Ed Hrybyk: A Jazz Bassist Buoyed by Bright Moments

The moment I was at a party and read a guy declare that dwell songs was dead. As a touring musician and live performance organizer, I had to interject. “No it is not! There are exhibits taking place all the time!”

“Then explain to me the place I can go see some are living jazz tonight,” the male challenged me.

I was stumped. I beloved jazz, but I was a lot more tapped into Baltimore’s underground and experimental music scene, so I could not give him a great respond to. Our debate remaining me curious. But before long soon after our exchange, the pandemic began and brought almost everything to a standstill. The new music market took a huge hit, but stay new music was not lifeless. Comatose, maybe. Musicians and audio lovers have been just ready for conditions to shift, recognizing there would be a reside audio revival.

Baltimore musician Ed Hrybyk felt the impression not only as a performer but as a jazz teacher. A Baltimore University for the Arts 2006 graduate, Hrybyk returned as a jazz teacher in 2018. He commonly attended jazz jams with his students so that they could operate on their chops. “The standard product has been to perform in a bar on an off evening,” Hrybyk explained, which means a Monday or Tuesday, in the course of a musician’s weekend.  But in 2020, “we went from 3-4 jams a week to ZERO. On-line jam classes have been hilarious… nothing labored.”

For the duration of the pandemic, he used more than a yr conducting digital classes. “I was in my basement, they had been on the other side of the monitor,” he recalls. “Teaching jazz to very accomplished substantial schoolers with out basically playing jazz with them was a authentic problem. Now I can do that very effectively with guitar, bass, trombone, saxophone, but I struggled with the drummers. It is the middle of the day, everybody’s residence, their mothers and fathers are undertaking operate at house, their siblings are at home, how can I get them to enjoy?”

The response was to get out of the basement, off of the screen, and somewhere in individual. In September 2020, Hrybyk took a downsized drum kit to a local park and told his drumming college students to show up with sticks. What commenced as a jam opportunity for his pupils eventually remodeled into a reliable tunes series – The Baltimore Jazz Jam, each and every Tuesday in a metropolis park – temperature permitting.