Ricky Nye has more juggling expertise than a train car full of Ringling Bros. clowns. While he’s prepping for a pair of Raisins reunion shows, he’s simultaneously managing the details of staging the first Blues & Boogie Piano Summit since 2017, taking place at the venerable Memorial Hall on Nov. 8.
Nye organized the first Piano Summit in 1999 with no intention of turning it into an annual event. It began as a favor for his friend and colleague Carl Sonny Leyland, who returns to the bill this year after several previous Summit appearances. Nye’s friendship with Leyland dates back to the days of the early Arches Piano Stage shows held at the Cincy Blues Fest.
“Carl Sonny Leyland flipped the switch for me regarding getting into boogie-woogie,” says Nye over lunch at the Gaslight Bar & Grill. “Carl called me to say his wife’s cousin was getting married in Indianapolis and they were coming through town and he said, ‘Is there something you could set up for us?’ We were both friends of Big Joe Duskin, so I called Joe and he said, ‘Sure.’ I secured the Southgate House, the original location, on a Tuesday night, and then I got an email from Renaud Patigny, from Brussels, a friend I met at the Arches Stage in 1997. He stayed another whole week, came to all my gigs, came to my place to hang out. He was coming through Cincinnati on the day of the Summit, so I said, ‘If I pick you up at the airport, will you come to the show and play?'”
Nye spent five weeks assembling the Summit, complete with what he admits was a primitive promotional poster. When Patigny saw the poster, he delivered an appropriately abrupt assessment.
“He said, ‘Your poster is shit,‘” Nye recalls with a laugh. “He then pulled from his suitcase a poster for a series he was doing called “Brosella Boogie Woogie”— he had sponsors, was doing this twice a year — and said to me, ‘You can do it!'”
The following year, Nye had a poster professionally designed and got a handful of sponsors to offset costs. The biggest obstacle remained that he was the only one involved at every level of the operation.
“We had about 200-250 people,” Nye says.”The multitude of tasks just about killed me.”
By the third year, Nye’s brother Ken began assisting in handling some organizational aspects of the production, allowing Nye the opportunity to concentrate on necessary show details. Attendance went up dramatically.
In the sixth year, Nye attempted something radically different. He switched venues from Southgate House to Xavier University, with relatively disastrous results.
“I held it at Xavier because people said, ‘We want to bring our parents and our kids,'” Nye says. “I lost my ass due to low attendance, so it was back to the Southgate House. In the seventh year, it really took off.”
The last two years of the Summit were particularly harsh for external and self-inflicted reasons.
“The second to last year was the weekend before the 2016 election, and I think the public was feeling clenched,” says Nye. “Attendance was bad and I lost a lot of money. The next year, I had in mind to do a duets program which involved a little more dough; that bit it even harder. I couldn’t take the risk anymore, although I was actually thinking about making it to 20 years and then saying, ‘Thank you and good night!'”
The Summit was shuttered for 2018 and 2019, then Covid, lockdown and a bruised entertainment industry provided an alibi for the show’s absence in 2020 and 2021. Nye had largely set aside any thoughts of another Summit when he was contacted by Memorial Hall manager Joshua Steele about contributing to the venue’s Jazz at the Memo series.
“I’ve known Joshua since he was manager of the Carnegie arts center in Covington,” Nye says. Then Steele inquired about the long-dormant Boogie Summit, and Nye admitted that he was overwhelmed by the financial risk involved in the production.
“He said, ‘Let’s do it together. We’ll share the risk,'” says Nye. “To which I said, ‘Sold!’ And I will say this: The Southgate House, both locations, were excellent venues for the Boogie Summit. I’m very grateful to the late Ross Raleigh and his daughter Morella, who runs operations now.”
This year’s lineup features familiar names to fans of the Summit. Joining Nye on the bill are the aforementioned Leyland, formerly from Southampton, England, and now a California resident, local blues prodigy Ben Levin and husband-and-wife duo Ethan Leinwand and Valerie Kirchoff under the banner of the St. Louis Steady Grinders.
“Ethan specializes in barrelhouse, which is an intricate style. He’s an evangelist for this stuff,” says Nye. “He and his wife, Valerie, have this duo, and it’s ’20s and ’30s blues. It’s like stepping into a time machine. Having Ben on the bill is logical: a former student and current colleague, he’s 26 years old now and has become known worldwide as a leader on the bandstand and in the field of blues piano. Carl took part in the first Summit and several subsequent ones and has been a major influence for me. He’s extremely well-versed; along with traditional boogie-woogie, he plays ragtime, rockabilly, Western swing, traditional jazz and blues.”
The band that will accompany the players consists of drummer Josiah Wolf, upright bassist Matt McCoy and tenor/baritone saxophonist Eli Gonzalez, all of whom have earned Nye’s deep respect and effusive praise. The format for the Summit will be the first two pianists, then an intermission, then the next two pianists (some solo, some with the band) followed by the grand finale featuring all four pianists.
“The first two pianists will duet with the last two, so people will get that flavor and see two pianists interacting with this music,” says Nye. “The show is very entertaining. It’s not a clinic; it’s all about having a good time.”
Nye’s knowledge of the history and evolution of boogie-woogie and its adjacent subgenres and related but distinctly different styles is professorial and his passion is boundless. He can wax eloquent on progenitors like Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis and Jimmy Yancey, and yet humbly sees the role of himself and his colleagues in that lineage. But Nye knows that history is only part of the equation. The Summit is a way for the past to be translated and reconfigured for the future.
“My motivation is that, for some people, I’m their only glimpse into this way of playing piano,” says Nye. “It’s a big, wide world. I’m a little sliver of the pie, so if you think I’m good, check out my friends. You’ll see some very exceptional folks.”
Nye’s goal has always been to find the balance between honoring the past and shaping the future, and this new collaboration with Memorial Hall could energize him into continuing his involvement with The Blues & Boogie Summit well past its 20th anniversary.
“Sometimes people are fed something called “boogie-woogie,” but it’s not,” says Nye. “People that play in any style have to pay respect to tradition. You learn from the masters and then, through time, you find your voice. To find your voice is everything. Style is king. That’s the answer. That’s where you want to be.”
The Return of the Blues & Boogie Piano Summit takes place on Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. at Memorial Hall. More info: memorialhallotr.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Oct. 29 print edition.
This article appears in Oct. 29-Nov. 11.