Playhouse Square is swinging again with the 46th Tri-C JazzFest. Bass legend Stanley Clarke returns, one of many acts coming to Cleveland on the strength of a decades-long career. Yet there’s also a good mix of younger players and ensembles. Dan Polletta, afternoon host for Ideastream Public Media's JazzNEO jazz channel, said he loves seeing families visit for the performances happening indoors and out.
"There are free performances right in front of the Idea Center, under the chandelier, featuring jazz bands of all kinds and musicians of other stripes, too,” he said.
Polletta and his fellow JazzNEO hosts will also host cooking demonstrations with some of the acts after their performances. That’s one way for young people to discover jazz: Attending a casual event, with parents, that’s heavy on music. That’s how guitarist Jonathan Clark discovered performers like Yngwie Malmsteen and Charlie Parker. Yet he originally studied classical music.
“I recognized what the life of a classical guitarist is,” he said. “I kind of simplified it as playing music that other people wrote in a small room alone for hours a day, so that maybe, if you're lucky, one day you can play those same notes that someone else note wrote in a really big room - alone on stage.”
Clark graduated in 2025 with a degree in jazz guitar performance from Oberlin College before heading home to Massachusetts. As a student and a musician, he’s found that different forms of mentorship have driven him to music – whether new or new to him.
"Jazz is an aural tradition and you can't play it without listening a ton,” he said. “Junior year of high school, I had a New Year's resolution to listen to a whole album every day. I would frequently go to people for personal recommendations. I told my high school director that I really liked 'In a Silent Way' by Miles Davis, and he brought me 'Mwandishi,' which a trumpet professor at Oberlin, Eddie Henderson, played on - which is awesome."
A generation ago, record store clerks might have provided recommendations. For Clark, technology fills that role.
"I feel like this is a little more buried in the Spotify software/GUI now, but early on: Seeing what my jazz friends were listening to was a true way that I discovered new music,” he said.
Polletta said technology isn’t just for students.
“Now I might be a little biased, but I would of course encourage anybody to listen to JazzNEO,” he said. “There are [also] classes at places like the Music School Settlement as well as Tri-C offers classes for younger people, camps and that kind of thing.”
Visitors can also see the fruits of musicians who mentor up-and-coming players at this year’s JazzFest.
“If you talk to Ernie Krivda, he'll tell you about saxophone players like Dave O’Rourke and Joe Alexander, who mentored him,” Polletta said. “Ernie, in turn, has mentored Dominick Farinacci. Twenty years from now, there's going to be somebody on the bandstand at JazzFest who's going to talk about how Dominick Farinacci mentored him or her. So, it's always this continuing passing down of knowledge.”
