Lonnie Reid at the House of Swing: Ascension for $2

I’m a punk rocker, but I read Miles Davis’ autobiography and that guy was too.

Most people are too lazy to dig Jazz these days, and maybe it was the musicians that wanted to be heard instead of danced to that share some of the blame.

I know post-swing Jazz, but it was work. I put on a cassette of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” in my Orange Honda Prelude on the way to coaching sixth grade basketball in San Francisco for weeks. It took me at least 15 times before I understood it, but it was well worth it. It wasn’t that hard after that.

Truth be told, I prefer things that are more compositional like Mingus to some things that seem less formed, but if you put the work in it’s well worth it. Some free Jazz I still don’t get.

I paid tons of money to see good Jazz on the West Coast. I saw Wynton Marsalis explain Duke Ellington’s music and then play it with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. That music needs to be played live. They just didn’t have the technology to get it down on tape, and they were limited by the restraints of time and vinyl and even World War II rationing. Marsalis and the orchestra filled with Ellington contemporaries played a long suite called “Cops and Robbers,” I believe that I still can’t find, and it was amazing.

They brought “Harlem” to life, the city and the composition.

I saw Tony Williams play in a swanky Berkeley club, and it was just effortless the way that guy just added to the melody even though he could have been doing polyrhythms or whatever eggheads will call them in his sleep.

I saw Wynton join Coltrane legends McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones play “A Love Supreme.” That didn’t suck. It wasn’t cheap.

I used to hang out at the “House of Swing” in the afternoons about ten years ago when I first came back to Cleveland after 20 years away.

It’s almost always nearly empty and they have an unbelievable selection of vinyl. Anything they play is worth hearing. Bob Dylan would have slipped in during the middle of the night and made off with all those albums and it occurred to me that I should probably lift some, but that would be disrespectful.

I knew they had jam nights, but I figured they were ramshackle and never went. I saw a couple of blues bands there and they were decent, but not spectacular.

I started actually playing my guitars again recently and decided to weigh in. Someone told me Lonnie Reid had a jam night. I’d never heard of him, but I didn’t really know anyone from Cleveland other than the bands I saw my senior year in high school. They were mostly my guitar teacher Tony Martin’s hair metal bands, and I would have to restrain my friends assuring them that it would be worth their time once he ripped up “Kashmir” after playing Berlin and Ratt. That always happened. Tony Martin is still as good of a guitarist as I’ve ever seen.

I should have known who Lonnie Reid was. I’m almost ashamed, but I have a reasonable excuse. I left town. I saw huge names in expensive cities.

I brought my mother and my aunt to see Lonnie the first night I went. I played and did my best, but I was clearly out of my league, but the musicians were generous.

These nights start with the house band doing a set, and it was immediately clear just how good these musicians were.

Lonnie and his friends don’t just have Jazz, Gospel, and Blues down, it’s been updated with what followed.

Motown, Soul, Funk, even Hip Hop. People assume that Hip Hop artists are just guys with sampling equipment. I don’t know if that’s ever been true, but it’s definitely not anymore. I saw Mos Def sing for Chris Martin between an Aimee Mann/Beth Orton show in Los Angeles. Dude is wicked talented and belted out Bill Wither’s “Lovely Day” and Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as the Coldplay front man played acoustic guitar and just smiled with a sore throat.

I bemoaned the fact that the film star/rapper was so talented, but in truth it comes from hard work.

Lonnie plays a combination of Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” that is infused with everything including probably some Jaco Pastorius, and maybe even the Buckinghams.

They played “How High the Moon” in their own style. Anything was basically on the menu, and it was pretty much only limited to what the mood of the musicians was that night.

I keep trying to show my mother the passion I have for music. I’ve been close to tears discussing certain songs and actions by the people that I idolize.

She watches America’s Got Talent, American Idol, and The Voice. It drives me insane.

I keep telling her that she likes game shows not music. I have opinions on music, but there is no need for judges. It just stands up to time or it doesn’t.

Idol was an entertaining goof for a while, but now these shows make me irate, and they usually do the same to true artists.

I’m not saying that musicians deserve a free ride. Elvis was in every talent show he could enter. John Lennon would have auditioned for American Idol, but these shows have become scripted. They are corporate.

Every act has some sort of inspirational story as though you need a degree of difficulty to perform art. The difficulty is making good art.

I’ve seen great musicians felled by tendinitis. I’m impressed if you can still play guitar despite something that affects your nervous system, but when it comes to music I just want to hear the best.

Django Reinhart was the best with two fingers. I don’t listen to Django because he only had two fingers. I listen to him because of what he said with them. It’s a cool anecdote, but the music is just music.

Had he been a great musician with five fingers and a mediocre one with two, maybe I’d go see a show and mourn what was lost, but that’s just something to add to the story. If the music doesn’t hold up. I’m not going to listen to it more than once, and only then in a voyeuristic sort of fashion.

I don’t care if you have Tourette’s or a speech impediment as a comic. I want to hear what you have to say. If your timing isn’t the best because of it, I guess the power of your message can come through, but that is a verbal medium. Music is passion.

Too many of these shows concentrate on people’s backstories. You apparently can’t just have had a happy childhood, been passionate about music and worked hard at it.

They all play covers, because no television audience can handle originals. Club audiences can’t either, but this generation is lazy and selfish.

When the Beatles played Little Richard, they didn’t talk about the pain of their childhood’s. They glorified Little Richard for healing them.

Now they cover Beatles songs, play them the exact same way, and people act like they tore it apart when all they are doing is adjusting an amp at best and often times not even doing that. God knows if they even listen to the Beatles.

I don’t want to see a 13 year old imitate Janis Joplin. I want to see Janis Joplin on YouTube. There was still something original about Frankie Lyman and Michael Jackson when they were that age.

When John Lennon covered Arthur Alexander, he both glorified Alexander and added his own flavor to it.

Elvis is so misinterpreted. What he did was mix his universal, encyclopedic knowledge of music and make race irrelevant, but time has labeled him a thief. People who talk about Elvis are clueless.

Now it’s called crossover. It’s either called a sell out or a clever marketing device. I’m sick of hearing people talk about music. I just want to hear the music.

Actually, it was fabulous to talk music with Lonnie and his group because they knew the context of the songs they played. They knew local history I was tangentially aware of. Things that are so much more interesting than the standard chronology of the Cleveland Plain Dealer which still seems obsessed with 1975-1978 for some reason.

Lonnie’s brother Terry is a phenomenal bass player and only plays occasionally now. He works for NASA. Dude is a rocket scientist and a great musician. That takes work. That’s an inspirational story. That’s the pull yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality that Reagan talked about out of one side of his moth, while debasing the people who actually do it out the other.  

Look at the history of the Crack epidemic alongside the rise of rap after Reagan pulled music programs out of the inner city schools. Passion, talent, and honest intent cannot be stopped.

He wasn’t there to sell cola or beer. He was their to enjoy his muse.

Now all this cost $2, which is just absurd. You can make money as a musician on weekends, but this was a Thursday night.

There was plenty of free available parking. The drinks were cheap. You could bring in your own food, and a lot of times the people who actually support this music instead of just talking about it bring food and share.

Music is a Universal language that doesn’t need to be bound by race or gender. It’s the critics and commenters that limit it.

My mother was pretty easily convinced. It’s really that easy to see. It’s a lot like the clean versus dirty water scene in the movie Malcolm X.

We brought my father the next week, and we brought a plate of cookies too.

I actually invited almost everyone I knew. About 75 people, who are all too busy to actually see me in person. I offered to buy them a drink if they came.

The only one who did was my guitar teacher who is one of the most respected musicians in town who values his time. He came with absolutely no warning too, unlike everyone else I invited.

When he walked in I was so emotionally moved. I walked up and hugged him and introduced him to my mother. He had brought his ax.

I said to my mother, “He is going to just stand there humbly. Lonnie is going to walk over and say hello. He will go up on stage and kick ass, thank Lonnie gracefully and leave.”

That’s exactly what happened. I had brought my guitar, but I wasn’t going to try and play that night. Others with expensive equipment and pedigree actually got frustrated and left. I was happy to see a fantastic show.

Chicago style blues is pretty much my teacher’s main idiom and that’s what they played out of respect, but my guy could have played classical had he felt like it and Lonnie’s band would have kept up.

During their break the musicians came and talked to my parents. I’m about as Jewish as you can get and the musicians were about the same age or a bit younger than my parents.

Historically, what happened in Cleveland was that schools and communities that had been Jewish became African American. So my parents met a lot of people who also graduated from Cleveland Heights that were black. They also learned about the history of the downtown scene where Jewish clubs either featured Black entertainers who were managed by Jews or there was an intermingling.

I remember the Public Enemy Professor Griff debacle. I felt sad for Chuck D. I felt sad for the whole thing. I dug “Welcome to the Terrordome.” I probably can’t admit that in some Jewish company even if I can expound on it eloquently.

It’s a history where sometimes the management ripped off the artists either out of greed or incompetence. It has led to rifts between the two communities that I find idiotic.

I had the best childhood possible. Read all about Malcolm X and black athletes and musicians, and was raised in prosperous enough communities that I barely noticed that I grew up first in a nearly all Italian community. I knew racial history, but I just saw people as people.

In Chesterland, when someone black was in the area we almost stepped over ourselves to make them feel special. That may not have been what the parents who migrated there were doing, but somehow I was colorblind for the most part.

Actually, people thought I was eccentric and accused me of wanting to be black. Hell yeah, if I could dance like Muhammad Ali, or sing like Marvin Gaye or play like Jimi Hendrix?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY6_3Y7OOo8

It didn’t stop me from loving Elvis and Pete Townshend too. Real musicians see no race.

Dick Clark did. Pat Boone did.

In 1988, I was in a cab driven by an octogenarian African American. I heard Sam Cooke’s voice. I knew it wasn’t anything I had heard. I asked if it was the Soul Stirrers never having heard a note of their music.

The cab driver looked at me in amazement. I felt like a badass.

A few years later I took a wonderful girl to a swank resort in Sonoma, and played her the real Soul Stirrers that night. I’m not sure if that’s sacrilegious or totally Rock and Roll, but I still think it’s cool as hell.

I don’t care whether Sam Cooke is singing to God or a woman. It’s a cool vibe late in the evening.

Now they are selling these stories decades later on Netflix, and people watch and are amazed. I can’t be on those shows. I don’t have a PHD. I am not the proper ethnicity or gender. The people who are experts are younger than me. They learned it in school mostly. I sought it out. I paid for that music.

https://youtu.be/0ywZQ0Jknjw

If anyone discovers the music, the artists aren’t getting paid. They’re dead. It just perpetuates what Bill Hicks called the “Capitalist Gangbang.”

Later that night, I met an older gentleman who had actually played with John Coltrane.

We were talking about Duke Ellington, and he said, “The guy nobody knows was the key to Duke’s work was … wait let me think…”

I immediately said “Billy Strayhorn” and felt even cooler than I did in Chicago. I reads books. I read liner notes. It’s not that hard.

I met a drummer there who invited me to see him the next night. He was younger and I expected him to be playing jazz or hip hop. He was backing a white girl with an acoustic guitar singing a Ledbelly song, amusingly to me unaware that it had been popularized by Nirvana.

I feel old these days. I feel like people dislike the fact that I know stuff.

My parents were blown away and promised to rally their friends to come the next week. It didn’t happen, but they are old. It’s not really their fight.

After they left, I saw as good a Jazz show as I had ever paid big money to see. It was absurd. I could have taken video with my phone, but it was too good to not give my full attention.

I got a private show for two dollars. Yeah, I bought some guys some drinks too, but that just made me feel like a big spender and a patron of the arts.

I spent less than parking downtown would have cost me.

I swear I got a top notch personal jazz awakening devoted only to the people talented enough to hang and pretty much only me there to watch.

I don’t know how Lonnie’s brother managed to be so educated and such a good musician at the same time. Miles Davis dropped out of Julliard. Most musicians have to devote themselves 100% to their craft. It’s that competitive.

There are guys I’ve met who are amazing musicians, but they are also personal trainers or elite kickboxers. I’ve also met some who are hurting because their one skill can’t generate money, and they haven’t been able to adapt.

For every viral video showing some incredible woman getting paid in her 80’s entertaining old age homes, there are probably 200 stories of amazing musicians hustling for food without health insurance.

Sometimes, that happens because a musician didn’t face the music when it became clear that they couldn’t support themselves, but I’ve also seen people who were doing very well have a fluke event happen to them and never recover.

It happens to accountants and other occupations too, but I don’t get passion and art from accountants.

Unless there is some edict, I have no idea how the House of Swing will survive.

Playhouses and orchestras downtown are subsidized. John F. Kennedy was a supporter of the arts and felt that it was an important part of education and being well rounded.

Most downtown events though are corporate lovefests to me.

In the movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Gary Cooper plays a hack tuba player. When he is hit up for a classical music or opera donation, he tells the dude to start selling popcorn and to make some money.

Classical music is fine, but it has always seemed like dead people’s music to me. Maybe I’m ignorant, but it feels like people put on fancy clothes and go to be seen. They root for the “1812 Overture” because they like to hear cannons go off. The only things they really recognize are things that have been used in cartoons or movies.

They can’t discuss the music. I’m fine with those great musicians getting paid, but they are being subsidized by corporations who are making investments and acting like they support art. They teach high school music if they can’t cut it.

Real art happens on the street. Real art happens in clubs. It happens in bedrooms and basements. That’s the way it has been for at least the past century and maybe always.

There are beautiful views in the flats, but downtown Cleveland is a total headache to me. Parking is expensive. I can’t even figure out how to take a left turn to get to the parking and I wind up late to the shows.

The audiences seem to feel entitled.

I was at the House of Blues and there were 200 empty seats in the balcony and I sat in one. A woman haughtily came up 15 minutes later and told me I was in her seat.

I apologized and moved down two rows to better seats.

I don’t want a fancy program with ads for law firms, colas, beers, or hospitals that charge excessive fees, enslave their patients, and don’t cure anything.

Lonnie took a break for a time. I had been busy, but I stopped by recently. I said to him, “I’d rather pay your downtown prices, but I’d rather see you here.” He nodded sadly.

I said to him. “I think this is a conspiracy. That you guys just want a place to relax and play in your own solitude.” Sadly, he told me that the opposite was true.

I don’t get it. A place where I have to dress up, pay for parking, people are shallow, I’m hustled in and out by volunteers who need to get out of the house, versus a personal show that is current and vibrant and I get to meet the musicians?

I don’t get the modern world.

If you have any brains you should go to the House of Blues on a Thursday and overspend.

If you are too busy to do so then you should rethink where your charity dollars go.

I hate to call what I do charity. I support small artists. It’s not charity, it’s an absurd bargain. It’s not tax deductible. I’m not rich. I’m going to keep doing it even if I have to skip some expensive shows by national artists of renown.

When I first came back to Cleveland, I tried to write for Scene Magazine. They told me I needed some local flavor. I had none.

Now I do. They aren’t interested. They are going to write about whatever makes them money. It is usually weekend corporate warriors who have memorized five songs they play at passionless tempos. It makes me rage like a mad man.

Most nights I’d rather hear the Clash, but not like I do at certain places selling tons of burgers, fries, chicken wings, and troughs of alcohol. It makes me want to hit the woods like Alceste from the Misanthrope. Something I always threatened to do, but back in my youth it was a lark. Now it seems like the only honorable way to survive.