An unmatched Passion and Love for Akron, our Culture, and most importantly our music. When I remember my friend and colleague Wayne Beck those are the things that will always jump to the forefront.

Wayne was there at ground zero for what is loosely called the Akron Sound. The after hours parties he threw during the Bank Era were legendary, especially that last great one that got him evicted. Didn't matter to Wayne, it was a great party and there were still bands to see and music to hear.
I loved whenever he told the story about going to CBGB's in New York to see the American Debut of The Flock of Seagulls and he and his friends were let in for free because they had Akron IDs. His town was the place to be and he loved every minute of it.

His career took him to the West Coast and Los Angeles, but eventually the pull of his Town, His Akron brought him home, And more than anything he wanted to create a place to celebrated the amazing music that everyone around him was creating when he was a young man in the town he loved. He knew that time was special and didn't happen everywhere.

The first couple years he was running around town talking about an Akron Sound Museum he got a lot of polite nods and people saying that would be a nice idea but it would take a lot to make something like that a reality.

But then him and Jimi Imij set up what was suppose to be short lived exhibit down by Lock 3 in the former Summit County Historical Society location. A short lived exhibit that stayed open far longer than anyone but Wayne and Jimi thought it would.

It wasn't long after that we met. I had just published a book on Modern Akron with a chapter on our music, and Wayne pegged me as someone who could help him further his dream. His enthusiasm was contagious and I was in. We talked for an hour and half during that first phone call,

Those first couple years I spent a lot of enjoyable Saturdays at his apartment in Highland Square cataloguing all the things he had collected. He loved he had found someone who knew how to professionally set up archives, because he wanted his museum to be the best.

He always had something knew to show me. A Collection of Harmonicas from the Akron Harmonica Club dating back to the 1950s. Memorabilia from the Jazz Era on Howard Street, The painting of Devo he got Mark Mothersbaugh to sign for him. And of course anything dealing with the Akron Sound and more than anything Hammer Damage. Wayne loved to dance to Hammer Damage.
He bounded around town doing interviews, setting up Pop Up Museums at places like The Summit Art Space, EJ Thomas, and wherever they would let him set up.

Eventually some of us started to believe in his dream. Me, Jim, Jill, Dick, Gisele and so many others joined his team and pushed his dream along. But he drove the bus,

And when the time came Wayne made the decision to turn his museum into a non profit and make it our museum. He trusted us, he trusted Akron to keep it moving forward.

Now our website has over 300 photos from the Akron Sound Era, with hundreds more to come. Our Youtube channel has close to 200 videos dating back 50 years,

And of course last year we opened up at Akron's Bomb Shelter with rotating exhibit from the collection Wayne started. By them there were a lot of people involved in preserving out history and culture.

But make no mistake, if it weren't for Wayne Beck's passion and drive those first years The Akron Sound would be something the Beacon Journal ran an article about every 2 or 3 years.

This page, our website, our Youtube page, our physical space exist because my friend and colleague Wayne Beck made it happen.

Wayne passed away today, February 15th, surrounded by friends and family. He will be missed. But he left a legacy, because when people kept nodding politely at him he was hellbent to create a place to celebrate and commemorate out musical culture. Our Sound.

I can never really thank him enough for convincing me to make his dream mine as well. It has been an amazing amount of fun. In Large part because I got to work alongside a guy who was so passionate about it.

Thanks for that Wayne, and thank you for the Akron Sound Museum. It only exists because of you my friend.

I occasionally write a music piece for an English Website. Here is a recent one.

Song Of The Islands America's #1 Band Mood Indigo Duke With A Difference Slow Boat Clark Terry Stardust Serenade To A Bus Seat In Orbit In Orbit Brother Terry Color Changes Brotherhood Of Man Oscar Peterson Trio + One Step Right Up Tonight: Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer Quintet On The Trail Clark Terry And His Jolly Giants For Dancers Only Friendship Contributor: Calvin Rydbom I’ve been meaning to finish this piece for about two years, I just never really got around to it. I started it after going to see Keep On Keepin’ On released in late 2014, which was a documentary about Clark Terry, but more so about his history of mentoring young musicians. And of course he passed away in early 2015. The film itself covered his mentoring approach, starting with a 12 year old horn player named Quincy Jones and ending with a barely 20 blind piano player named Justin Kauflin, and covered a lot of years in between. Although the film did end with Terry in bed, both of his legs amputated from diabetes, coaching a horn player sitting at his bed side. The happiest sound in Jazz, that’s what they called him. He played relentlessly cascading bright, clear notes with a stunning velocity which made him Dizzy Gillespie’s favorite trumpet player. He also often picked up the rounder-toned flugelhorn making his sound even more identifiable and did a lot to popularize the instrument among serious musicians. He played with both Count Basie and Duke Ellington during the 1950s and became the first African-American musician to be hired full-time by the National Broadcasting Company when he joined the Tonight Show Band from 1962-1972. Nobody is really all that sure how many recordings he appeared on, but about 900 seems to be the best guess. His list of awards is endless. Sixteen Honorary Doctorates, French Order of Arts and Letters, Jazz Ambassador for US State Department tours in the Middle East and in Africa while performing for eight Presidents. Although my favorite is a knighthood in Germany, I didn’t even know Germany had knighthoods until I read about it. He was also known as a great duet partner, releasing countless duet albums over the years with numerous partners. Some covering decades. When Terry passed away last year Martin Chilton of The Daily Telegraph wrote “Terry was a music educator and had a deep lasting influence on the course of jazz. Terry became a mentor to a generation of jazz players, including Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis and composer-arranger Quincy Jones.” He first came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a member of Count Basie’s Orchestra, but in that large ensemble he was just another guy in the trumpet section. It was within the octet groups that Basie put together where Terry really was able to show his stuff. The Basie Octet, with a four-piece rhythm section and a four piece horn section, featured Basie, guitarist Freddie Green and the great clarinet player Buddy DeFranco as well as Terry. Song Of The Islands from 1950 is an Octet piece where the horn sections certainly steal the thunder from the rhythm section. Terry and DeFranco weaved around each other in a clear foreshadowing of Terry’s long string of duets in the future. And while saxophonist Wardell Gray doesn’t quite reach their peaks he certainly holds his own in this early recording of Terry. Sometimes when writing a Toppermost article you find yourself trying to make sure every era of a musician’s career is included, and while that doesn’t really lower the quality of the ten songs, it does change they way you put together your list. I only mentioned that as it’s really impossible to talk about Terry’s career without including at least one Basie and one Ellington cut. And I had some trouble choosing my favorite Ellington cut, which I knew was all the room I’d have as I still had the Bob Brookmeyer and Oscar Peterson partnerships to deal with later, and that wasn’t even getting into his solo work, And I knew what the last cut would be. So that brings us to 1957, by which time Terry was also often serving as an arranger for Ellington. The classic Duke With A Difference saw him acting as the arranger on six of the eight tracks with Mercer Ellington handling the other two. Mood Indigo stands out among a group of eight standouts. How did Terry, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves and Billy Strayhorn among others all show their chops but give each other such space? An amazing rendition of the Ellington classic. Off of his first solo recording comes Slow Boat. It’s somewhat unusual for a musician to have achieved their full sound by their initial solo recording as Terry does here, of course it doesn’t hurt that his band included Oscar Pettiford, Art Blakey and Horace Silver. He was also smart enough to give Pettiford and Silver time to solo, and didn’t just give the spotlight all to himself. Yet his solo on the piece is still fantastic. As I said though, it didn’t hurt of course to have a band featuring a bunch of men hitting their peak who would all eventually become household names in the jazz world. I remember being somewhat shocked when I first heard Terry’s 1957 rendition of Stardust. I was sort of mentally invested in the “happy sound” by that point, and while I shouldn’t have been, was surprised with how good he handled a melancholy ballad. His playing on this track is wonderful in a soft lush sort of way, which is utterly in contrast to a really ferocious solo by saxophonist Johnny Griffin. It worked. When I bought the album In Orbit as a cassette in around 1980 it was probably my first Terry album. I bought it not because I was all that aware of Terry, or the cassette called itself out as a great Terry album, but because the cover announced itself as Monk’s last album as a sideman. The title track, also featuring Sam Jones and Philly Joe Jones, is some of the hardest swinging work that you’ll find in Monk’s catalog. I’d say it was rivaled only by his Giants of Jazz work with Dizzy and Blakey in that sense. It really seems that Terry’s tone, which here was the kind of tone that gave him the happiest reputation, pushes Monk into the phrasing that is heard here and was a rarity for Monk. As well as a rarity for this period in jazz. My favorite album by Terry was 1960’s Color Changes. I think his round and full sound reached its full maturity on the album, and Brother Terry for me is the highpoint, mostly because he is able to fit everything that needs to be said in under four minutes. Terry had a long partnership with pianist Oscar Peterson. I remember reading somewhere, and I’m afraid I can’t give credit, that putting Terry and Peterson together with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen had to break some sort of law concerning the amount of swing allowed in a song. There are so many standout tracks on this album, but I prefer Brotherhood Of Man. This is one time where I step out on my own as a lot of Terry and Peterson’s fans prefer a few other of the album’s tracks, specifically Squeaky’s Blues. Me? I just find Brotherhood Of Man to have an explosive feel to it I can’t get over. The album was also the introduction of the Mumbles persona that became part of Terry’s repertoire. And you have to cite that as an important moment in Terry’s career. Another long time musical partner for Clark Terry was valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. Terry had sort of evolved into a bit of a modernist by the 1960s, and it was then I think he was at his best in contrast to Brookmeyer’s hard swinging style. Step Right Up from 1967’s Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer Quintet is some of the best work by either artist. They find that middle ground within their styles that made their shared catalog so good. And it’s one of the swingingest solos in Terry’s long career. That’s a bold statement I know, but I believe it. By the 1970s “The Happiest Sound in Jazz” had become the center of Terry’s sound and relationship with his listeners, almost too much the center really. In 1975 he recorded On The Trail with his Jolly Giants which could have come off as too cute but didn’t. It had the happy sound of course, how could it not with a band called the Jolly Giants. And there was that signature move from the period where he traded off between the flugelhorn and a muted trumpet. But it worked well here, really well. I’ve mentioned Terry’s talent at duets several times already. I really wanted to choose something from his late career duets with bassist Red Mitchell, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Mostly because of the 2002 album Friendship with Max Roach. You see it was Roach’s final recording and among all the jazz giants my favorite is Max. He was ill here, and didn’t play on another released track for the last five years of his life. So perhaps the cut For Dancers Only isn’t as heartwarming and beautiful as I think it is. Maybe Terry’s joyful sound doesn’t inspire Max to be the greatest musician to choose the drums as his primary instrument one last time. I just know it’s in my top ten Terry pieces because of what it is. It’s Max’s last statement. When it’s all said and done, Clark Terry deserves the title the happiest sound in jazz. And while I didn’t really get into it too deeply he was also one of the great mentors in jazz.

Several years ago I was sitting in my folks back yard with my nephew Mitchell, hmmm, critiquing my mother's cooking. She heard us, came to the window and said something about her cooking not being that bad and right then her smoke detector went off. Mitchell and I looked at each other and couldn't stop laughing for what seemed like forever. So many memories like that have come flooding back since I got the call Thursday night he was gone.

Such a great kid, who was becoming such a great guy. Last year we were shooting the breeze about something and it hit me we were two adults having a conversation and not me talking to a kid. Or no longer two kids talking to each other as I haven't really come to grips I'm not 20 anymore.

I can't quite fathom he's gone. That there will be no more times someone says something ludicrous and we lock eyes and know we both get the joke. His sister Brittany and I do that sometimes as well.
I wish I could do something about the pain in my mom and sister's voice. But I can barely deal with mine. Even now, when everything hurts, I dont envy those who aren't close to their family. Family is everything, I love mine even when they drive me crazy, Mitchell will always be part of mine.

And I have some good memories to hold on to. And I will.

St. Stanislaus and the Polish Festival

Even been to St, Stanislaus? Beautiful Church on the east side over in Slavic Village. Its dates from the late 1800s, although its been remodeled a few times.  Once in 19089after a tornado took down its then 217ft spiers. Which the city of Cleveland refused to let them rebuild, but they are still impressive.

It was also renovated in the 2005, with the goal of looking more like the original church. Buts its pretty impressive as Churches go.

Yet Another International Day

This one was at the Cleveland Museum of Art and was called Cleveland International Community Day. It wasnt bad really. The had two stages set up in the atrium, and that place is always nice. And some of the acts werent bad. But for the most part it smacked of a little bit of amateur hour thrown together.

The Hingtown Hoedown

OK, right off the bat I think the whole Hingetown is silly. You cant create a a Hip Neighborhood out of thin air just because you want another hip neighborhood.

But the idea of a bluegrass festival is good, very good.  And I have to credit the guys from Honeybucket for making it happen,  The music was pretty good, there were some very traditional bands and some some of new era bluegrass bands like Honeybucket.

The funny thing was the guys from Cleveland wearing overalls and dancing like the guys they saw in O' Brother Where Are Thou. Stop that right now, you look stupid.

And you do realize those ridiculous beards that our the fad now are going to in 15 years or so be viewed the way we view Mullets and Rattails now down you.

Still, good music.

The Ohio City Festival

Just for the Record, Ohio City might be my favorite neighborhood in Cleveland. Once a very long time ago, as in before anyone alive was born, say from 1836-1854 Ohio City was actually it's own city.

Now it's just one of the cooler neighborhoods in our region. And a few weeks back they had a street festival.  Now that main drag, West 25th, was littered with stores and restaurants that had set up little stands on the street to serve their best foods and wares.

 

One of the cool hidden business' in the are is the glass blowing works facing the West Side Market Parking Lot, and they give classes in case you want to learn the craft.

Lots of Live Music as well, a favorite of mine, Brent Kirby, opened the day.