Cleveland Jazz Heroes
Ohio
Starting a music festival from scratch is a gargantuan undertaking. Making that festival free of charge adds an element of complexity and financial risk. Doing all this without big donors or corporate sponsorship sounds like an impossible lift. Yet that is just what Amber Rogers and Daniel Bruce did in 2023 when they bootstrapped the Hingetown Jazz Festival, an event that seems destined to become a circle-the-date event on the expanding Cleveland jazz calendar.
Rogers, an orchestral violist and consultant who in ’23 was the head of Cleveland’s American Federation of Musicians Local 4 Music Fund, had accomplished the impossible before. During the pandemic-induced shutdown of the live music scene, she initiated a series of live-streamed concerts that helped keep member musicians busy — and sane. In discussions with Bruce, a guitarist and educator and a member of the Fund’s board, an idea formed.
“We were talking about having a festival that’s super local-focused and using venues of the neighborhood,” said Bruce. “The neighborhood” was Hingetown, a quarter of Cleveland’s trendy Ohio City that’s home to a growing assortment of craft breweries, hip apartment blocks, buzzy restaurants and, crucially, the Bop Stop, a destination for touring and local jazz musicians (the JJA named its former director Gabriel Pollack a Jazz Hero in 2023).
Rogers, a tireless and effective grant writer, had received a large award. “After a while she called me,” Bruce remembered, “and was like, ‘Hey, I think I got this grant. Do you want to do this?’ and I said, ‘Sure, let’s do this.’”
Bruce had spent some years in Chicago and knew of the Chicago Jazz Festival, a four-day free event that has been a Labor Day weekend tradition since 1979. With a minuscule marketing budget and a lineup filled entirely by musicians from the northeast Ohio scene, the Hingetown fest launched in 2023 with modest expectations.
“It caught us by surprise,” said Rogers, “We expected maybe a couple hundred people throughout the day, and my guess is we probably had close to a thousand. It was insane.” The 2024 second edition of the festival, despite competing with the Cleveland International Air Show, confirmed the wisdom of the concept.
Now the Hingetown Festival aims at a permanent place on northeast Ohio’s musical calendar — and maybe as a model for other hyper-local festivals. “We’re not trying to grow it into a large thing, but it’s the kind of thing that could be duplicated around Cleveland,” Bruce said. And speaking for both our Jazz Heroes: “Wouldn’t it be great if that happened?”
—John Chacona
