Who is Northeast Ohio?

The question of which artists “belong” to Northeast Ohio is not as simple as it sounds.  Depending on the yardstick we use, we can extend the possible number to extremes or narrow it to the point of triviality.  At one end of the spectrum, for example, place-based musical organizations are prime targets:  The Cleveland Orchestra, the Akron Symphony, and the Ohio Light Opera should be unquestionably included.  At the other end, many artists come to the region to record for Telarc, Azica, or some other record label who have no other connection to the region.  It seems appropriate to exclude them entirely.  Others fall in between, and reasonable people can disagree about where to draw these lines.  For example, is it appropriate to include an artist such as Marilyn Manson, who left the area after tenth grade (although members of his family still live in the region)?  We needed a classification scheme to guide us. Forgive me, I am a librarian, and I love to classify.

1. Place-based entities:  Those that by definition are associated with the region.  Examples include the above-mentioned organizations as well as the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, the Mahoning Valley Button Box Club, and Burning River Brass.

2.  Artists associated with Hiram College or the village of Hiram and nearby vicinity.  These include faculty members who record (Randall Fusco, piano), as well as alumni such as Michael Stanley, and very local artists such as Crypts of Paris (rock) and Foster Brown (folk/children’s music).

3.  Artists who were born in the region, attained regional popularity, and have stayed largely within the region (except to tour).  Examples include Ernie Krivda (jazz), Alex Bevan (folk), and many bands such as Hillbilly Idol (rock), Yiddische Cup (klezmer), Brigid’s Cross (Irish), and the Hank Haller Ensemble (polka).

4.  Artists who were born in the region and attained fame elsewhere, but live locally, maintain roots in the region or who regularly return to play locally.  Examples include Joe Lovano (jazz), Sean Jones (jazz), and Chrissie Hynde (the Pretenders).  These are included in the collection, and are likely to be reviewed.

5.  Artists who were born or achieved some fame in the region, but left for greener pastures.  Their continued connection to the region is unknown.  Examples include Anne E. DeChant (left for Nashville), and Mystery of Two (left for Brooklyn).  These have been included in the collection, but future releases may not be included, depending upon circumstances.

6.  Artists who were born in the region, left before they achieved fame, but whose continued connection to the region is tenuous or unknown.  These are often artists who are touted as “from Cleveland” or “from Canton,” but who seldom perform in the area.  This category includes a wide variety of artists, including Nine Inch Nails, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and Tracy Chapman.  These are included on a case-by-case basis.  In the words of one student, “If you leave out all the famous musicians, all you have left are the ones nobody cares about.”  While we disagree with the facts, we also sympathize with the “favorite son/favorite daughter” thinking implied in the statement.  

7.  Artists who were born elsewhere, but who live and are employed in the region.  These include members of area orchestras, faculty members of universities and colleges in the region, and occasional other individuals.  Examples include Richard King, Principal Horn for the Cleveland Orchestra (born in New York), and Robert Lockwood, Jr. blues artist (born in Arkansas).  

8. Deceased artists who people may no longer associate with the region, such as Henry Mancini or Vaughan Monroe.
Some other artists are simply difficult to categorize.  Joe Walsh is a excellent example.  Born in Wichita, Kansas, he began playing in bands while attending Kent State University.  His initial fame came with the James Gang, then Barnstorm, both Northeast Ohio bands.  He joined the Eagles in 1975 to considerable success.  Both Kansas and Ohio could claim him, as well as California to some extent.  We include his James Gang and Barnstorm output, as well as solo albums, but would not include his Eagles-related material as germane.

We'll keep working on it.

Jeff Wanser

A Great One from Last Year

Rainy Day Saints.  All These Strange Ghosts.
Get Hip Records, 2011.   Rainy Day Saints:  http://www.facebook.com/rainy.d.saints

This came out back in October, but we’re playing catch-up with the new blog.  Besides, we want everybody to know about the good stuff.  I could call this band a lot of different things including garage rock, psychedelic rock, and indie rock, and all these designations would be right.  But what they really are is a damned fine Cleveland band that put out a truly fine, tight, listenable, grooving album.  I don’t say such things lightly.  I’m of boomer age, I’ve listened to rock music for 50 years, and it takes a lot for me to be impressed by a contemporary band.  I’m impressed.

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They take a bit of a kitchen sink approach to rock.  They borrow (or steal, as Dylan would say) ideas from other bands, but what they do with their influences doesn’t sound the least bit derivative.  Sure, I hear the Who, Cheap Trick, a bit of Sweet, (maybe even the Seeds) and lots of other sources, but that hardly matters.  Somebody else will hear other bands, real or not, but what really matters is what they did with all of this sound they produce.  And what they did was marvelous.

Dave Swanson seems to be the busiest of the group, having written the songs and played a whole batch of instruments, but it’s clear that everyone is upfront and contributing at some point or other.  Keith Pickering provides some great lead guitar on a few tracks, and Marianne Friend gives us some sweet saxophone interludes at just the right time.  Vocals are appropriately rough, but filled with harmonies that work just right for the gritty but psychedelic sound they’re going for.  Bombastic keyboards take us into a congealed garage/art rock place that the Brits sometimes try to pull off, but don’t.  There isn’t anything I would call a ballad until the last track.

Most songs are mid-to-uptempo and strong in melody and lyrics, with a good deal of musical complexity, mostly in the form of layering of studio tracks to produce a thicker sound.
The title track takes a basic Bo Diddley beat and ads surf/psychedelic swirls and a great guitar solo, all while sounding like music from the old Munsters TV show.  “This is Not the Way Back Home” is a strong rocker with lots of forward motion and drive.  My favorite track is “All Gone Wrong,” a garage rock styling that suggests a lost song by the Seeds. I could go on, because there are no clinkers here.  My one complaint is the lack of a lyric sheet, since the singing is not always crystal clear. Good variety, excellent musicianship, and a fine feel for what’s important in rock make this one my vote for best Northeast Ohio rock album of the past couple of years.

Personnel:  Dave Swanson (guitars, drums, vocals, keyboards, bass, percussion), Brian P. McCafferty (bass, mandolin, harmonies, accommodations), Marianne Friend (saxophones, harmonies, glamor, medicine), Keith Pickering (guitar), with assisting musicians.
Tracks:  Where Are You?, Underneath the Dreamer’s Moon, She’s Long Gone, Memories, Lose My Mind, All Gone Wrong, All these Strange Ghosts, Sylvester Greene, Reward, This is Not the Way Back Home, Gone, Everybody Shows the Way, Where I Stand.

The Grand Wazoo

Macy Gray's Latest

Macy Gray.  Covered.
429 Records, 2012.   Macy Gray:  http://www.macygray.com/

I find Macy Gray fascinating.  She is quirky, eclectic in taste and genre, ranging from R&B to rock, and one never knows which way she’s going to move next.  I have heard her compared to Billie Holiday in vocal style, and it’s easy to hear that in both timbre and delivery.  Growing up in Canton as Natalie McIntyre and attending Western Reserve Academy (and later the University of Southern California), she had a family before having a music career, and her maturity and sophistication are on display in full force with her sixth studio album.

Covered is mostly, well, covers.  She pulls songs from the Eurythmics, My Chemical Romance, Arcade Fire, Kanye West, and other artists, mixing styles with abandon, and changing the originals to suit herself.  She largely succeeds in this project, and brings some remarkably strong vocals on “Sail,” “Here Comes the Rain Again,” and “Wake Up.”  My favorites may not be someone else’s, and I prefer the rock to the rap, but there’s plenty to choose from.  She even gets her kids involved on a couple of tracks, with her son, Mel Hinds, taking the lead vocals on “Mel Rap.”  In fact, she gets all kinds of help, not only from her regular band, the Sex Fiends, but from a whole batch of background vocalists and percussionists.  They lend power and breadth to the tracks, but never get in the way.
For me, the least successful parts of the album are the short comedy bits, interspersed among the songs, which may please some people and annoy others to no end.  The first time through, they are pretty funny, with people giving her advice about her performance or introducing her, but after that, they just get in the way of the music.  Fortunately, one can skip them or program them out.  The songs are the strength here, and Gray’s voice is the key.

Personnel:  Macy Gray (vocals); the Sex Fiends: Martin Estrada (guitars); Ronald “RJ” Kelly (drums); Mike Torres (bass); Zoux (keys and synths, organ, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, programming); and lots of assisting musicians and background vocalists.
Tracks:  Here Comes the Rain Again, Creep, You Want Them Nervous, Smoke Two Joints, La La La (Teaching the Kids), Teenagers, The Power of Love, Nothing Else Matters, Sail, I Try is Cool and All, but..., Maps, Lovelockdown/Buck, Mel Rapp, Bubbly, Wake Up, Really?

Wansdog

So, What Are We Doing Here?

I've been at Hiram College for a lot of years, and I've always been fascinated by the complaints students have that we are in the middle of nowhere.  Come on, folks, we're in the middle of everywhere!  You can be in Cleveland, Akron, or Youngstown in less than an hour.  Kent is less than a half hour.  There's stuff going on all around us (and stuff on campus too).  What we need to do is change our perceptions of what constitutes nowhere.  That's what this blog is partly about, to expose the musical network of Northeast Ohio all around us, and be a part of that larger conversation.
Since 2006, the Hiram College Library has been developing a collection of Northeast Ohio music.  We're closing in on 600 CDs (still a drop in the bucket) in all genres:  rock, pop, rap, metal, jazz, classical, folk, country, polka, gospel, world, and who knows what else.  We're looking for new music to review, while building our back collection.  It's all about making connections with the surrounding landscape, and making our campus community a part of it.  More on this later.  In the meantime, take a look at what we've got at
http://hiraml.hiram.edu/search~S2/X?northeast+ohio&searchscope=2&SORT=DXZ
Jeff Wanser

Miss Springtime, by Emmerich Kálmán. Ohio Light Opera, Wooster, Ohio
Opening Performance, Wednesday, July 25, 2012    OLO:  http://www.ohiolightopera.org/ 

The Ohio Light Opera, housed at the Freedlander Theatre on the campus of the College of Wooster, has been performing operettas and musicals for nearly three decades, specializing in the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, but branching out to many other composers over the years. They have had their successes and tragedies, but nearly always put on good shows for their loyal audiences. The opening performance of Miss Springtime, (Die Faschingsfee, or The Carnival Fairy,if you prefer the German title), Kálmán’s 1917 operetta of Carnival season intrigue in Munich was by my standards a rousing success. Everything about the work was done right. The singers were strong, the costuming and staging were excellent and creative, and the acting of the leading characters was appropriately dramatic or amusing, as it’s supposed to be.

I have had my doubts for the last few years about performances at the OLO. The performances were good, but not great. They often lacked a certain spark, and sometimes the lead singers were sometimes a bit weak (except for the perennial Ted Christopher). However, the leads have become stronger with experience and that experience is now paying off excellent dividends.

The plot is, as with most operettas, a series of mistaken identities, mishaps, and misunderstandings strung together into a loose sequence that can sometimes get one quite lost. Miss Springtime holds it together better than most. A Hungarian Princess (played by Tara Sperry) sneaks away to Carnival and falls in love with a painter (played by Grant Knox), despite the fact that she is betrothed to a German Duke in a marriage of diplomacy. The painter has been awarded a monetary prize by another Duke (played by Stephen Faulk), who shows up and lusts after the Princess. The painter loses his award, gets it back secretly by way of the Princess who cannot marry him, and... well it goes on from there with subplots involving other characters, and the eventual happy ending, with the Duke deciding that he can manage without dealing with a much younger wife who is in love with someone else.

Three components hold this together as a splendid performance: the lead singers, the staging, and the music. Steven Byess conducts the OLO Orchestra in Kálmán’s delightful score, with English translation by Steven Daigle, the Director. Even in the years when I thought the singers were less than stellar, I have always enjoyed the orchestra, and this performance was as good as ever. Byess gets lots of applause from the regulars whenever his head pops up from the orchestra pit. The staging has also always been a key creative feature to OLO performances, and their use of simple but colorful sets, with the fascinating double duty of props from one act to the next is always a pleasure to see. I believe I heard an audible gasp from the audience when Act 2 began and the curtain went up. The stage and prop folks are exceedingly clever.

But the singing is the centerpiece of every operetta, and this time out, the lead singers were a wonder to hear. Grant Knox is one of those singers who has been with the OLO for quite a few years, and his casting as Viktor Ronai, the painter, was an excellent choice. His voice is stronger than ever, piercing the theatre right to the back row, a clear, emotive tenor that commanded attention. Tara Sperry, the Princess, was also very fine, and her precise enunciation was a relief from previous soprano leads who tended to swallow their words. The “character” actors were also gems. Jacob Allen, as the hapless babysitter to the Princess, was in fine form as both singer and comedy actor. The real scene stealer was Stephen Faulk, as Count Mereditt, who needed to maintain a balance of lecherousness and humor, and did so with great skill. The rest of the cast also did a fine job, with excellent choral work and some good dancing (always necessary in operetta). The finale was a choral spectacular with the entire cast, and the audience was more than satisfied.

If you haven’t been to the Ohio Light Opera, you really should go. There are still performances through August 11th, but hurry. The house was full for our matinee, and there may not be many tickets left. Try their other shows as well. I also saw Blossom Time, by Sigmund Romberg, and was just as impressed. But that’s another review.

Jeff Wanser

The O’Jays.  We’ll Never Forget You: The Imperial Years, 1963-1966.  
Shout! Records, 2012  The O’Jays:  http://theojayshomepage.com/

Anyone who listened to the radio in the 1970s or 1980s knows the O’Jays.  They were a prime exponent of the Philadelphia Sound, and one of the biggest R&B acts of the time.  But before their first big hit, “Back Stabbers” (1972) and the later “Love Train,” they kicked around for more than a decade, honing their skills, going through name changes, personnel changes, and putting out records that occasionally cracked the Billboard Hot 100.  And they weren’t from Philadelphia.  It started instead in Canton, Ohio.

There were lots of teenage vocal groups back in the mid-1950s in Northeast Ohio, and every big high school had several, including McKinley High in Canton.  Most of them faded, but a group called the Triumphs came together there and didn’t disappear.  The original members were Eddie Levert, Bobby Massey, Walter Williams, Bill Isles, and William Powell.  Influenced by Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers, they began their career in the doo-wop style popular at the time.  As musical tastes changed, they switched to a more soul/pop sound that occasionally reflected other groups such as the Drifters and the Temptations.  They played local clubs, and eventually saw a lot of the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” the network of African American nightclubs where R&B acts of the era spent a lot of their time.  After changing their name to the Mascots, then to the O’Jays (after Cleveland radio DJ Eddie O’Jay) they bounced between a couple of record labels before landing at Imperial Records.  There they began churning out singles in earnest, some placing well on the Billboard R&B charts.  After 1966, they moved again, eventually ending up working with the team of Gamble and Huff, the masterminds behind the sound of Philly Soul.

This CD presents nearly all their output for Imperial Records, A and B sides, and it shows an O’Jays that most people haven’t heard.  Their sound, beginning with a re-release of their early doo-wop song, “Crack Up Laughing,”  is like nothing they did in the 1970s, but has a sound that is solidly 60s, R&B heading for soul, with major elements of pop music thrown in.  They sound great to these ears, but then I was a kid in that decade, glued to the radio and crazy about the music I heard.  While I never heard one of these 28 tracks, they sound oddly familiar, fitting right in with the spirit of the times and feel like long lost friends I vaguely remember.  It’s easy to hear the Temptations in their first charting single, “Lonely Drifter,” and later releases, such as “I’ll Never Forget You.”  The Drifters are hanging in the air, ghostlike, in half the songs here.  Other influences are less obvious, but they tried their hand at dance/pop music, New Orleans R&B, more bluesy material, and songs that make me think of the British Invasion years.  While a lot of what they did was derivative, the music was done at a high level of professionalism, and they didn’t just imitate.  One can hear something else developing over time, an identity forming.  

Production values on the remastered recordings are excellent.  John Reed’s fine liner notes present the details of a group struggling to find itself and sometimes succeeding.  Anyone who enjoys 60s soul and R&B is likely to find a great deal of interest.  It’s all here, and it all sounds like summer, from 1963 to 1966.


Personnel:  Eddie Levert, Bobby Massey, Walter Williams, Bill Isles, William Powell
Tracks:  Crack Up Laughing; How Does It Feel; Lonely Drifter; That’s Enough; Stand Tall; The Storm is Over; I’ll Never Stop Loving You; My Dearest Beloved; You’re on Top; Lovely Dee; Girl Machine; Oh, How You Hurt Me; Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette); Think It Over, Baby; Whip It on Me Baby; I’ve Cried My Last Tear; You’re the One; Let It All Out; I’ll Never Let You Go; It Won’t Hurt; I’ll Never Forget You; Pretty Words; No Time for You; A Blowing Wind; Stand in for Love; Friday Night; I’m Gonna Make It; Time is on My Side.

The Grand Wazoo

“Truckin’, like the Doo-Dah Man,
Once told me, “You got to play your hand.
Sometimes, the cards ain’t worth a dime
If you don’t lay ‘em down.”
--  “Truckin’,”  The Grateful Dead

Welcome to Buzzard Tracks, a blog created by folks connected to Hiram College, and devoted to reviews of Northeast Ohio music, both recordings and concerts.  At the moment, things are quiet here with summer upon us, but that is likely to change in a few weeks.  I will be recruiting reviewers and writers, soliciting music, begging for money, and doing all the things one must do to get this project moving.  The first review should show up by August.  After that, who can say? Stay tuned, and we hope to surprise, enlighten, and stun you into submission.

The Grand Wazoo