Skip to content

Tag: Sammy DeLeon

Bounceback: Akron’s Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival Is Back In A Big Way

It could just be a case of wishful thinking, but the terrific things I’m hearing about this past weekend’s inaugural Hingetown Jazz Festival show what can happen when top-flight musicians, welcoming venues and tireless, community-minded organizers come together to meet audiences where they are. Who wouldn’t be stoked for the future?

And you won’t have to wait to get a glimpse of what that future might look like, because this weekend brings Akron’s annual Rubber City Jazz and Blues Festival Sept. 7-9.

Comments closed

A Free Outdoor Jazz Festival Swings The Doors Open In Hingetown

With its high blue skies, comfortable temperatures, clambakes and promises of a Super Bowl season for the Browns, it’s hard to imagine how September in Northeast Ohio could possibly be better—though a free outdoor jazz festival might be a nice start.

Wish granted. Make way for the inaugural Hingetown Jazz Festival Saturday, Sept. 2.

Comments closed

At Severance, Julian Davis Reid Examines Both Sides of The American Dream

Julian Davis Reid

Like many Black musicians, pianist, bandleader and theologian Julian Davis Reid paid close attention to poet and essayist Amiri Baraka’s 1963 book “Blues People: Negro Music in White America.” Reid was particularly taken with, as he told me, “this idea that Black music is a place where people in this country, Black and otherwise, rest. But at the same time, the music emerges from our sense of homelessness, of not feeling welcomed.”

Baraka was a man of action as well as of ideas, and Reid, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, took his words as a call that Reid answered in words and music with “The American Dream, the American Nightmare, and Black American Music,” which he will present Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center. as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s weeklong Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream.

Leave a Comment