Entertainment

The Rebirth of Cool

THE AFRO — There was a surreal scene in the swanky Harbor East community over the Memorial Day weekend. Billy Murphy, the legendary defense attorney was holding court outside of a new nightclub with a group of other men, still buzzing after witnessing a world class jazz performance by Baltimore native Cyrus Chestnut.

Published

7 years ago

June 11, 2019

Sean Yoes

Jazz musician and impresario Todd Barkan has brought world class Jazz back to Baltimore.

By Sean Yoes

There was a surreal scene in the swanky Harbor East community over the Memorial Day weekend.

Billy Murphy, the legendary defense attorney was holding court outside of a new nightclub with a group of other men, still buzzing after witnessing a world class jazz performance by Baltimore native Cyrus Chestnut.

What most don’t know about Murphy the iconic lawyer is that he is not just a jazz aficionado, he is an outstanding Jazz drummer; he really knows this music, the only organically American art form. And it has been decades since Murphy and other true lovers of the music have been serenaded by a Jazz titan like Chestnut in a club setting in Baltimore.

The wait is over, Keystone Korner has arrived.

“It was like a fait accompli, it’s like destiny,” said Todd Barkan, programming director/executive director of the Keystone, which opened in April. Barkan’s odyssey from Jazz pianist to co-owner of the Keystone Klub in Baltimore, began almost 50 years ago in Northern California. He purchased the original Keystone Klub in the North Beach community of San Francisco in 1972 and operated it until 1983.

“I built Keystone Korner into an internationally famous place, that had many famous live recordings; Rahsaan Roland Kirk, McCoy Tyner, Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Wynton Marsalis, all recorded live there,” Barkan said. Subsequently, Barkan opened Keystones in Oakland, Calif., and Tokyo.

Keystone Klassic: A classic 1975 marquee picture from the original Keystone Korner in San Francisco.

From the establishment of Keystone as a beacon for the Jazz world, Barkan moved on to New York as program director for Jazz at Lincoln Center from 1999 to 2012.

In April 2018, he was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts, Jazz Master award, an honor Barkan describes as, “the highest award in jazz in our country…it’s like the Nobel Prize for jazz.” The bestowing of the Jazz Master award (the other winners that year were Pat Metheny, Dianne Reeves and Joanne Brackeen), on Barkan led to an encounter with the man who would become his partner in bringing the legendary Keystone to Baltimore.

“The night before the big concert and ceremony at the Kennedy Center we had an awards dinner…and the owner of the awards dinner restaurant, Marcel’s, was a guy named Robert Wiedmaier,” Barkan said. “Well, he and I met and struck up wonderful and fast friendship and we decided to do something together.”

Wiedmaier, who owns the RW Restaurant Group, is a Michelin Star restaurateur who owns several upscale eateries. He was the second element of the Keystone equation, which has allowed the Baltimore incarnation to become a club, in Barkan’s words, “featuring the best food in the world and the best music in the world.” Wiedmaier owned the Mussel Bar and Grille (which had been closed for over a year because of the extensive construction taking place within that neighborhood) at Harbor East, the space that ultimately became the Keystone Klub Baltimore.

Prior to crafting the Keystone Klub in Baltimore with Wiedmaier, Barkan had only had a tangential relationship with the city. He had played at the Left Bank Jazz Society decades ago and his last performance here was at Ethel’s Place, the city’s last world class Jazz club owned by the highly venerated daughter of Baltimore Ethel Ennis, who died in February. Perhaps, it is divine the reconfiguring of Wiedmaier’s restaurant into the Keystone began that same month.

“I’m going to build up the strongest and best jazz club I can,” Barkan said. “That’s the best thing I can do for Baltimore is to make this club…as successful as can humanly be. And in so doing I’m doing a solid for the people of Baltimore. I want them to be able to come here any week of the year and hear five-star music…the people of Baltimore deserve that.”

This article originally appeared in The Afro.

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Arts and Culture

IN MEMORIAM: Oakland Dance Legend Reginald Ray-Savage, 67

Savage lived his life as tribute to the teachers who had shared their wisdom on art and life with him. With a palpably genuine enthusiasm and desire to bring out the best in people, and pass the torch to the next generation, he poured into his students, as his teachers and mentors had into him. His infectious energy, love of life, and generosity of spirit inspired countless souls, both inside and outside the dance studio.

Published

1 week ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Reginald Ray-Savage brought the old-school teaching techniques he learned in the Katherine Dunham Dance Company to the youth at the Oakland School for the Arts in 2003. Courtesy photo.

Special to The Post

Reginald Ray-Savage – dancer, choreographer, and beloved teacher, mentor, and inspiration to many – passed away on May 17. The Oakland School for the Arts dance instructor was 67.

Born Reginald Ray, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 5, 1958, he formally adopted the name ‘Savage,’ to honor the great Archie Savage, his mentor at Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center where his dance training journey began in East St. Louis, Illinois.

He soon started dancing professionally with Katherine Dunham Dance Company, making dance a way of life. His grit, tenacity, and notorious work ethic brought him scholarships to train at multiple prestigious dance institutions, including The Ailey School (NYC) and Ruth Page School of Dance (Chicago), under the direction of acclaimed ballet instructor Larry Long and Dolores Lipinski-Long.

He danced with several companies including Joel Hall Dance Company, Ruth Page Ballet Chicago, Lyric Opera, Chicago City Ballet, American Festival Ballet, and touring productions of “Music Man” and “A Chorus Line”.

In 1989, Savage moved to Oakland where he started teaching seven days a week, amassing a devoted following that was attracted to his no-nonsense, impassioned, and effective old-school teaching style.

In 1992, at the insistence of his committed core of students, he founded Savage Jazz Dance Company (SJDC). Over a span of 30 years, Savage produced more than 100 original works, and tour SJDC nationally and internationally, performing at Casa del Jazz in Rome to a packed house and rave reviews—the first dance company to receive such an invitation.

Savage built SJDC into one of the Bay Area’s most respected dance companies, creating a signature style known for its combination of disciplined training, blended with rich artistic musical expression, and raw energy.

In 2003, Savage joined the Oakland School for the Arts as chair of the School of Dance. Over the next two decades, he created, built, and maintained a strong dance program, recognized, and respected by other dance institutions for forging well-trained and resilient dancers and human beings.

The depth of Savage’s tough love and care, and the skill of his teaching and mentoring are reflected in the careers of his students who have gone on to dance with the San Francisco Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, Janet Jackson, Ariana Grande, and companies across the globe.

Mark Kitaoka, a photographer hired by Savage in 2016, posted a living eulogy on the dance instructor.

“When I see the self-pride he builds in his students I am constantly impressed that people like Savage still exist in our ‘meme’ society,” Kitaoka wrote. “The kids he mentors are fiercely loyal to one another and I’m certain his methods teach each of those kids to put aside social status, race and gender and is replaced by solid loyalty for other souls.

“What Savage contributes to our world cannot be completely summed up in a few meager paragraphs but can be seen in the countless lives of those he has touched. Because of him, our world, and the world of the future is both a richer and better place.

Reginald Ray-Savage will forever be missed, remembered, and lovingly quoted. He is survived by his beloved wife, Alison Hurley, his sister, Sonia, and his brothers, Pierre, and Andre. May his inextinguishable spirit and impact live on in all the lives he touched.

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Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

Published

2 weeks ago

June 20, 2026

Oakland Post

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Books

Book Review: Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me

Though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

bpusa-syndication

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, SRP: $29.00, Page Count: 304 pages

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to be a lively discussion, but unintentionally it quickly veered off course. When a White student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet, and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a White world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her.

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly.

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often.

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay for certain people to say it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend. It is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language – and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.