CHEROKEE, Iowa | A promoter of the Cherokee Jazz & Blues Festival takes a call over coffee at The Copper Cup in downtown Cherokee. He talks up venues, ticket sales and a promotional appearance he'll do to beat the drum for an event that annually brings 1,000 music fans to his hometown.
The funny thing? He's no musician. This 69-year-old traded his piano for a basketball in fifth grade.
"I took piano lessons from a nun at Cherokee Immaculate Conception School until fifth grade," says Jim Adamson, the leader of Cherokee's band of jazz enthusiasts. "My mom said, 'Jimmy, you're going to regret this!'"
Took 39 years for Ruth Adamson's warning to prove prophetic. Happened during Cherokee's inaugural Jazz Festival in 1992. Adamson, who dabbles in photography, stood on a bench at The Gasthaus Bar & Grille to take overhead pictures of a band wowing the crowd. Thoughts of his late sister and late parents filled his head. While his father died in 1968, his mother and sister had both died in a year prior to the jazz event.
People are also reading…
"My God, this music is powerful," he remembers saying. Standing on the bench, he began to cry.
"The tears came as I listened," Adamson says. "The music that night brought home to me how bound up with grief I was. At that point, I said I'd help with the Jazz Festival in any way I could."
Try as he might, Adamson and Jazz Festival founder R.J. Baker, then executive director of the Cherokee Area Economic Development Corp., couldn't keep the celebration afloat. Events in 1992 and 1993 lost money. Asking donors to fund a bash that couldn't break even became fruitless. The music didn't die, as a Don McLean song says, it lay comatose for 10 years.
Adamson didn't sit at home during this period. He kept working on a variety of Cherokee projects, notably the restoration of the historic depot downtown.
The music rebirth came over drinks shared at The Gasthaus by Adamson and Dan Meloy, an attorney in Cherokee. Adamson, a psychiatric social worker at Cherokee Mental Health Institute, had recently retired. Meloy suggested they re-start the Cherokee Jazz Festival, giving Baker's dream to bring folks to Cherokee -- in January of all months -- one more shot.
That was one full decade of Cherokee jazz ago.
Several breaks have gone this party's way since then. Organizers found a signature attraction in trumpeter Mark Pender, of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." The Jim Oatts Quintet worked -- and still does -- with middle school and high school jazz units at Cherokee Middle School, helping students tune-up for upcoming jazz competitions.
And, Adamson kept his non-musical director's hands in motion for this entertaining cause. "I try to use what influence I can for the Jazz Festival," he admits.
Case in point: Adamson attends a wedding reception at The Gathering Place in Cherokee a couple of summers ago. The mother of the groom sits at the piano and plays. Adamson listens, makes a judgment and pounces. "Will you come to Cherokee in January?" he asks.
The invitation came full circle this winter when Sherri Cafaro, the mother of the groom, toted her Sherri Cafaro Trio to The Gathering Place for a three-hour show. She was joined by her son, the groom, Joseph Cafaro.
It's but one weekend of music in Cherokee, a place where jazz, country and a variety of notes fill downtown year-round.
This Cherokee Jazz & Blues Festival, the town's signature music celebration, is a $13,000 event built on the backs of super passes sold by Adamson and his volunteers. Those passes ensure a family admission to any event.
"We tell people that if they were to take their family to Chicago or Kansas City for a weekend of music like this, they'd spend a lot more than $250," Adamson says, striking an apologetic promotional tone. "Plus, they're doing something that's bringing people and some excitement to their community."
