His voice ranged from rich and mellifluous to rich and stentorian. Longtime Cleveland reporter and jazz historian Joe Mosbrook has died at age 91.
“I made sure to never talk before or after Joe spoke, because after his great baritone the rest of us all sounded like Mickey Mouse,” said Dan Polletta, senior host and producer for Ideastream Public Media’s JazzNEO.
Mosbrook’s first career was as a politics and government reporter on WKYC. Yet jazz was his passion. He hosted “Cleveland Jazz History” for 33 years on WCPN.
“When we began airing the segments in 1988, I thought 'How long can Joe keep finding new material?’” Polletta said. “I’m amazed at how Joe brought us new stories and was able to tell them in such a concise and entertaining manner. I can’t tell you how many music sets I built around those segments.”
Working for NBC radio and television, Mosbrook covered everything from the Sam Sheppard murder trial to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to the elections of Cleveland Mayors Carl Stokes, Ralph Perk, Dennis Kucinich and George Voinovich. During a 35-year tenure at WKYC, he even survived a crash of the station’s news chopper in 1981. The station’s obituary included his remembrance of what happened.
"The helicopter started to take off,” he said in 1998. “He (the pilot) moved around to get away from some wires and we were maybe 10 or 15 feet off the ground. And the helicopter just went over.”
Mosbrook was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and began his broadcasting career at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he began to seek out jazz records. In the mid-1980s, he realized that little of Cleveland’s jazz history had been documented.
“I think a big part of it was that in the '30s and '40s, Cleveland was a major stop on the big band circuit,” he said in 2019. “All the bands would come to Cleveland, they would play at the Palace Theatre for a week at a time. Some of the old musicians told me that when they were here, kids would cut school and go down all day long and listen to these bands. They would play four or five times a day for a week, right between showings of a movie. These kids would come in and they'd stay all day long listening to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman.”
He eventually authored two books on the city’s jazz heritage and served tenures on the boards of the Northeast Ohio Jazz Society and Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. Yet, he was not a musician himself.
“One time, when I was in college, I had a fraternity friend who had a band, and they got a gig at some girls’ school for a dance,” he said. “He knew I was interested in jazz, he said, ‘Come on, Joe, our bass player got sick. We want you to play bass.’ I didn't have any idea at all how to play bass, but I stood there pretending I was playing this thing and my fingers got bloody. At the end of the night, they said, ‘Take a solo.’ I plucked a couple of strings and smiled.”
Mosbrook received the Central Great Lakes Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Silver Circle Award in 1996, and he also served several terms as president of the Cleveland broadcasters' union. His wife, Elaine, passed in 2016. They're survived by their children Nancy, Joe, Susan and Charlie, who said his father instilled in them a love for music.
"I really enjoyed recording music, and as a kid he taught me how to splice tape," he said. "Then later on in life, I taught him how to use some of the digital editing software. So we shared a love for audio production."
Charlie is now a renowned folk musician. He also uses a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury. He recalled his parents taking him to sing for MetroHealth patients each month. They would also commiserate with people going through similar issues. Mosbrook entered hospice earlier this month, and Charlie recalled his reaction to the presidential election.
"He woke up and looked at my older sister and I and said, 'Who won?'" Charlie said. "He hadn't spoken to anybody in 14 hours. And we told him it didn't go as we had hoped. And he rolled his eyes. Then Tom Beres came in a couple of days later. He recognized Tom, became very alert and his voice became very full and he wanted to have a full-on political conversation."
Charlie said he'll remember his father as a "fair, kind, objective human being" and said the best way to honor his memory is, "Go listen to some Louis Armstrong, smile and just think of my dad."
