Theron Brown: The Ambassador of Akron Jazz

Theron Brown recording his oral history at Stone Cottage, 2023. NPS / Arrye Rosser.

Theron Brown is an accomplished jazz pianist and a leader of the arts community in Akron, Ohio. He founded the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival to cultivate the city's sound and honor its jazz history, teaches jazz as an assistant professor at The University of Akron, has toured nationally and internationally, and also plays blues, gospel and soul — including regularly at Happy Days Lodge for Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park events. In 2023 Cuyahoga Valley National Park recorded an oral history with him for the multi-partner Green Book Cleveland project; his account of Northeast Ohio jazz gives context to the Cabin Club and Lake Glen, two mid-1900s jazz and blues clubs in the valley.

A preacher's kid

Brown was born in 1986 to Terrence and Denise Brown. Terrence had moved to Akron from Youngstown, Ohio, and Denise had come there from Clayton, Alabama, as a teenager; after marrying they settled in Zanesville, Ohio, where Theron grew up. His father is pastor of the Greater Apostolic Church of Christ.

Music came from church, where the family spent almost every day of the week, and from his mother singing at home. A bored toddler, he tinkered with the instruments. He learned by ear, starting on drums at five and piano three years later, and was playing in services by eight, emboldened by encouraging adults and inspired by a seven-year-old newcomer, Kenny Banks — now a pianist who plays around the world. At school his instrument was the viola, from fourth through twelfth grade.

Discovering jazz

He had a viola scholarship to Ohio State when, in his senior year, a teacher at a week-long string camp heard him playing piano before rehearsals and suggested jazz. Brown, a church boy, at first dismissed it as the devil's music. But the teacher gave him a Thelonious Monk songbook and CD, and reading about Monk's life struck a chord. That summer he learned jazz piano and auditioned on it.

First breaks

The University of Akron's jazz studies program accepted him in 2005. His church background meant instant work playing for churches; his home church even kept him in Akron over the summers, paying for an apartment and a salary through his first three years so he could practice and stay in the scene. Early in college, an older student, Josh Rzepka, took him around to meet musicians in Akron and Cleveland, and soon the calls came — private parties, weddings, country clubs, sometimes two or three gigs a day, and on good nights up to $700 with tips. Young piano players were scarce, and the community rallied behind him. Nearly every job, he says, came through a recommendation.

From about 2008 to 2010 he played keyboards in Cat Walk Blue, a pop-rock band that performed at every Cleveland Cavaliers home game — until LeBron James left for the Miami Heat and the gig went with him. He also learned from older musicians in the Howard Street Blues Band, named for Akron's historic Black business district and its jazz clubs of the 1940s–60s. Its leader, Howard "Sonny" Robertson, who died in 2016, was a demanding mentor at gigs paying $25–75, and Brown credits those nights — a second school after class — with making him better faster. He had meant to become a gospel organist and use jazz to enrich it; instead, as he jokes, he stayed on the dark side, finding in jazz the expression he had been missing.

Teaching, touring and film

He began teaching in summer 2005 at Firefly Music School, went on to high school clinics, and got hooked at Tri-C Jazz Camp. His aim as a teacher is to help students find their own voices rather than copy his, and to trust the process: you either win or learn.

Late in college, with too many credits to graduate without paying out of pocket and just after his grandmother's funeral in Alabama, he was recommended to the Glenn Miller Orchestra, on the road since 1956, and joined within a week, practicing the music in the car. In 2010–11 he toured the United States, Canada and Japan as its youngest member. He then spent a year based in New York as musical director on a steamboat cruising the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, staging shows about the towns they visited, often inspired by Mark Twain.

He returned to Akron in 2012 to settle down with his fiancée, now his wife, and finished a bachelor of music in jazz studies that year. In 2022 he earned a master of music in piano performance and, with saxophonist Chris Coles, was hired to revive the university's jazz program. He is artist coordinator for the I Promise School, an Akron public school supported by the LeBron James Family Foundation for children at greatest risk of dropping out, and has played with the Cleveland Orchestra, Akron Symphony, Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Through another recommendation he was cast as a young Herbie Hancock in the 2016 Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, auditioning after cutting short a family vacation.

The Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival

The achievement he is proudest of took root in 2013–14, when the Knight Foundation included him in its effort to strengthen Akron's arts. Trips to the Detroit Jazz Festival and the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival inspired him to found the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival in 2015 with Knight Foundation funding. For him, honoring Akron's jazz history is about recognizing artistic work that still thrives in the city, and the festival gives emerging and established musicians a stage. He hopes it grows into something unmistakably Akron — run by local musicians, loved by local audiences — and eventually passes to young people who take it further than he imagines.

His maternal grandfather, Monroe Friar of Alabama, sat in playing the blues in bars; Brown never met him or heard him play, but carries that legacy on.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "Theron Brown: The Ambassador of Akron Jazz" (Cuyahoga Valley National Park), based on a 2023 oral history, in hubnx's own words; Brown's words are paraphrased. The article spells Thelonious Monk "Thelonius" and the Glenn Miller Orchestra "Glen," and names his mentor both Robertson and Robinson; the page uses Robertson, the name in the article's own link.

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.