Hingetown Jazz Festival
Various venues
Cleveland, OH
August 30, 2025

It would surprise no one if this review of the third Hingetown Jazz Festival in Cleveland began, as such pieces often do, by noting how the festival has grown. But that would not exactly be accurate.

By the most common measure of such things, the size of the audience, this year's audience looked a lot like 2024's (this writer was not at the inaugural edition). Yet bigger doesn't always mean better, and like a bordelaise sauce patiently reduced until its flavors are vividly concentrated, Hingetown 2025 made an impressive statement.

Amber Rogers, an orchestral violist and arts administrator, and Daniel Bruce, a guitarist whose wide-ranging practice is rooted in jazz, conceived of the festival as an approachable, human-scaled showcase for local musicians, more block party than Coachellian spectacle.

Not more than a two-minute walk separated the three venues in the hip, rapidly gentrifying Cleveland neighborhood from which the festival takes its name. That made it possible to see most of the ten 45-minute sets that began at 3 p.m. and ended at 9:30.

It was canny programming to begin the day with a performance by Pulse, a saxophone quartet that represented the absolute middle of the middle-of-the-road in current jazz practice—and did so with unselfconscious accomplishment and admirable unity of purpose. The band's unruffled aplomb and discipline were tested on the outdoor patio of the BOP STOP when, during the set's first ballad, the fighter jets of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds screamed overhead in a Cleveland Air Show performance. "They were so loud that except for our drummer, we stopped playing," saxophonist