Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up.

A band of musical brothers marries punk and funk.

We rediscover Cincinnati's silent screen vixen.

And the black beans are bouncing into Akron.

Hello, and welcome to another rockin round of applause.

I'm your VIP emcee and DJ career brought to you now along with our show.

This show.

Applause.

We've also got an online only show called Applause performances.

It's a fantastic collection of Northeast Ohio musicians, and it's hosted by my friend Idea Streams Amanda Rabinowitz.

Here's a look at the most recent episode available to stream now, with the PBS app spotlighting the Cleveland trio.

C-Level.

Me.

So, Coda you and Dave met when you guys were teenagers at a place that is.

Now, I understand, a beauty shop in North Olmstead.

Can you talk about that?

How you two met?

Yeah.

So, yeah, we met when we were young.

My mom worked at a bar called Phoenix, and she saw Dave playing at the open mic there, and, she just told me this kid can play like Jimi Hendrix, and you got to meet him.

And the first time we jammed was at the Phoenix at the open mic night when we met, I remember our friend and teacher, George Hartwig, who's a local musician based out of Parma.

He, he was running the open mic night and, he would just had this way of corralling people and making people feel welcomed and like they can do whatever.

And like I remember the first song we did play was, Hey, Joe, write me.

You and George.

Furious.

George.

Curious George Hartwig.

Yeah.

How did you guys meet?

Both.

Meet him?

I remember at that time in his life.

This was when he was first doing music full time.

And he's a pretty serious, like, well thought out guy.

And like, just seeing, like, that scene, someone like that and growing up being like, okay, it's a possible thing.

I can figure out how to make my life work and, and do music.

And it was like super important because he had this way of like uplifting everybody and just like, kind of being, you can do this and like and he was doing it.

So it was like a really kind of like critical time for like at least myself to meet like Cody and meet George and know that you can do these things because there's so many people in our like, I feel like we get a lot of people saying, you can't do something.

So to meet someone to say and saying you can is a super important person to have in your life.

So all that great guitar work, that's all from George.

Yeah, yeah, George taught me a lot.

I don't know if I'm right there.

Maybe.

No.

See, you gotta write the vibe that you're on.

That's, you know, you have to go just to make a little change and let me down.

Now it's up to you.

You want to.

Oh, wait.

You want to learn how to how to make want to do you have to do what you always.

Tell me, what is the goal?

You gotta try to break it down with you.

Find yourself a way with you.

Find some way.

So, Cody, you and Dave started out playing covers together.

That's how this started.

From Bad Brains to Hendrix.

Did you ever think that it would turn into something more than that?

That when we first started playing, that was like my dream was to just be in a band with Dave.

I remember there was a good couple of years of our friendship where I was just afraid to ask him, and then I finally asked him and he was like, yeah, why wouldn't we be in a band together?

So yeah, there was always I always first saw it going further.

Yes.

And I know Dave in the background.

You were actually writing songs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, quietly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things is like to put yourself out there is kind of scary and especially being around, you know, people we knew around the Mike night who were really doing good and like watching George and all these guys just rocket.

It was like one of those things where it's just kind of like, I'm doing this and maybe someone will think it's cool.

And so I remember showing it to Cody and and Jay in like getting positive feedback and being like, okay, we can do something.

You and, be.

You grow.

You can't.

You can't keep.

Was bottled up inside the take.

You now make your case.

There's no telling what you're going to face.

But walk a mile in yo man's shoes.

The crack is bones and bad news I tell you.

Now come find me this morning.

You guys have long wanted to do a concept album.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

What made you want to do that and how did you approach it?

We've always like, like to do kind of like a bigger, concept project, but it never really panned out.

And then our drummer, Pat, he brought up this, Albert Iler performance in which John, it was for John Coltrane's funeral, and he's playing he rips the saxophone and screams a couple times.

The first time out of anguish in the second half of Joy.

And Cody and I have both recently experienced some loss and through our grieving process, have been like writing these tunes and reaching out to a bunch of people.

And like a lot of people we admire and we got a lot of like positive feedback for the songs we were writing, and it pieced together to be this kind of concept, and it outlines this John Coltrane, this Albert Ayler performance.

Yeah.

Because the album is called Scream Like you're at Coltrane's funeral.

Correct.

You have a podcast?

Yes, Dave.

And it's called zig at the gig.

Correct.

First of all, tell me about that title.

So I used to do the two when you're at a show, right.

And trying to fill time, I would do, I would try to make the most of every moment we had.

Right.

So you get there, you wait, you get there, you wait.

So instead of that, I would pull the bands we were playing with.

I'm like, hey, I'm going to start a podcast in my van.

Can I interview you?

So I would interview people in my van.

We would get all sweaty and then like, we missed soundcheck.

So this happened for a while.

The logistics just logistically it didn't work out the least.

The idea of the concept of the podcast.

And then around the time of 2020, when things were shutting down a little bit, Dave started to do a lot more remote interviews.

Yeah.

And and just get more consistent with it.

And that's when the podcast kind of took off.

Some of the people you've had on the podcast you've featured on this album?

Yeah, that was kind of the moment we have to share, and it was cool to know that was more than just like, a conversation or just like, you know, that we meant something to them too.

So that was super special, and it's hard to believe.

Like I'm saying, we can even say we are on a we're on wax with these guys.

Yeah.

So you mentioned that this album is really, you know, inspired by a lot of loss.

Yeah.

Has it been a cathartic experience?

I mean, what what have you gotten through all of this?

We lost my grandpa, who was one of our biggest supporters, and then we lost Dave's mom, who another huge supporter, and then my grandma.

So it was just kind of a period of a lot of loss.

And getting to work with these artists that we, you know, grew up listening to around those people, around Dave's mom and around my grandpa, showing them like, check out this crazy Bad Brain song.

So it was very cathartic to get to this point in life where we're able to work with these people and it's it's beyond cathartic because it's like, it's like the ultimate joy of what we do, coming back to us, knowing that the people that inspired us are ready to work with us and we're just.

Yeah.

No, Carrie, no.

It's you.

And to have your hero be like, yeah, it's a cool song, you know what I mean?

Like, we've done it.

We're done.

I hope it was in me.

Made you pack your bags and go home.

And sometimes you over.

They give you, low.

I grows weary, signals crossed.

I cannot make it fly in silence.

To watch the entire applause performances by sea level and learn the cool story behind the group's name.

Check it out online right now with no cover charge on the free PBS app.

Well, before rock n roll, Hollywood was quiet with silent films.

Theda Bara was a silent film star of the early years of the 20th century.

She's someone that a lot of people don't know about nowadays.

However, at the time, roughly from 1914 to 1920 or so, she was pretty much one of the top stars in film of the times.

She was considered the original, as they called it.

Them, which doesn't mean quite the same thing that it does now, but meant that you were a seductive woman who was dangerous to men.

Even though the studio, Fox Studios, made a biography for her that made her sound very exotic and told everyone that she was born literally in the shadows of the Sphinx in Egypt.

She was actually just a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati, as she sometimes said.

She grew up as a middle class Jewish girl in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, which was at the time a predominantly middle class Jewish area, and she went to Walnut Hills High School.

That's the Theodosia Goodman who became Santa Barbara.

Later on.

She attended the synagogue, the Plum Street Temple Synagogue.

For those who did attend.

You see, after she graduated from Walnut Hills High School, she attended for two years.

We do see Theodosia Goodman in 1904 and the 1905 yearbooks.

She does not seem to have graduated.

She left for New York, in the midst of her studies.

And she had this very condensed career from roughly 1914 to 19 19 or 1920.

During that time, she made over 40 films, which is hard for us to think of given how films work today.

But some of her most significant films were a fool There Was, which was an early film that really created that vamp image for her.

It's where she broke out as a star, and in that film she played the seductress who was bringing a man who had a wife to his room.

So she was she was an early vamp and one of our early sex symbols in film.

And so she's had a huge effect, I think, on future starlets and representations of women in film.

And yet we know so little about her because her films didn't survive, into the contemporary period.

One of the painful things that she went through was the loss of her legacy.

So 1937, which was during her lifetime, there was a fire in the vaults of Fox Studios.

And so something like 90% of Theda Bara's output was destroyed at that time.

And she was alive.

And she was very aware of this happening.

The archives in the AbeBooks library is one of 13 library units at the University of Cincinnati.

So we have a collection here that the official name is the team over at her manuscript on Theta Barrow, the University of Cincinnati Libraries and the Archives and Rare Books Library acquired this manuscript in 2008 and was through the efforts of a man named Kevin Grace, who was then the head of the Archives and Rare Books Library, who spotted this manuscript listed in a book in manuscript dealers catalog.

It is about 450 typewritten pages of a manuscript on the life of film actress Dana Bear.

It was a completed but never published memoir that was supposed to be published under Theta Bear its name, and so it was ghostwritten in collaboration with Theta Bear by Territory, who was a newspaperman and author and editor from Philadelphia.

Apart from the manuscript, was also about 60 letters between Theta Bear and Hooray!

Talking about that collaboration.

The importance of this manuscript is it really gets to kind of the heart of Theda Bara.

It's like this transformation from the those are good men who described herself as a good Jewish girl from Cincinnati into this femme fatale figure.

But we've been very fortunate to work with our preservation lab colleagues who were able to stabilize the document.

The lab is responsible for the preservation of the treasures of the library.

We are a book and paper lab, so we primarily work with found objects and paper.

The manuscript is an unbound manuscript.

It's a typed manuscript.

It was in good condition.

There wasn't a lot of tearing, but with paper that is that thin, it becomes delicate.

And because it was typewriter ribbon, it is stable.

But you could still rub some things off.

There are marginalia where they've written in on pencil, so that could also be rubbed off.

The question was how to make sure it stays in that condition, both by handling by researchers and in the future if it would be digitized.

And that's why we made the decision to sleeve it instead of encapsulating it so it could be removed from the sleeves if it was digitized in the future.

It includes a cover page with the title Woman or Vampire.

It includes chapter titles such as I Procured Poison Caramels with full Intent to use them, or saved from an early marriage by a Ouija board or Devil's Handmaiden, and.

So if you look at the table of contents, it seems like this almost.

It's intended to be somewhat this scandalous, spectacular memoir.

When you look at the actual content of it, it's more of a day to day life of Theta Bear.

Everything from her early childhood and education in Cincinnati, the move to New York and ring Broadway and film productions all the way up to about 1917 1918, when she was a lead in the film Cleopatra Theta Baron's career kind of goes into a decline.

She has, I think, one stage production, which is not received well by critics.

And then there's a few years before she has, I think there were two remaining films in her career.

So unfortunately, this is being written kind of, I think, as she's sliding out of the public eye in a certainly Hollywood producer's eyes, which may have led to why this was ultimately not successfully published.

But it is a fascinating document and testament to the fact that we can continue to find artifacts from silent film stars like theta era.

The outlook is very good for it.

Nothing lasts forever, but it'll be around before probably I pass or anyone I know passes.

We perceive her as having completely lost her legacy when the films burned in the Fox Fire.

But as time has gone on, what we found is that a lot of silent films which were shown all over the world because they were silent, they were very easily translatable to other audiences, have survived in different forms.

There have been clips of Theta Bear films that have been found in various other countries.

So it's absolutely the case that we can continue to find more of her films over time, as we go into the vaults of various old cinemas.

There really is a sense of kind of a treasure hunt to find material like Theta Bear as films.

She wasn't just a studio creation, she was also her own creation.

She is very much a woman of her age.

She grew up middle class.

She grew up in Avondale.

She grew up as part of the Reformed Jewish movement.

All of these are very central parts of that time period in Cincinnati history.

And she's emblematic of what it was like to be a smart young woman who wanted to make it from the Midwest.

You know, the big screen and I think that stories is one that can absolutely still capture people's imagination if they're told it.

The word refugee comes from the root word refuge.

And our next group has found an artistic refuge in the traditional dances of Africa.

Since arriving in Akron from East African refugee camps in 2020, these young men have danced their way into the national spotlight as the black beans.

Our food is nothing but your own lazy.

What does it mean to be lazy?

And if there are no more, that's it.

My dad said, let me put my money away.

Let me.

The store would do 4 or 5 kinds of styles from Africa.

We do South, East and North Africa.

We do not Bordeaux.

And that is from Congo, from Central Africa and would do, Afrobeats from Nigeria.

And we do a piano that is from South Africa.

And we also we do bongo flavor and that is from Stephanie.

Well, I started dancing when I was like 2 or 3 years old, and that's when I started dancing.

It was just full of like views of Paris behind our neighbors every time.

Like, like at least just like a night.

Mostly me and my friends.

And that's when I fell in love with dancing.

We are from different parts.

We're from three different parts of Africa Central and East Africa.

We are from Congo, Tanzania and Uganda.

All of us, most of our tribes, we don't wear that in most of our tribes.

So basically we looked back.

Way back.

We asked our families, what do you know?

Our people like our ancestors.

Where back in the days and we all got the same thing for our parents were like, we can do something with that.

You know, we ask you for the songs together, you know, just sit down and think, what are we going to do?

Then after that just takes time, you know, no parties.

We found like, well, dance measures the song.

Yeah, that's what we do.

So I'm also a dancer choreographer by myself, which is like a choreographer.

It's like I'll bring the song watching choreographer like he a dancer or create it together.

But what's a song?

Who created all the black beans all together?

I started creating anthem back in 2020 when I moved in Akron, Ohio.

The this group, the black beans.

It was not that dancing group was like just four teenagers playing soccer.

And I came up with this idea of dancing because since because most of the the what we know what we know.

And.

Yeah.

So I just told the boys, let's start the.

So my mom was telling me that since I was young, I used to love dancing.

So where I go is just dancing, dancing, dancing.

They're self-taught and all their dance moves are original.

I started working with Tom, about three years ago, and through that process, I saw these guys kind of dancing and stuff and wanted to see how I could be involved.

And we just kind of end up managing these guys together.

I wanted to play soccer for Jim Core in the city, as of March.

And I'm like, I wanna, I wanna play soccer and I want to join the team.

So then I joined the team.

Then later on, I made body off from the same.

Then the like.

We have a dancing group.

I don't know if you know, dance, but I'm like, I'm not a dance then.

So I'm like.

But then I joined the black.

These are the dance world of dance, which is the top dance competition in the world.

A couple hundred different groups.

So they all come to California and it's all different ballerinas to, you know, dancers like these guys, and they all compete.

And the top prize is actually $1 million.

David and I brought them to a dance audition.

We we sang in one of their videos and they qualified.

And the reason that we brought them there is we knew that technically, they really needed to hear from judges what they needed in terms of competition as dancers, what they needed to know, you know, in terms of staying together, transitions, that kind of thing.

They didn't have a lot of practice time.

The judges had to put them through.

They just said, this is so unique.

These boys are so joyous.

We gotta send them through a lot of dances.

It was amazing and I experienced what this means for days.

Oh great.

I can't I can't tell you how it was, but I know it was amazing.

They won crowd favorites, the worst dance.

We performed war theater first before we go on stage.

But we kept growing.

And we did.

We did our best.

They got the most applause in the audience of any dance group, and the most people standing up to cheer them on.

These.

Look, you know, who do they?

I bet they got up on your bed by myself.

So that means it's not just a bunch.

A teenager comes together to dance.

Will it be like a family?

Like brothers, where we can be creative relationship in a fairly.

And I mean, if one of us need help out there to support it and everything we.

Our next applause is iron clad.

Yes.

Roses are red.

But here in northeast Ohio, they're also the color of iron.

We look back on a century of Art Deco design at the historic Rose Ironworks of Cleveland.

Growing up in our family was that there was never anything other than Rose ironworks.

Go inside.

A new tribute to the Rose family at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Plus, the Cleveland Orchestra takes care of some unfinished business with the final symphony of an Austrian master.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

Okay.

Show's over.

Folks.

You don't have to go home.

But you can't change the channel either.

Thanks for coming to the Applause Concert Club tonight.

I'm idea stream Public media's Kabir Bhatia and to play us out once again here.

Sea level.

You.

You.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.