Ernie Krivda, a mainstay of Cleveland jazz for more than 40 years, pays tribute to spiky underground comics guru Harvey Pekar in Blues for Pekar, Krivda’s first CD on the Capri label. The disc is a honey. Not only does the big-toned tenor sax master reanimate standards including “The End of a Love Affair” and Sonny Rollins’ lesser-known “Valse Hot,” he contributes two originals including the bluesy title track and spotlights the best brass men in Cleveland, the flashy trumpeter Sean Jones and the more lyrical trumpeter-fluegelhornist Dominick Farinacci.
Powered by the Detroit Connection – bop pianist Claude Black, perspicacious bassist Marion Hayden and tasty drummer Renell Gonsalves – Blues for Pekar is a dynamic record that celebrates continuity by breathing new life into the jazz tradition. Key to that is Krivda’s stamina, which, informed by circular breathing and endless creativity, produces long lines designed to tell a story. This is Krivda’s tip of the hat to Pekar, a noted jazz critic and underground comic book author who gained widespread fame in 2003 with the film American Splendor, an adaptation of his best-known comics. Pekar died last July 12 at age 70. At least one of the causes: cancer, which Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, often treated in their writings.
While Krivda made a name for himself in New York in the '60s in the Quincy Jones Orchestra, he returned home in the '70s and has made his base here ever since. He’s a kind of Cleveland patriot – or, perhaps, a Midwest patriot. He’s also a big fan of Pekar, who called Krivda one of the greatest tenor saxophonists.
Krivda cut his teeth on Cleveland’s East Side in the '60s in such clubs as the Jazz Temple, the Lucky Bar and the English Grille and grew up listening to such Cleveland tenor legends as Weasel Parker and Joe Alexander. Among his contemporaries then: guitarist Bill DeArango and blind organist Eddie Baccus. He and Pekar would encounter each other back in the day, and, like many others in the Cleveland jazz scene, often talked records.
"[Pekar] would come over and check out stuff, and he would call in the middle of the night and say listen to this, and he would tell me what he thought about whatever. He was a passionate jazz fan,” says Krivda. “And he was a writer,” contributing reviews to DownBeat, The Village Voice and The Austin-American Statesman.
Unlike the gregarious and loquacious Krivda, Pekar was not that social: “Harvey was not a club goer. He liked to listen to records. Clubs, of course, were social situations. I don’t believe he drank. He didn’t go into clubs, (because) in my opinion he couldn’t suffer fools at all, so he didn’t even want to take the chance he would encounter one,” says Krivda.
Blues for Pekar is Krivda’s attempt to honor the love he and Pekar had for jazz. At the time of Pekar’s death, not enough attention was paid to his work as a jazz critic, Krivda says. It was work strong in context and fact.
Besides its celebration of a heartland hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero), Blues for Pekar attests to other local connections. It was recorded at Ante Up Audio, Michael Seifert’s recording studio at East 36th Street and Superior Avenue, with Seifert producing and engineering. A $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) financed it, and it features Jones and Farinacci, former students of Krivda’s in the Cuyahoga Community College jazz studies program. It’s an “opportunity to give back in my time,” says Krivda.
