By DEBORA SHAULIS

By DEBORA SHAULIS
ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
T'S CALLED THE TRI-C JAZZ FEST CLEVELAND --Tri-C stands for Cuyahoga Community College -- but local connections are plentiful this year.
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Tri-C Jazz Fest Cleveland, which begins Wednesday, related art exhibits are already on display at Cleveland Museum of Art. One of those shows, "Burchfield to Schreckengost: Cleveland Art of the Jazz Age," features works by artists who were born in Mahoning and Columbiana counties.
YSU group
As for live music, Youngstown State University Jazz Ensemble I will perform April 24 in the DownBeat Rising Stars Invitational Concert at Tri-C's Metro Campus. DownBeat is a respected jazz magazine. The YSU musicians will join Berklee College Jazz Orchestra, Tri-C Jazz Studies Alumni Ensemble and others in what's being billed as "the future of jazz" and "a showcase of hot young talent."
This won't be YSU Jazz Ensemble 1's first time at Tri-C Jazz Fest. Jazz studies director and YSU alumnus Kent Engelhardt says YSU's participation in the festival dates back at least 20 years, when he was a student. "We played with [trumpeter] Clark Terry and [drummer] Louis Bellson," Engelhardt recalled.
Engelhardt and company were asked to prepare music for the April 24 concert by two festival honorees, Horace Silver and Tadd Dameron.
About the stars
Silver, a composer and pianist, was nicknamed "The Hardbop Grandpop" because he was among the first to combine rhythm & amp; blues, gospel and jazz into what's called the Hard Bop sound.
Dameron was a Cleveland-born composer who wrote arrangements for Sarah Vaughan; composed "Soulphony," which Dizzy Gillespie performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1948; and was co-band leader with Miles Davis at the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949.
YSU Jazz Ensemble 1 also will have "the very unique opportunity to perform with saxophonist Jimmy Heath," Engelhardt said. Heath was a childhood friend of the late, great John Coltrane. Heath is "one of the living legends of be-bop saxophone," said Engelhardt, himself a saxophonist.
YSU's student musicians will be keeping good company at the DownBeat Invitational. Berklee College Jazz Orchestra is from Berklee College of Music in Boston, which has been "one of the leaders in jazz education," Engelhardt said. "Berklee was probably the first really well-known school to dedicate itself to study of jazz and popular music only."
Two weeks of music
The musical portion of Tri-C Jazz Fest Cleveland is largely condensed into two weeks. The artistic aspect will be on display through July 18 at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Record producer and Cleveland native Tommy LiPuma is the focus of "Modern American Masters: Highlights of the Gill and Tommy LiPuma Collection." It's a two-pronged show, with pieces from the couple's private collection of 20th century American art and a selection of Tommy LiPuma's career memorabilia -- including gold records, album covers, photographs and one of the Grammy Awards he received.
Modern masters
"Burchfield to Schreckengost: Cleveland Art of the Jazz Age" is in conjunction with the "Modern American Masters" show. The museum chose 66 pieces that were produced by leaders of the Cleveland art scene between 1914 and 1941 -- the incubation period for American jazz music.
Charles Burchfield was born in 1893 in Ashtabula Harbor. His boyhood home in Salem is managed by Burchfield Homestead Society and was added to the National Register of Historical Places in 1999. Burchfield studied at Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art) and later taught at Art Institute of Buffalo and University of Buffalo in New York. His reputation in the art world is based on the symbolism he used in his paintings -- his specialty was outdoor scenes -- and his realistic, emotional world view that he communicated on canvas.
Now in his 90s, Viktor Schreckengost was born in Sebring, in western Mahoning County. He learned sculpting from his father, who was a potter. He, too, studied at Cleveland Institute of Art, intending to be a cartoonist but switching to ceramics. He graduated in 1929 and went to Vienna, Austria, to hone his ceramics skills (where, interestingly, he also gained fame as a jazz saxophonist).
Schreckengost is credited with many things: the first line of modern dinnerware to be mass-produced; the first truck with a cab over its engine; and many products for Murray Bicycles, Sears, General Electric, Salem China Co. and Harris Printing, according to the Cleveland Museum of Art Web site.
CMA director Katharine Lee Reid calls Schreckengost "the last major surviving figure from the first age of industrial design."
shaulis@vindy.com