After years of holding down the low end in other people’s bands, bassist and composer Kevin Martinez decided it was finally time to make his own statement.
Martinez, a native of Northampton, Ohio, grew up surrounded by music.
His father, Chuck, was a guitarist active in Northeast Ohio’s blues-rock scene since the late 1970s.
As a kid, Martinez dreamed of being a rock star, first picking up the guitar to play Nirvana songs before switching to bass so he could join a band.
At Woodridge High School, strong music teachers introduced him to both jazz and orchestral playing, sparking a deeper interest in composition.
That foundation carried him to Chicago in 2001, where he studied music performance at Columbia College Chicago and earned a master’s in composition at DePaul University.
The city shaped him both as a bassist and as a composer.
“I started getting Bass Player Magazine, and a lot of it was upright bass and jazz,” he said. “I would look for Ray Brown or Charles Mingus or these names I was learning. I was really trying to listen to all the bassists I could find.”
In Chicago, Martinez immersed himself in the jazz scene and toured nationally with the Chicago Afrobeat Project.
“I guess Ohio is like the nature of my music life and Chicago was the nurture,” Martinez said.
Returning to jazz
By 2010, he was back in Cleveland, where he quickly found his way into multiple corners of the city’s music community, from indie to art rock and folk.
He started playing with singer-songwriter Roger Hoover and popular Cleveland band the Speedbumps.
“Shortly after I moved back here, I ended up kind of falling into a different music scene than jazz … So almost back to my roots, but different,” he said.
While hitting stages in Ohio and beyond, Martinez met prolific Cleveland drummer, composer and bandleader Anthony Taddeo.
“He’s like, ‘You play upright bass and you play jazz. How do I not know your name?’” Martinez said. “I met Anthony, and that’s how I came back to jazz, really.”
Taddeo and other players have been helping revive local jazz spaces like the Bop Stop.
By the late 2010s, Martinez said he was fully in the jazz scene and ready to lead his own ensemble.
Debuting his own project
He launched Reclamation Band as a quartet, with two horns, drums and bass.
“If you don’t carve the time for that, you can just be real busy and have a really fun time playing as a side man for other people’s projects,” he said.
But as life and the pandemic disrupted momentum, he found himself reconsidering what he wanted out of music.
“In hindsight, it gave me a wonderful opportunity to really think about why I wanted to do it, what I wanted do with it,” he said. “And it’s like, “I really wanna make an album of my own.’”
That became “These Roads,” recorded in June 2023 and released on Halloween of that year.
Martinez wrote all of the parts, though he leaves space for improvisation.
The sextet version of Reclamation Band — Martinez on bass, Taddeo on drums, Dan Bruce on guitar, Chris Coles on alto sax, Tim McDonald on tenor sax and Tony Spicer on bass clarinet — interprets his compositions, which Martinez often begins writing on his instrument.
The album’s title track is inspired by the Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s winding roads.
“I guess Ohio is like the nature of my music life and Chicago was the nurture."Kevin Martinez
“I learned to drive a car on all those roads, because I grew up in that area. It’s always been my place to go,” Martinez said.
The band has been described as “modern jazz with an open rural backdrop,” a phrase Martinez embraces.
“A lot of the music that I most love is jazz that has an open rural landscape — when a song has a certain amount of space in it,” he said.
His background playing folk, blues and roots music inspired melodies on the album.
“’These Roads’ is a good example. That melody and the chords for that could be a folk song,” he said. “It would feel like driving across a landscape. It would feel like something natural.”
Returning to regular performance
The band’s name, Reclamation Band, has taken on deeper meaning over time.
“I like the band name because it can mean a lot of different things, but all the things I find it meaning to me are things that I resonate with,” he said.
What began as a four piece in 2020 has impacted Martinez’s worldview during a pivotal time in history and as a musician.
“I think now if anything’s going to get better, societally, it’s not just going to be given to us, obviously,” he said. “At this point, we’re going to have to go reclaim it.”
Martinez is working on new music and pushing himself to bring the band on stage more often.
“At the end of the year last year, I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, we only played I think three times.’ So I made a literal New Year’s resolution to just try to book a gig every month,” he said.
That resolve has brought Reclamation Band to the Hingetown Jazz Festival, where they’ll close out the free, all-day event Aug. 30.
The festival takes place at various venues around Ohio City, including the Bop Stop where Martinez returned to his love of jazz.
He said bringing music to cities is crucial, but especially in Cleveland, which he said is “a city of neighborhoods.”
“Bringing it to the community, the neighborhood model is probably the best way to do that,” he said. “I think Hingetown is really forging a path that I hope sticks around for a long time.”
