- [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(upbeat music) Coming up, Viola's trumpets, bassoons and bass drum all go kaboom.

Thanks to a new music collective.

Plus the art and life of 80's pop art star, Keith Haring shines in Akron and Cleveland music History comes Alive in this Professor's unique collection.

What a show we have in store for you right now.

So sit back and join me.

Idea Stream Public media's Kabir Bhatia for "Applause."

Young Creatives can now work on Hollywood style recording projects as members of kaboom collective.

Led by Cleveland Arts Prize winner, Liza Grossman, the collective aims to give young talent a place to flourish.

- So there's this thing called Kaboom.

- Kaboom Collective is a place for curious artists ages 15 to 25 who want some career connected learning training in all aspects of the commercial arts.

- It's like a studio orchestra thing.

It's like a great opportunity.

They get to do all these things with these different type of people and producers, all this stuff.

- The collective is a group of professional musicians and artists and teachers from around the country who specialize in specific craft.

- And I was like, "Okay, that's pretty cool."

- It's sort of a think tank about what kinds of productions might be cool for these students to experience to help them accelerate in this field.

For example, let's say an animation.

In order for an animation to work there's all of these different fields of expertise that come together to make that happen.

Our script writing team with students from around the country who worked with someone from Warner Brothers who does script writing.

Then it moved on to the voiceover team and students from around the country online were studying with someone else from the industry who does voiceovers for a living.

From there, it will go to an animation team and then to the composition team, and then to the studio orchestra and now students from around the country under the guidance of people who specialize in this specific art have created this product.

We are in our homeroom at Baldon Walls Conservatory and tonight we are in the final stages of completing an album with musician and producer Michael Bradford.

- Well, when I was a young person, programs like this didn't exist really, but when I started out as a professional, I was 15 and I was playing with a lot of really heavy duty jazz cats at the time.

And one fella said to me, "You can't just be good for your age.

You gotta be good enough for us."

And that became sort of my guiding principle for the rest of my life.

That's what I see happening here.

Taking this legit, this traditional, compositional, classical trained style and understanding of music but having the the sort of modern chops to work in a contemporary environment.

And it's very rare that you see someone who can really live well in both worlds.

- Here's the top.

(upbeat music) I had been in education for a quarter century with my former youth orchestra the contemporary youth orchestra and I was always trying to offer my students insight into different potential professions but we could only go so deep.

And my Kaboom co-founder and partner Joe Weagraff and I discussed this and realized that what was missing was practical experience.

(upbeat music) The Studio Orchestra is a Hollywood style recording orchestra, round 35 members that does all of the recording for every production that Kaboom puts out.

(upbeat music) - So tonight has been a pretty fun night so far.

We're working on these two tunes from Michael Bradford's new album.

- We're going through Michael Bradford's pieces and it's phenomenal.

- They're having their regular rehearsal but tonight we've brought some recording equipment in.

I've written some pieces of music they intend to record and perform later this year.

- When you're in a recording things there's kind of little difference to that.

There's more of, you know, making sure you're even playing field musically with everybody.

- You're gonna have headphones in, you're gonna have a click track to make sure everyone's on beat on time.

It's a really catchy song.

There's a constant beat in it that's kind of stuck in my head right now.

Kinda like a a crime field with chaos.

I really like it - In "Misery and Company" we're working on a really tight groove in five and being able to lay accents out properly.

Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.

So this (claps).

And really what kind of rhythm is that that you're getting and focusing in on that and how to play in that pocket while dusting the rest of the notes and focusing in on that groove.

But all of them have to fall into that groove at the same time.

(upbeat music) - I actually always kind of wanted to be a studio musician so as soon as I heard that I kind of jumped on it.

'Cause I mean where else are you gonna find something like this?

Kaboom has a way of making everything seem more simple when it comes to recording.

One of my passions is jazz but I would also like to be a jazz session reporter as well.

So being a part of this is a really big help.

And every rehearsal I come here, I'm learning something new.

- Well, my thing is I've always wanted to tour everywhere.

That was like my main thing that I wanted to do.

- This past year we recorded an album with the indie rock female fronted band the Accidentals, and we also took it on tour.

- Knowing that they have already done something like a tour with like the Accidentals.

And I was like, "Whoa, okay, like this is cool."

- [Liza] Now all of these students will have something in their professional portfolio before they hit the professional marketplace looking for work.

- What I get out of this personally is a chance to see young people doing something really good.

Remember it's in five, so it's gonna be like (humming).

(instrument strumming) Right.

When I was young I got the chance to play with some really advanced people and I had to hold my own in that environment.

And I want to see young people do the same thing.

(upbeat music) - We will run through some stuff and she'll ask everyone as an example, what do you think we should add?

What'd you like?

What did you not like?

Any comments?

- [Liza] Good memory on that one.

I think that tends to be one of your favorites though.

Yeah?

- This is the only group where you have the conductor asking the people in the sections what they think, you know?

So I really think that's a really big thing and it really helps myself.

And I'm assuming for everyone else it really helps them further their musical education.

- Music is never really gonna go away, but good music might.

- I love what I do and my students are the center of it all.

I just get to hang out with them.

Such a good groove.

You just nailed that to the back door, you guys.

That was hot.

- [Narrator] Well, if you like that, we've got more from Kaboom Collective and the Accidentals coming up at the end of the show.

Stay tuned.

Now let's step inside the Akron Art Museum for an up close look at a pop art legend.

Keith Haring made his mark on the contemporary art scene in the 1980s but his work continues to show up today in pop culture.

(upbeat music) - The first thing that I'd say about Keith Haring is if you don't know him by name you've probably seen his imagery somewhere or other.

It's on t-shirts and shoes and posters and all sorts of things.

One thing that people might not know about Haring is that before his career really took off which was right around 1980, he was actually doing abstract art, video performance, a whole variety of things that aren't necessarily what people know him for.

And he put all of that into primarily painting and drawing and he would do painting and drawing almost as if it were a performance.

So to combine his interest in performance and then his desire to shift into really accessible works with simple human figures that people could understand he brought all of that together.

Really one day when inspirations struck he was down in the New York subway station he saw that when an advertisement was out of date it had been covered over with black paper and he realized that was just an empty canvas available for him to use.

And so he went, bought a simple piece of chalk and did a drawing on that unused advertising space.

And that was so exciting to him because he could do it in front of people and he started doing it more and more and doing it at rush hour on purpose.

And between 1980 and 1985 he made thousands of those drawings and that's really what caused his career to take off because people started to see them all the time and get used to seeing them.

And he became part of the fabric of New York City.

We do have some earlier works on the show where you can see that his lines are just a little bit more angular a little bit more broken up.

They're not quite as sort of organic and flowing as they become later on.

So over the course of just doing all those many drawings and always being incredibly prolific he very quickly got better and better and really sharpened his skills.

We have a variety of other artists represented in this show.

One gallery really puts Haring in a space with his close friends in contemporaries.

There were a number of artists like Jenny Holzer and John Ahern who were going out onto the streets of New York in different ways.

And then he also drew inspiration from other artists from earlier generations like Andy Warhol.

We have an Andy Warhol Elvis image in our own collection.

We made it part of this exhibition because it's such a perfect fit.

Warhol's ability to take pop culture images and blend them into fine art is something that Haring really enjoyed.

He saw Warhol's Art during a high school trip to Washington DC and it stuck with him.

And I'm sure that he was really excited by the mid 80s when he got to meet Warhol and become friends with him.

And then finally, Jean Michelle Basquiat is another artist who I think many people are familiar with.

His art is just wonderfully dense, creative with materials, creative with symbolism and imagery.

We have a wonderful work of his from the Rebel Museum on view as part of this show.

He's another artist who was drawing from his own black American, Haitian, Puerto Rican identity from hip hop, from graffiti, all sorts of different things and just blending them together into something that looks really intentional and really fully finished.

I think Haring really liked to bring that similar sort of a blend to his work.

And he described Basquiat as his favorite painter.

And I think that's really a big part of why.

So in order to reach the broadest possible audience, Haring was very keen to sell merchandise with his imagery on it.

So t-shirts, posters, buttons, stickers all manner of things.

It became particularly important to him when his art started to sell for really high prices that wouldn't be accessible to regular folks.

And he wanted to make sure they could still have some connection to him.

He was really more comfortable with merchandising than he was to selling to art collectors who had a lot of money.

And so to really take that forward, in 1986 he opened up a store that he called the Pop Shop in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan and New York City.

And it was in and of itself something of an art installation.

He painted every surface from floor to ceiling all over the walls.

And then on top of that, he pinned up a variety of shirts and posters and all the merchandise that he had for sale.

So it was, I think, a really important part of his art.

It's not just a matter of making money through selling some t-shirts but it was really a way for him to make his art accessible and to reach as many people as possible.

He really calibrated his art differently for different contexts.

So when he was working in the New York subway he really tried to keep things light because he knew that all sorts of audiences were going to see what he was doing.

They might not have chosen to come to see it like they would with a museum or a gallery.

But then when he started to work in art galleries and to make works that were for museums or for fine art collectors he really was much more able and willing to bring out his social position, his political ideas.

He really highlighted his gay identity very prominently in his work, which was really important to him during the 1980s, during the height of the AIDS crisis.

He was out and proud and an activist really through a lot of his work.

I'm glad that we have a couple works in the show that represent that.

I hope you can see behind me his series of 20 drawings titled Against All Odds.

This is the the piece that inspired the title of our exhibition.

It's also one of Haring's very last works.

He did the drawings in 1989.

In 1990, he did an introductory text for it when it was published as a book, this series of drawings.

And then he died of AIDS-related complications in early 1990s.

So this was really completed just a couple weeks before the end of his life.

And in that context, it's particularly, I think, striking that the series delves into economic exploitation, violence and especially threats to the environment.

All things that Haring touched on throughout his career and even in this moment where he was facing the end of his life and he knew that he was, he ends it with an optimistic message of continuing to fight for the future of humanity against all odds.

- [Narrator] Keith Haring: Against All Odds is on view through September 24th at the Akron Art Museum.

Dive into the colorful portraits of another pop art icon, Andy Warhol.

Next time on "Applause" we'll travel to a northeast Ohio temple that's now home to 10 Warhols celebrating Jewish geniuses of the 20th century.

Plus meet a Kent State University grad who's making city skylines her artistic calling card.

And the Cleveland Orchestra shares a triumphant symphony by Finish composer, Jean Sibelius.

(somber music) All this and more on the next round of "Applause."

If you wanted to hear your favorite song at the turn of the 20th century, then someone had to play it.

It was essential then to have the sheet music with the song's notes and lyrics.

Case Western Reserve University, director of popular music studies, Daniel Goldmark has a passion for collecting historic sheet music from and about northeast Ohio.

(gentle music) - Nowadays, if we want a song, we go online and we can buy it through whatever online source we might use.

And we typically buy one song at a time.

Well, 120 years ago when sheet music is the big thing that was the way you did things as well.

You weren't buying a whole bunch of music all by one performer or one writer, you were buying one song at a time.

And if you're looking for songs and you're living in Cleveland at the turn of the century you could go to a bunch of different places.

You could come here to the arcade because you had music stores and even music publishers based here.

And you could go straight in buy what the latest songs were, maybe go look for something from their older catalog, something you'd heard before and like "Oh can do you have a copy of that song."

And you could find just about anything.

(upbeat music) So in the late 19th century the popular music industry was basically based in New York City and the area was referred to as Tin Pan Alley.

This is on 28th Street around Broadway.

Now this is around where all the theaters were based before they started moving up toward Times Square.

Now in Cleveland, a lot of the big publishers were actually based here at the arcade.

And if you think about the arcade's proximity to Playhouse Square, it makes perfect sense 'cause you had a lot of shows coming into Cleveland.

You had shows starting here in Cleveland and those shows would need music.

And so they would come to the publishers, ask for songs, the songs would be written and they would put 'em right into the shows.

And that's the thing about shows back then.

This is before Broadway gets really big.

It's before Oklahoma and Showboat and before the songs are so identified with particular show.

The turn of the 20th century, if a song wasn't good they'd chuck it out and you could write a new song next week.

They weren't looking at them as great art.

It was a product, it was something they were selling to the public.

It was something that was gonna get people into the theaters and hopefully into the stores to buy more and more music.

♪ Oh Nora Lee my Nora Lee ♪ ♪ Your name is the sweetest music to me ♪ ♪ It's (indistinct) song holds me completely ♪ ♪ Birds in the tree sing their songs more sweetly ♪ ♪ Just for Nora Lee ♪ Sheet music is certainly not a new invention in the late 19th century.

It's been around for a long time.

But there are a couple advances in technology that help the music industry explode by the late 1890s.

And one of those, of course is advances in printing technology.

Printing things in four color, meaning where you have the full spectrum of the rainbow, advances in lithography.

So you have really clear definition of images and layers upon layers upon layers.

That became a real boon to the printing industry, a lot of which was based in Cleveland.

(upbeat music) Music publishers at the time would basically glom onto any topic they could that they thought might sell.

So when the Rag Time craze happens, everybody writes a rag on every theme from famous names to animals, fruits and vegetables, lobster rag fruit and vegetable rag, pickled beets rag, you name it.

So every time something happens, the industry kind of contracts and tries to figure out which of those is gonna be a hit.

And usually they weren't.

Usually they're just trying to jump on the bandwagon.

♪ Cleveland armstrong for you ♪ You also have publishers of course, are gonna try and have songs about local interests, current events, even local boosterism.

So there's all kinds of songs about Cleveland, for instance, saying how wonderful a place Cleveland is or saying how wonderful a place Ohio is.

The Ohio Centennial, the Cleveland Industrial Exposition in the 19 odds, the Great Lakes exposition in the late 1930s, all of these needed songs.

They wanted songs, people bought the songs for these.

And it's just an impossible number to try and wrap your mind around how many songs are out there.

And so few of these songs actually became hits.

And that's what's fascinating about them is we get this entire history of the life of a city, Cleveland or Detroit or New York or Chicago, wherever you wanna look you can really see what was going on in the people's minds at the time by looking at the kinds of songs that are being published.

♪ But when I'm blue and brokenhearted ♪ ♪ Or times and I have parted ♪ ♪ I know I'll be welcome down in Cleveland ♪ Probably the most famous music publisher to ever come out of Cleveland was Sam Fox Music.

We were actually based directly above where I'm standing on the third floor on the arcade.

Sam Fox sold but also started writing a few songs of his own.

And within a couple years he borrowed a couple hundred dollars and started his own music publishing company again, based right here at the arcade.

So very quickly he kind of starts to corner the market on this kind of music and he makes a name for himself not just in Cleveland but throughout the entire music publishing industry.

♪ I'm going back to Cleveland now ♪ ♪ To Cleveland oh I go ♪ ♪ Where I get three square meals a day ♪ ♪ And money for the show ♪ The sad thing about the art for sheet music covers is that a lot of these are unsigned or even the ones that are signed, we know very very little about the people who created them because these were craftspeople, just like people who made furniture or built cars or had any other kind of nine to five job.

Nobody could have imagined that basically a century later folks like me would be asking, "Oh, who is this person who did this amazing cover?"

Or better yet, "Who is this person who did 300 covers over a period of several years with such great breadth and skill, I want to know about them."

And unfortunately there's such little information about these folks.

So that's one of the great mysteries about the music.

And it's also one of the great joys because every time you find a new piece you're like, "Oh wow."

Another little piece of the puzzle slides into place.

You know, the 10% of music that was published in Cleveland that made it to the rest of the United States.

There's that other 90% that's in people's attics and basements and in thrift stores and on eBay and other places just waiting to be found.

And so I started just collecting.

Any time I would run into someone, I would say, "If you have any sheet music in the basement, if you know someone who's giving rid of it please don't let them trash it.

Come find me.

I'll take it off your hands."

Even if I have to find an eventual home for it 'cause it's not what I'm looking for.

I am more interested in seeing the stuff not be destroyed.

Dedicated to the school children of Cleveland.

This was Minnie the Elephant, I think I dunno if it was the first elephant to the Cleveland Zoo but they got her in the OTs.

The children of Cleveland named her.

That's why it's dedicated to them because they picked the name for the new zoo elephant.

Every little town in Cleveland has someone who had a song in their heart that they just had to get out.

And so they went to their local printer and the printer found an image and they printed up the music for them.

And maybe they printed a hundred copies, maybe they printed 500 and maybe I have the only one.

Maybe they're sitting in someone's basement somewhere.

I think ultimately what I want to do is be able to tell a story of how popular music was a part of life in Cleveland, particularly before rock and roll.

And visually, it's so rich.

I'm really looking forward to having the chance to help fill in this gap of what a strong part Cleveland had in the music industry in shaping musical tastes in the United States during the late 19th and through the 20th century.

- [Narrator] Let's keep the music rolling as Kaboom Collective and the Accidentals take us out with a song from their 2022 album, "Reimagined."

♪ Dark woods tall trees ♪ ♪ Reaching for me ♪ ♪ I think some nights gone ♪ ♪ Better condition ♪ ♪ Keys in ignition ♪ ♪ Trying to be strong ♪ ♪ Blue night dry leaves ignite ♪ ♪ Finally there's that fire in my heart ♪ ♪ My mind is lightning tells me do not leave ♪ ♪ Believing it's just a start of something new ♪ ♪ When these grow old ♪ ♪ Where do they go ♪ - [Narrator] And on that note, it's time to go.

I'm Idea Stream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Please join us next time for another round of "Applause."

♪ And so much I ♪ ♪ Look with my own eyes ♪ ♪ Fulfill the truth that lies in the unknown ♪ (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.