Milwaukee’s actually representative in many ways of jazz in other cities. “It’s probably no different than any other Midwest city…. you have these smaller midsize, Midwest cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee, and Cleveland. They have this great history, but it’s largely unacknowledged by the greater folks that are interested in jazz.”
By Zeb Larson
Manty Ellis described the jazz scene that he grew up around in Milwaukee lovingly. “We would change clothes and by 6:30 or 7 o’clock everyone was on Walnut Street between 6th and 10th. You could go from club to club. We’d hang out all night. It was beautiful.” The heart of it is what was known as the Bronzeville neighborhood, though Ellis pointedly insisted that was a name given after the fact: “later on they started calling… talking about Bronzeville. I always wondered what the fuck they were talking about.”
Ellis became a jazz guitarist and a fixture in the city; his music shop would host visiting luminaries like Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Stitt, and George Benson. He knew Herbie Hancock before Hancock hit it big with Miles Davis, and he swore that local drummer Dick Smith was playing hard bop before Art Blakey even put his toes in the water.
Milwaukee isn’t usually the first city that comes to mind when you imagine a happening jazz scene. The truth is, most places in the United States are probably seen as jazz backwaters, and Milwaukee is known better for polka bands. An overemphasis on national culture and fame distorts what exists locally, and it hides regional cultures from view. Critically though, it does not erase them, and looking at Milwaukee shines a light on how vital regional musical culture is, especially jazz.
Milwaukee has been home to a number of jazz greats, beginning with the trumpeters Jabbo Smith and “Wild” Bill Davison. Woody Herman was born in Milwaukee and launched his career there; so did Al Jarreau. But the city has been home to a host of great local musicians: Berkeley Fudge, Manty Ellis, and Dick, among others. (There might be a touch of bitterness or ruefulness with players like Willie Pickens who started out in Milwaukee but ended up in Chicago, the city’s musical big brother). Like most musicians anywhere, those in Milwaukee usually had day jobs, and gigged on the side. Some clubs were mobbed up, run by gangsters from Chicago.
The story of jazz in Milwaukee is much the same as it is in most cities: migrants from the American South came to work in factories and foundries and slaughterhouses as part of the Great Migration. The city’s music was also shaped by its larger neighbor to the south; musicians from Chicago regularly played gigs in Milwaukee, and the first jazz band to play in Milwaukee probably happened in 1916 with the John Wickliffe Famous Ginger Band — a Chicago group. The city’s first jazz club, Club Metropole, opened in 1922: most of the city’s dozen or so early jazz clubs were concentrated on Walnut Street, where most African Americans lived.
Those clubs were eventually targeted and destroyed by the city’s government as part of urban renewal in the 1950s. Across the country, cities like Milwaukee, Portland, and Kansas City targeted African American neighborhoods for “renewal.” Thousands of residents and dozens of businesses were forced to sell or were acquired through eminent domain in order to build freeways, housing projects, and new commercial areas. This killed a generation’s worth of clubs in Milwaukee: the two-dozen clubs that existed in the early 1950s were almost all gone by the mid-1960s. Once their patrons were forcibly dispersed by the city, the reality of trying to maintain liquor licenses in a city that was at best ambivalent towards their existence was too much.
But this didn’t mean the extinction of jazz in Milwaukee. New clubs sprang up on the Eastside of the city, and Manty Ellis became the coordinator of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music’s jazz program. Tastes in jazz meant that Milwaukee’s audiences became predominantly white, and shifted towards more fusion and rock influences (angering some of the purists). Jazz shifted and changed; in many ways, its practitioners and adherents had to retreat to lick their wounds, work their day jobs, and train new musicians.
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One of the major boosters of jazz in Milwaukee is Milwaukee Jazz Vision. Run by trumpeter Jaime Breiwick and guitarist Neil Davis, the group works as a combination promoter and fundraiser for jazz groups around the city. It acts as a social media hub for musicians in the city as well as for venues, and it organizes periodic concerts and festivals for jazz musicians. It also collected ephemera and histories of the city’s earlier music scene; Breiwick helped to put together an archive of the city’s musicians and history.
Breiwick explained how the group came together. “We were trying to just put together a one-off concert with a bunch of our own groups. In the planning of that first one and the subsequent feeling after doing it, we decided to do it again! We started meeting and having larger discussions around the scene at large and where else could we make an impact, with either providing performance opportunities, or scholarships, and over time it started to take shape as a hub of advocacy for the jazz scene at large. We’re actually, finally after twelve years about to become a nonprofit.”
Breiwick is originally from Racine with a background in music education who started out gigging in Milwaukee. “I caught sort of the tail end of the previous era of jazz musicians in Milwaukee, even with guys who were playing in the ‘50s and ‘60s.” Breiwick played with Manty Ellis, which was part of the impetus for the creation of the group’s archive. “He’d tell me these great stories about playing with Stanley Turrentine or Sonny Stitt, and then I’d go and try to Google and informally research some of this, and there was no record.” An interview with Manty Ellis built on itself and led to other interviews.
According to Breiwick, Milwaukee’s actually representative in many ways of jazz in other cities. “It’s probably no different than any other Midwest city. There are some that get a lot of recognition, rightly so, like Chicago, which has tremendous history, or Detroit…but you have these smaller midsize, Midwest cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee, and Cleveland. They have this great history, but it’s largely unacknowledged by the greater folks that are interested in jazz.” Breiwick also pointed out that Milwaukee’s Latino community was also vitally important: Breiwick started out by playing in salsa and merengue bands on the south side of the city.
Milwaukee Jazz Vision’s main event every year is Bayview Jazz Fest, hosted as a one-night event spread across multiple venues. Pre-pandemic, they had as many as thirteen different venues and forty different bands, and most of the bands tend to come from Milwaukee, with some outsiders coming in from Chicago and Madison. So far, the group has funded this entirely through community buy-in, raising funds from friends and increasingly the participating venues. Breiwick hopes to keep expanding on the group’s successes. With nonprofit status, they can start applying for grants, and he’s in preliminary discussions with another organization to start a second music festival modeled on Bayview.
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Jazz in Milwaukee is instructive. Some of its lessons are familiar and reveal a history that played out across the United States. Jazz was part of a wave of African American music that boomed as the Great Migration pulled people from the South and into the rest of the country. As soon as cities felt that they could do without these musical cultures, they tried to obliterate them, and in most cases they forced them on the defensive for several decades. Not coincidentally, that period of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s marks the onset of a period of neoliberalism in cities when city leaders began to focus more on property values at the expense of everything else.
But there’s also been a tendency to turn older music scenes into museum pieces — “what was.” Cities like Kansas City, after they obliterated their jazz scenes in the 1950s have come back around to them in the last decade or two, seeing them as potential sources of revenue in the form of tourist dollars. These are often deeply rooted in a sense of nostalgia about the past; they also frequently struggle, and bypass the local music scenes that they depend on. Astroturfing a music scene rarely works: what developed in the 1940s and 1950s in Milwaukee happened organically, and it’s still happening that way today.
Regional culture is always supposed to be on its last legs: the internet or radio, if you want to examine an older fear, is supposed to be steadily homogenizing us and erasing these local cultures in the process. Groups like Milwaukee Jazz Vision show that reality is much more complex: rapid communication via the internet makes it possible for us to think that we know more than we really do about a place’s music.
Milwaukee’s history also teaches us that musical cultures do not simply cease to be: they wax and wane. Jazz in Milwaukee thrived in the 1940s and 1950s, declined because of the violence of urban renewal, and started to come back again in the 1980s. It’s never going to look the same as it once did, but that’s fitting. Jazz, after all, is improvisational.
Zeb Larson is a writer and historian based in Columbus, Ohio.
