Ed Hrybyk: A Jazz Bassist Buoyed by Bright Moments

When I was at a bash and read a man declare that stay music was dead. As a touring musician and concert organizer, I had to interject. “No it isn’t! There are exhibits taking place all the time!”

“Then notify me in which I can go see some live jazz tonight,” the person challenged me.

I was stumped. I liked jazz, but I was a lot more tapped into Baltimore’s underground and experimental tunes scene, so I could not give him a excellent answer. Our discussion still left me curious. But soon immediately after our trade, the pandemic commenced and brought every thing to a standstill. The songs marketplace took a massive strike, but stay music wasn’t useless. Comatose, possibly. Musicians and music fans ended up just waiting for situation to shift, recognizing there would be a dwell audio revival.

Baltimore musician Ed Hrybyk felt the effects not only as a performer but as a jazz trainer. A Baltimore University for the Arts 2006 graduate, Hrybyk returned as a jazz instructor in 2018. He commonly attended jazz jams with his pupils so that they could get the job done on their chops. “The common design has been to play in a bar on an off night time,” Hrybyk explained, indicating 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 sessions ended up hilarious… almost nothing labored.”

All through the pandemic, he used more than a yr conducting virtual classes. “I was in my basement, they ended up on the other aspect of the screen,” he remembers. “Teaching jazz to quite completed high schoolers with no essentially enjoying jazz with them was a actual obstacle. Now I can do that quite well with guitar, bass, trombone, saxophone, but I struggled with the drummers. It is the center of the working day, everybody’s home, their mothers and fathers are executing operate at property, their siblings are at home, how can I get them to participate in?”

The response was to get out of the basement, off of the monitor, and someplace in individual. In September 2020, Hrybyk took a downsized drum kit to a regional park and instructed his drumming students to present up with sticks. What began as a jam opportunity for his learners finally remodeled into a strong songs series – The Baltimore Jazz Jam, just about every Tuesday in a city park – weather permitting.