That’s what I think community is. Through our music, we’re able to develop even more.”
Akronites are trying to define the future of the jazz scene. The nonprofit ArtsNow has invited jazz musicians to the table to discuss what they need to develop here. Brown and his friend and former roommate, Dan Wilson, have created one way to highlight local artists and feature national artists, by founding the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival in 2016, thanks in part, to a Knight Arts Challenge grant. It’s been a platform to develop a dedicated local audience for jazz.
“I feel like Akron is a pretty intellectual, eclectic place, and there are active listeners,” Brown says.
The institutional support has been huge in elevating and furthering the Akron jazz scene.
“We can retain more musicians, get more clubs, let more people know there is a scene here to invest in and be a part of,” Brown says. “That gives the artists a chance to get their work seen or heard.”
Music is generating further community and private interest in the city of Akron. This summer, Troppe is opening a new 72-room Blu-tique hotel inside the United Building across from his club and Blu Plate restaurant. Blu Jazz already draws audiences from as far as Washington, D.C., and New York City. Troppe says the hotel will create an eat, listen and stay model for development around jazz clubs that could be successful throughout the country.
“We are attracting a regional and national audience and completing a hospitality circle,” Troppe says. “We feel that Blu Jazz is going to be a flagship leader that is replicable in Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, Charlotte.”
The resurgent jazz scene has turned into a groundswell of opportunity for this next generation of players.
photo by Tylar Sutton
There’s a single green door and a barbershop light in a space near the original Howard Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in downtown Akron. The red brick Hotel Matthews monument is the sole reminder of the heyday of jazz on Howard Street. An inscribed brick reads, “A monument to a time & a place.”
In many ways, the electricity of jazz in Akron is just a distant memory of a time gone by.
“People were hungry for good music, good jazz music,” Noel recalls.
Noel is one of the only musicians left from those days.
All of Noel’s musician buddies from Howard are gone. Just in November saxophonist Danny Mazzocco died. In December, Parker Morgan died. As each great passes, memories of Howard Street’s prime go with them. Nearly 70 years later, Noel still plays his sax and hasn’t forgotten that feeling jazz gives him.
“It’s something that’s born into you. If you really sit and listen, you can feel it,” Noel says. “It’s something that you make within your soul.”
Akron is no longer built around jazz, but the players continue to carry that hunger, and that might change the city.
Workers have started tearing out the Innerbelt, figuratively and literally changing Akron’s path again, removing divides and making way for growth. It’s unclear how much jazz will play a part. But with the Blu-tique on the way, Akron may be poised to be a destination for jazz once again.
Despite all the low and high notes, jazz is still what it was in Noel’s day: music that dissolves barriers. Each player — the guitarist, pianist, saxophonist, trumpeter, drummer — gets space in the song to shine. Yet they need to work together to make a beautiful sound. In these divided times, maybe a little harmony is what we’re craving.
“Our younger people are curious about the slow sounds of the upright bass and the piano,” says Lead Pastor Sheryse Henderson. “Jazz is a better way to understand the beauty of instruments and voices. Younger people are trying to find a way to unite and bond. Millennials and Generation Zers are looking for something more, and I think jazz might be the answer.”
