- [Host] Ladies and gentlemen, The History of Jazz in Akron.

(audience clapping) ("The Intimacy of the Blues") ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) ("The Intimacy of the Blues" continues) (audience clapping) - Well, I don't know about you, but I just wanted to kind of let them keep playing.

Can we give them one more round of applause?

Fellow artists, Theron Brown and Chris Cole.

(audience clapping) Thank you, Chris.

When we talk about the most really American kind of music, we always start with jazz.

And jazz has been such an amazing influence on really the artistic and the entertainment development here in the city of Akron.

Akron's central location between New York and Chicago really helped make it into a hotbed of jazz activity.

And people from all around the world and really amazing artists from around the country and audiences came to Akron to hear our very thriving jazz scene from people like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Punchy Atkinson, Jimmy Noel, another Duke, Duke Jenkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong.

Akron was really such a hopping place for jazz.

And jazz galvanized the culture of Akron from its early onset in the 1920s to really when it's reached its apex in the 1930s through the 1960s.

The Akron jazz scene was dealt somewhat of a death blow in the '70s and the '80s when urban renewal came in and with the implementation of the Akron Innerbelt.

But what is so amazing about the Akron jazz story is that the Akron jazz scene has been resurrected by so many important artists and people here in our city, including many who are right here on our panel.

So, I'd like to begin by introducing our panel.

And again, these are four amazing individuals who have helped with the resurrection of the Akron jazz scene and to the the thriving base that it is today.

To my left, first, we have Christopher Wilkins, who is the music director and the conductor of the Akron Symphony Orchestra.

Then of course, we have Mr.

Theron Brown, assistant professor of Practice at the University of Akron and co-chair of the Jazz Department.

And also his colleague Chris Coles.

Again, assistant professor of Practice at the University of Akron and co-chair of the Jazz Department.

And we have Rose Vance-Grom, who is the research historian at the Summit County Historical Society.

We're looking forward to really going into not only the history of jazz, but seeing its development over the years.

And so, we'd like to begin with Maestro Wilkins, who is going to give us a really grand overview of jazz and its role here in Akron.

(upbeat jazz music) (audience clapping) - Thank you, Mark.

Good evening, everyone.

It's thrilling to see so many people here interested in this subject.

I'm honored to be sitting here next to and amongst the greats.

I have worked with jazz musicians my entire career, but I'm not a jazzer.

And for some reason, Masters Lieberth and Greer thought it was important to have balance on the panel and invite in a non-expert.

And that's a role I can fulfill ably.

What I can provide is a little bit of table setting by talking about what jazz is and why Akron might have been such fertile soil for the jazz scene to grow in.

Diversity is the magic sauce that has made jazz possible.

Diversity of population of cultures, of musical languages.

And it doesn't only lie at its heart, it actually is what brought jazz into being.

We think of it as the quintessential American art form because it is a cultural expression of E pluribus unum.

Out of many, one.

Jazz also has thrived not so much in the countryside like other kinds of music, folk music, that relishes the expression of an individual.

It's thrived in our urban centers, in places that foster that kind of diversity.

The crossroads of America.

Places accessible by rail and by canal.

It's commercial centers.

Akron has been all of these things.

Importantly and surely, it's a reason why for over 20 years, jazz has thrived here.

Another quality about jazz that makes it really unique amongst musical art forms, at least in the West, the creator is the performer and the performer is the creator.

In that sense, it's a uniquely autobiographical musical expression.

We can tell by listening who the performer is and maybe even where they come from.

Louis Armstrong, quintessential New Orleans musicians.

Charlie Parker made his reputation and did his great innovations in New York, but he was from Kansas City.

And he was a blues musician through and through.

These two gentlemen, Northeast Ohio.

We've talked about the difference between the gospel sound in Cleveland and the gospel sound in Akron.

Chris, you and I talked about that a little bit.

It's a real thing.

And so, it's part of the Akron story about jazz and Akron is how Akron is it.

In my world, we're playing music from all over internationally.

And so it ideally we're trying to make it sound like where it came from, but here the creators are telling their own story.

And the last thing I'd like to say in terms of establishing a framework is jazz is freedom.

It's the ability of that performer to decide what, and how, and when they wanna play.

And if jazz evolves in a certain way where performers start to feel restricted, along is gonna come somebody like Charlie Parker who busts out of it and says, "Uh-uh, I'm gonna show you a different way to do that."

When the big band era, those swing bands became so successful, bands like the Duke Ellington Band said, "But there's another way to do it."

Or the bebop age grew out of saying, "We don't believe in formulas.

We're gonna break free of that."

So, freedom is an incredibly important part of it.

And again, I would point to this community and say, "What is it about Akron that produced so many innovators in rock and roll?"

The History Center really puts a wonderful finger on the bands who grew up because they didn't wanna be cover bands.

They wanted to sound like themselves a devo.

There's was nothing like a devo, right?

But gospel music too.

Our great orchestrator for Gospel Meets Symphony, Dave Kempers, has a wonderful expression.

He says that, "Akron is to gospel music as Texas is to barbecue."

There's something here that's distinctly a free kind of expression related to place in the people who live here.

(audience clapping) ("Donna Lee") ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) ("Donna Lee" continues) (audience cheering and clapping) - You know, I think whenever we start talking about jazz in Akron, we can't go much further than Howard Street.

And when it comes to Howard Street, there's such a rich history and so many really hidden gems that many Akronist may not know about now.

So, we wanna actually invite Rose Vance-Grom.

She's gonna take us through a lot of that history of Howard Street and her presentation on Howard Street, jazz and beyond.

- Like Mark said, the history of jazz in Akron really begins on Howard Street.

This is Howard Street here.

You can see it's lively.

It's full of people.

It's was also home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, barbershops, beauty salons, record stores, cafes, clubs, grocery stores, pharmacies.

Anything you would need, you could find on Howard Street at this point.

Howard Street itself and a nearby neighborhood in between downtown and West Hill actually came to be known as Little Harlem.

Now, when you hear Howard Street today, you might not be thinking of downtown.

So, I kind of wanna orient ourselves where we're talking about.

This is a view of Downtown Akron, looking north in 1950.

You might recognize this.

This is the Huntington Building here.

It's in the corner of what's now Cascade Plaza on Main Street today.

You may have passed it on your way here now.

So, this stretch of Howard Street is what we're gonna be really focusing on.

And as you can see, it ran parallel to Main Street right through the heart of Downtown.

This map here lists just some of the businesses that were along Howard Street.

You can see we've got The Matthews Hotel, Bennie Rivers, Green Turtle, Hi-Hat Bar, Dot's Record Shop, and more.

So all of this stretch here is, this stretch here, right, right through downtown here.

This is also Howard Street in Downtown.

We're looking south now.

So, you still have that Huntington Building to sort of orient where we're looking.

So, we have Hi-Hat Bar right there on the corner.

So, it is right in the middle of downtown.

It was right next door to, it was a very popular spot for live music, dancing, drinking.

It was located right next door to Cozies Record Shop and the Green Turtle Cafe.

Bill Doggett and Tony Williams played there among many others of the ones we've already listed.

And Akron had another advantage that made it a hotspot for jazz.

We've already talked about it being a central location between bigger cities, like New York and Chicago.

So, this is a "Beacon Journal," article from 1955, talking about Count Basie playing a show in Akron.

And the club owner was fortunate to get the booking with Count Basie.

He just had a few days open after a 10-week show in New York on his way to Chicago.

And so he stopped in Akron, played a few shows, and then went on his way to Chicago to finish out his tour.

This is a later picture of Count Basie.

This is in 1964 at the Akron Armory.

But from the 1930s through the 1960s, some of the biggest names in music played in Akron at one point or another.

Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway.

Pretty much any big name in jazz you can think of probably played in Akron at one point or another.

Most of these big name musicians that traveled through would've stayed at the Mathews Hotel.

The Mathews Hotel was Akron's premier Black hotel, and it was right at the center of Howard Street.

You could rent a room for the week, play a few shows across the street or next door, get a haircut, a fresh suit, go out for a nice dinner, all within a couple blocks of your hotel.

Another popular spot was the Green Turtle Hotel & Cafe.

This shows a page from the 1956 "Green Book," which was a travel guide for Black Americans to be able to navigate safely.

And it's showing both the Green Turtle and Mathews Hotel as safe hotels for Black Americans to be able to patron.

So not only were there these big names traveling through, but there was a thriving local scene within these clubs on Howard Street.

So much so that this stretch of Howard Street we showed on that map came to be known as Rhythm Row.

And there was always something to do down Rhythm Row.

You could head over to Benny Rivers for Talent Night on Thursdays, or maybe Mambo Night on Fridays.

The Akron Night Jazz Society met on Sunday, while the Akron Jazz Club met on Mondays.

And battles of the bands and jam sessions were frequent.

The Cosmopolitan at 33 1/2 North Howard Street was described as Akron's most sophisticated hotspot when it opened in 1936.

The Cosmo, as it was often called, was managed by Booker T. Brooks, who also managed several other clubs and was responsible for booking a lot of the big name acts that came through.

He was actually one of the two gentlemen in that image with Count Basie at the Armory.

So, he was the one that brought Count Basie through at that time, at least.

He's a big name.

I need to know more about him.

He's an enigma.

The Cosmo was dubbed the Swankiest nightclub in Ohio after renovations in the 1940s that expanded its operations.

And it hosted regular bands that played weekly and also traveling groups that came through, including B.B.

King, Dinah Washington, the Pete Diggs band pictured here, as well as the Corny Rookard Band among many, many others.

Akron jazz wasn't exclusively contained to Howard Street.

It didn't just, you know, cut off there at the end of the street.

So, I wanna talk about just a few of the larger venues off of Howard Street.

We already mentioned the Akron Armory.

This was still in downtown, but it was over on High Street.

It was right next door to the courthouse.

If you know where the Oliver R. Ocasek government building is today, that is exactly where the Armory used to be.

So, this was Akron's largest venue.

It opened in 1917.

Many musicians played here over the years.

All of the ones we've already mentioned, including Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, James Brown, many more.

This was torn down just to build the Ocasek government building that sits there now.

So, it was also gone now.

The Palace Theater opened in 1926 on Main Street, where the main library currently sits.

It hosted a variety of shows.

Again, all these big names, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway.

These are actually posters from the "Beacon Journal," you know, highlighting these shows coming through, just different advertisements for it.

Duke Ellington actually went on a government sponsored tour in 1945 in an effort to sell war bonds.

And he played a four-night show here at the Palace in 1945.

And one of those shows was actually aired live on national radio at that point.

And then it was re-released in 1974 as "A Date with the Duke."

And you can actually hear that Akron show on volume six of that record.

It's really great.

Despite Duke's status as one of the biggest entertainers of his time, Duke and his orchestra stayed at the Matthews Hotel rather than any of the larger hotels in Akron, as they weren't welcome at the larger hotels.

So right down the street from where the Palace was is a memorial to Mathews Hotel, Howard Street, and all of these big names that came through.

By the 1970s and '80s, we've already mentioned urban renewal projects were well underway across the city, including the Innerbelt, Cascade Plaza, the Superblock.

All of Howard Street was completely erased.

There's nothing left at this point.

This memorial that sits here was designed by Miller Horns.

He advocated for over a decade to get this memorial actually in place here.

And we've already mentioned, as devastating as this was for Howard Street, this didn't mean the end of jazz in Akron.

It wasn't a death sentence for it.

It just didn't disappear from the city.

It just went underground.

It just maybe got a little harder to find, you know.

It was in the smaller clubs.

It was in the church basements, It was at somebody's house, you know.

The music continued.

Thanks to people, you know, like these guys here playing and recognizing this history.

Of course, we've got the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival now.

Thanks to Mr.

Theron Brown starting it.

And a lot of musicians will still tell you that Akron still has a unique sound, and that is because of this rich history.

And the UA's Jazz Studies program actually has direct links straight back to Howard Street.

The founder of the program, Roland Paolucci, grew up playing on Howard Street in the '50s and '60, and then started the UA's Jazz Studies program in the '70s after all of this was already gone 'cause the students had nowhere to play.

They were all gone.

So, the UA's Jazz Studies kinda stepped in and filled a little bit of that hole and allow musicians to keep playing, and find their sound, and explore more of that Akron sound so... (audience clapping) ("Eternal Grace") ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) ("Eternal Grace" continues) (audience clapping) - We call a masterful segue.

I wanted to start off our panel here.

What is Akron's jazz legacy and what were the major influences on it?

- I'd have to say for me it really does start with Roland Paolucci as being the link between the people that were here, yes, '50s going into the '60s, '70s.

I always heard stories from his wife that he would go down with a particular bass player.

And remember, this is a Black community, right, in Howard Street.

Roland's white.

And it would not like be cool for him to just walk into a club.

So, he made friends with the bass player.

And also he was underage too.

I think he was perusing Howard Street around like 16, 17 years old, yeah.

And a lot of times, we hear the beautiful things about Howard Street, but it was a rough area as well.

You know, it's not a place you'd actually wanna hang out late night by yourself.

Like anywhere as a kid, right, you should be accompanied.

So, he would have the bass player and he made friends with the bass player.

He would take him into the club and he'd be able to sit in and play.

And that was kind of his protection and support while going through that.

And then years to come, like Rose was saying in the '70s, he started the program at the University of Akron.

And what this did was keep those stories alive.

It allowed there to be education.

You know, it was institutionalized.

The music was being institutionalized, but it allowed access as well.

Made things more popular.

This was a shift in our whole country at that time where schools were starting to integrate our American music that represents freedom, like you said.

And what more American than jazz music?

We can shake our heads with that, you know?

Along with meeting Mr.

Paolucci, we fast forward to when I was in school in 2005 and Jack Schantz was leading the program.

Roland was so giving when it came to knowledge and really old school too.

He was one of those people that would say like, "Come over to my house and pick up some music."

And that should only take five minutes.

I'd end up being there for like two hours.

And we're sitting at the piano.

He's showing me chords, different tunes and things.

And that's a part of the tradition.

That's something that he kept from his experience that we didn't lose as you know, time is going on, even Jack was the same way, "But yeah, come to the house, come to the office."

And even now as me and Chris is continuing that legacy, we do the same thing.

I mean during the summer, Chris is always having cookouts and guess who's there?

Yes, the musicians in the community but students too.

And that fellowship is needed to keep things going.

So, I can only imagine what it was like being on Howard Street.

And honestly, I do know what it's like.

It's probably very similar to New York, how you have these strips of communities, these jazz clubs.

And yeah, you walk down the street and you see the same people in that neighborhood.

You're playing with the same people.

It's like you don't have to play for Saturday night.

You know, Smokey's going to be there on Saturday night with his pipe and he's ready to play some music.

You have anything to say on?

- This music in places like in Akron or New York, it happens very similarly.

This is like it's a community.

It's fellowship, breaking bread with one another, sharing ideas.

This music is freedom with respect to the group that you're in, whoever you're playing with.

Everybody can have their say in their piece.

This has gotta be, you know, within the confines of that thing, whatever it is, you know.

And within that, knowing that, comes a lot of freedom.

And we, you know, Howard Street was an integral part to that.

Then, you have Roland continuing that through Jack, and now we're trying to keep it going.

(upbeat jazz music) - Chris Wilkins, I know that you've also done a lot of research on Pat Pace and talk more about his influence here on the Akron jazz scene.

- Yeah, sadly, he died the year that I arrived in Akron.

I never met him.

And as a context for Pat Pace, just to go back to Roland Paolucci and what's distinctive about Akron.

In many communities, the jazz world and the classical world have nothing to do with each other and wouldn't want to.

The jazz folks, for the most part, maybe don't read music or aren't that comfortable reading music.

The classical folks can't improvise, and you wouldn't want to ask them.

You wouldn't wanna hear it if they tried.

But when you talk about Roland Paolucci, you talk about Jack Schantz, you talk about Paul Ferguson, who was a student also at the university in the same program, you're talking about people who traveled comfortably between both worlds.

Everyone I've just mentioned has performed on the stage in my tenure with the Akron Symphony.

Paul Ferguson was a member of the Akron Symphony.

They traveled comfortably between both worlds.

And I think that's something distinctive about Akron and it's one of the reasons that our fellowship is particularly strong.

That idea of, yes, jazz is communal music making, but that community in Akron is particularly wide.

Both of these distinguished gentlemen have soloed more than once with the Akron Symphony.

And when you talk about the composers who wrote works, who were jazzers, who wrote works for orchestra... It's a very short list.

Like Duke Ellington loved the idea of writing extended works for orchestras, but it was unusual and it was written about as being a unicorn.

Mary Lou Williams, somebody you both performed, Mary Lou Williams with us a couple of years ago was another one and it was a remarkable story that she would include an orchestra in her writing and take it to Carnegie Hall and all that kind of thing.

Pat Pace would be the poster child for this way of thinking, just very inclusive thinking.

He was born in 1930 in the North Hill section of Akron.

He was the son of a couple who were immigrants from Sicily.

He showed a remarkable musical gift.

He was a true prodigy.

At the age of five, he appeared on a radio show in New York.

His first instrument was accordion.

He's a good Italian boy.

But he was quickly encouraged to play piano and his career took off.

But he kept on moving in both directions in a relatively young age, he won a scholarship from Akron to attend the Julliard School in New York as a classical pianist.

And there he studied both classical and jazz.

He also studied classical composition with Vincent Persichetti, who was one of the giants of American music at the time.

So, he was studying at the highest level in classical music, but he was going to clubs.

And he was born in 1930, being in New York in the mid '50s, he heard Charlie Parker.

And he, you know, he went to all those clubs and heard the golden age of bebop as it was emerging in New York.

He came back to Akron.

He started to take an interest more and more in composition.

And there's a quotation... There's now a website called patpace.com.

And it's a wonderful website.

A gentleman called Raymond Demattia, who taught at the university, whose son is a horn player, who plays frequently with us, who was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra, has done a lot of work on Pat Pace's compositions, including engraving many of them, making, putting them in print so that we could perform them in the future.

And I think we're gonna put our minds together to perform some Pat Pace.

I like that idea too.

It's one of those iconic names that should not be lost to history.

It should be remembered this great man who contributed so much as a pianist, as a composer, and also as an educator.

He was deeply devoted to working with his students.

He was quite open about his addiction to heroin.

And it became a major part of the story and it kept on reaching the headlines of the newspapers was his addiction rather than his talent.

And there's a whole seesaw throughout his adulthood of his battles there.

And he kept on making the argument that it should be treated as a health challenge, not a crime.

And with it, he had lived in today's age, I think there would've been so much more available to him.

But one article in the "Beacon Journal," said he was the first in this area to ever receive methadone treatment.

And he said it really turned his life around.

And later in life, he started to perform again.

But he died in 2006 having really successfully revived his career And yes, a very, very important part of the history of the last century.

(upbeat jazz music) - Theron, I know that you also taught a class called Round Howard Street.

And Rose, you were also a part of a number of these, what the university called Unclasses.

- I got it started with some ideas of the things that I have found already.

And then Rose here, who was the best student, I can't say... She's laughing, but I can't say enough about her enthusiasm.

The talks that we would even have offline.

Rose is one of those people that took the class to new heights.

As you can see, this is only a bit of the information that she has.

Some of these pictures I didn't even see when we were doing the class.

So, she's continued to dig up a lot of other things.

And I mean, you're still working in this, so I'm gonna let you talk about the Unclass and what it did for you.

- Yeah, so before we actually started the Unclass, we, while I was in grad school at UA, we started working on a project called Green Book Cleveland.

And so, Green Book Cleveland is an initiative at Cleveland State University that is working to document a lot of these sites that were actually listed in those Green Book travel guides and kind of reviving what these sites were and what they mean for the history of the city.

And so in those classes, every site on in the Green Book in Akron was on Howard Street.

And so, doing that work sort of led to, well, there was multiple threads kind of leading into what became the Howard Street Unclass.

So, it's super exciting and a lot of this research you can actually see yourself.

So, these are QR codes.

Green Book Cleveland is all accessible.

A lot of these ones that I talked about, the Hi-Hat, the Cosmopolitan, Mathews Hotel, they all have postings on Green Book Cleveland.

So, you can go look at more pictures and read more info and explore around other venues that we didn't talk about 'cause we just barely scratched the surface on Howard Street and jazz in Akron here tonight.

And then, this is a link to those Stewart Studio photographs that we mentioned.

And again, if you are from Akron, even if you're not, just take a look through those photographs.

It is a seriously spectacular collection.

So, do your own research.

Check it out.

There's a lot to see.

There's a lot to learn.

Contribute 'cause they're taking, if you have memories of Howard Street, people would love to hear it and add it to the Green Book Cleveland sites and all of that.

So, it's definitely still an ongoing project.

There's lots to learn.

(upbeat jazz music) - We wanna really, you know, talk about looking ahead.

What does jazz in Akron look like over the next 10 years?

- Well, it's certainly going to evolve.

The only way it evolves is directed by the musicians and the community, like you're all a part of it.

Your actions is what makes me react.

It's the reason why I create.

The whole reason why I play is yes for myself, but also for you all to inspire you too.

So, there's a lot going on in the world as usual, but I like to directly affect my community.

And for me, that's with music.

There's gonna be other students that, you know, they come up and they write music about how they feel.

Not everything's just like happy and prances.

This is a release for a lot of folks.

So, I think we all decide that together, you know, what's the Akron sound.

Well, it's how you greet people.

Are we happy when we're out in public?

Are we being kind to the next person when we're out in public?

Or are we evil and mean?

Well, that's a different sound that's gonna happen in the city.

So it's really, I don't think it's something we can pinpoint nor do we want to pinpoint.

Just like every chance you get, just try to do better at whatever you can be.

And then, look, up blooms beautiful music.

And that's the sound if we've got a good community here, people that support.

All of you that came out here to hear about jazz history in Akron.

- [Mark Greer] There's no better way to end this evening but with again, the musical talents of Theron Brown and Chris Coles.

- All right, and this last one that we're gonna play for you all.

I think it's very fitting and let this resonate with you, where you're at, or however you want to think about it, but the song's called Peace.

It's by the great Horace Silver.

I don't think I need to say anything.

We'll just play it.

Thank you all so much again.

This is important to come out of this kind of stuff and learn, share, just to see each other so.

(audience clapping) ("Peace") ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) ("Peace" continues) Chris Coles.

I'm Theron Brown.

Thank y'all so much.

(audience clapping)