by Zak Harper and Rachel Ickes
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The goal of this UnClass is to understand just how influential music, especially jazz, is to Akron history and to hopefully recover some of the lost knowledge surrounding the nightlife that used to help bring the community together. As we were exploring this topic in old copies of the Akron Beacon Journal, we turned up an article about Ange Lombardi. We wanted to highlight Lombardi’s career to show that jazz was a vital point in Akron’s community in places other than Howard Street, which is a main focus for our class.
In order to understand the influence that jazz has on music as a whole, tracing it to locations all over Akron is important. Jazz was able to bring all kinds of people together and Lombardi’s career showcased that. Lombardi formed a jazz orchestra in the late 1920s while enrolled at The University of Akron and continued to perform around the Akron area until the early 60s.
Lombardi, who arrived in Akron with his Italian immigrant parents, played in clubs all over the area, ones that welcoming both Black and white audiences, and gave people a place to dance and enjoy themselves. His orchestra was featured at local country clubs, at the Merry-Go-Round club on Main Street, and on a bill at the East Akron Wagon Wheel with Ann Star, a “disrobing artist that even women like.”
In a wide ranging career, Lombardi was able to showcase jazz around Akron in places such as the White Pond Inn (aka The Granada Inn), Akron’s East Market Gardens, and Springfield Lake’s Starlight Ballroom, which as seen in the photo above/below shows that the club was open to people of all races which was a major reason that jazz got as popular as it did. It was able to provide a place for all people to meet up, dance, and play music together.
Many of these places — like the East Market Gardens, Meyers Lake Park, Summit Beach, and Springfield Lake — are listed on the Green Book Cleveland site, but none of them are on Howard Street. And, as the term moves forward, we’re sure that we’ll be finding many more spots like there. All of which goes to show that jazz and its wide audience could not be contained to one neighborhood in Akron’s downtown.
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