Hingetown Jazz Festival 2025

Hingetown Jazz Festival
Various venues
Cleveland, OH
August 30, 2025

It would surprise no one if this review of the third Hingetown Jazz Festival in Cleveland began, as such pieces often do, by noting how the festival has grown. But that would not exactly be accurate.

By the most common measure of such things, the size of the audience, this year's audience looked a lot like 2024's (this writer was not at the inaugural edition). Yet bigger doesn't always mean better, and like a bordelaise sauce patiently reduced until its flavors are vividly concentrated, Hingetown 2025 made an impressive statement.

Amber Rogers, an orchestral violist and arts administrator, and Daniel Bruce, a guitarist whose wide-ranging practice is rooted in jazz, conceived of the festival as an approachable, human-scaled showcase for local musicians, more block party than Coachellian spectacle.

Not more than a two-minute walk separated the three venues in the hip, rapidly gentrifying Cleveland neighborhood from which the festival takes its name. That made it possible to see most of the ten 45-minute sets that began at 3 p.m. and ended at 9:30.

It was canny programming to begin the day with a performance by Pulse, a saxophone quartet that represented the absolute middle of the middle-of-the-road in current jazz practice—and did so with unselfconscious accomplishment and admirable unity of purpose. The band's unruffled aplomb and discipline were tested on the outdoor patio of the BOP STOP when, during the set's first ballad, the fighter jets of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds screamed overhead in a Cleveland Air Show performance. "They were so loud that except for our drummer, we stopped playing," saxophonist Brad Wagner said.

Savoring the glorious late-summer—or is it early-autumn?—weather didn't leave time to catch the set by Tim Powell at Saucy Brew Works, a new venue this year. But right across 29th Street, Abstract Sounds a quartet led by tenor saxophonist Jevaughn Bogard had the muscle—and the volume—to be heard over the party-hearty crowd under the tent at Jukebox, a convivial bar with a music theme.

A genuine novelty this year was the first performances at Hingetown by student ensembles. Both, from Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga County Community College, included students of Bruce's and though the somewhat boomy acoustic of the room at Saucy did the midsized groups no favors, a large and enthusiastic audience didn't seem to care. Nor should they have.

Back at Jukebox, the buoyant atmosphere did no favors to Horizon, a trio of trumpeter Garrett Folger, pianist Anthony Fuoco and drummer Carmen Castaldi. Their rapt and thoughtful music, especially the subtle gestures of Castaldi, perhaps the next in line of the mystic drum tradition of Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille was swallowed in the buzz and conviviality of the vaulted indoor-outdoor space. "Lesson learned," Rogers said, thinking ahead to 2026.

A very different vibe prevailed at the BOP STOP set by Andru Dennis' Mana Cannon. The electric trio takes its name from a weapon card in the popular tabletop game Magic the Gathering, an apt allusion given the band's velocity and power.

Those qualities are also present in the trio led by Bobby Selvaggio at Jukebox. Fresh off shoulder surgery, the saxophonist had John Coltrane on his mind, offering a pair of "Giant Steps"-inspired pieces after leading off with a pretty waltz in the manner of Sam Rivers' "Beatrice."

If Horizon nodded to an ECM Records aesthetic, Howie Smith's Organ-ism was straight out of the Prestige Records catalog. Smith, remarkably lithe and elfin at 82, was a professional musician in the heyday of the organ-tenor circuit and though he mostly played alto, the organ trio of Dr. David Thomas, Bobby Ferrazza on guitar and Bill Ransom's get-up drums recalled the entertaining music found in the clubs that once lined Cleveland's Euclid Avenue. Like Chekov's gun, the baritone saxophone stage-right on the BOP STOP patio was finally brought out for the setbreaker. "Here's a song that you might recognize the melody to, though I never played the melody when I toured with Elvis," Smith said before offering a very grown-up reading of "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You." Lovely.

The day concluded on the patio with the Reclamation Band, bassist Kevin Robert Martinez's three-reeds-and-rhythm sextet. Martinez grew up in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and as heard on their debut recording These Roads (Self Produced, 2023), his music has an appealing spaciousness, with strong melodies unfolding patiently over Coplandesque chords. Yet even music as outdoorsy as this needs to be bigger outdoors, and every member of the band responded with impassioned solos, not least the leader himself, who dug into his bass with a Mingus-like ferocity.

The name of the tune was "The Thick of It," and that was a fitting epigraph for the day. Everywhere you went, there was music. Better yet, there were people talking about the music and the near-perfect nimbus of vibes it wrapped around Hingetown.

As the backline was being reset for the final band, Rogers and Bruce were honored as 2025 Cleveland Jazz Heroes by the Jazz Journalists Association for creating the festival practically out of thin air.

It came near the apex of a busy day for the co-directors who, in the thick of it, might have missed Bogard's impromptu summary of what it means to live with music: "AI has changed what rich is, but rich isn't what you get on a screen. Rich is being with your family and friends, and rich is doing what you love."

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