Jake’s work here has included lots of networking efforts behind the scenes, but he has also written columns every two weeks for the Savannah Morning News and has overseen The Creative Coast’s excellent blog, which has included many guest posts.

The sum of these efforts has been to point out positive, sometimes progressive, sometimes unfamiliar developments to the broader community

Jake’s column yesterday — Eat a Peach — Savannah Style — is a great example.

He spotlights “a few noteworthy individuals who are making positive impacts on Savannah in their own unique ways.” Hodesh manages in the column to spotlight quite a few, beginning with Kristin Russell, Teri Schell, and all the folks who have made the Forsyth Farmers’ Market take off.

He then moves to Rene Tran and the Well Fed movement, Kay Wolfensberger of The Maker Collective, the coffee scenemakers, and the public efforts of artists Matt Hebermehl and Katherine Sandoz.

Jake also talks about the music scene:

Sticking with the theme of revolutions, letâ€s talk about music. Bill Dawers, the most prolific attender of happenings I know, has an incredible blog covering the Savannah music scene better than anyone in the region. If you care about Savannah music, stay tuned to www.billdawers.com.

Kayne Lanahanâ€s Savannah Stopover Music Festival solidifies the spring as the best season to be in Savannah. Kayne has transformed a simple idea into a movement, and her festival has grown into a regional powerhouse of great music. Stay tuned for bigger and better acts in 2013.

Blake Olmstead and Peter Mavrogeorgis†recent opening of Dollhouse Studios is not only a world-class recording facility but an incredible place to hang while watching fantastic emerging acts. Itâ€s exciting that Blake and Peter have committed time, money and energy to producing a state-of-the-art music facility in Savannah.

Savannah Unplugged covers a pretty wide range of topics, but I’m obviously pleased that anyone would think that the music category alone would be worth such a nice plug.

But we still need more people writing about Savannah’s rich, varied, unpredictable music scene.

And we just need more voices doing what Jake has been doing — looking for things that enrich the community and then spreading the word about them. Too many Savannahians — especially young, optimistic, well-educated ones who could enrich quality of life in myriad ways — are only tangentially connected with consistent sources of quality information about the local scene(s).

I see the problem firsthand in the general unawareness of local developments among the college students I teach and in the media selectivity of those who read my columns but have no idea that I have a blog — or vice versa. One of the nicest messages I’ve gotten in a long time was from a young musician who loves my blog but had no idea that I’m a newspaper columnist — much less one with over 1,500 published columns.

We’ll miss Jake’s upbeat voice and realistic perspective about what can or can’t succeed here, but here’s hoping that other voices proliferate, filling that void — and then some.

According to a press release:

Jake Hodesh, the executive director of The Creative Coast, has been recruited to serve as the director of mentoring for Cintrifuse, a Cincinnati-based organization that proactively links entrepreneurs with strategic businesses to launch high-growth startups. Hodesh will start his new position in February of 2013.

“The fact that Jake was recruited underscores the fact that The Creative Coast is doing strong, impressive work and capturing national attention,” said Susan Isaacs, chair of the board of directors for The Creative Coast. “Weâ€re on the right path and must continue the good work.”

Hodesh successfully transitioned the organization from The Creative Coast Alliance to The Creative Coast. In 2012, The Creative Coast hosted TEDxCreativeCoast, the FastPitch Competition, StartUp Lounge and monthly Free Advice Friday sessions and initiated several projects for the creative entrepreneurial community. The organization also consulted with more than 400 local companies and individuals and helped fill 140 local jobs through the Creative Coast web site. Hodesh will continue to serve The Creative Coast by being a member of its board of directors in 2013.

The announcement has already gotten some nice press from Cincinnati’s Business Courier.

Jake’s a Cincinnati native and I join many other Savannah residents in wishing him well and thanking him for his fine work. Hodesh has been an upbeat figure — and has taken full advantage of the networking potential of the Creative Coast. He has consistently drawn attention to the importance of understanding the civic interplay of the arts, livability, and knowledge-based businesses.

From the press release description of The Creative Coast and its mission:

The Creative Coast was originally founded in 1997 by a group of volunteers as CBETA (Coastal Business & Technology Alliance of Savannah). In 2004, under the leadership of Chris Miller, the name changed to The Creative Coast Initiative. Today, The Creative Coast has a stronger foundation and deeper understanding of the community it serves with an autonomous independent board of directors and funding through the City of Savannah and the Savannah Economic Development Authority.

Despite assurances that the Creative Coast is on firm footing, it seems clear that much will hinge on finding just the right replacement for Jake.

In a post last week, Savannah Red asked, “What Is The Savannah Sound?”

Reflecting on a recent experience with the live music scene in Nashville , he added:

So does Savannah have a sound? And if not, shouldn’t it–especially if gathering creative people here matters to increase the city’s entrepreneurship?

By comparison with cities like Nashville and Austin, Savannah’s live music scene seems “fragmented and diffuse”, according to Savannah Red. As pretty clear evidence, he even does a fascinating percentage breakdown of the various genres of live music listed by Connect Savannah for Saturday, August 4. Savannah Red mentions only Nashville and Austin, but we could add other cities — New Orleans, Brooklyn, Athens, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore, and so on — to the list for their signature scenes now or in the recent past.

So let me take a long, roundabout stab (if there is such a thing) at those two questions: Does Savannah have a sound? And if not, shouldn’t it?

Consider the acts I heard last Friday night.

I caught a great act from Lansing at The Sentient Bean — I already posted pics and wrote a little bit about that great set from Doug Mains & The City Folk in a previous post.

Sauna Heat at The Sentient Bean

The opener at the Bean that night was Sauna Heat, a summer side project of Michael Younker from Triathalon. Two other Triathalon regulars were on stage — Hunter Jayne and Chad Chilton — plus a woman with a saw. (Name, anyone?)

Michael has been experimenting with a lot of reverb in the vocals, so for this even more experimental short gig he sang through an old telephone handset. There were passages with similarities to Triathalon’s fabulous surf rock (listen here), which most music lovers in Savannah haven’t heard. The full band has played a couple of higher-profile shows, including opening for CUSSES at The Jinx and doing at great set at Locos during the 2012 Savannah Stopover. But half the members of Triathalon literally just turned 21, so they haven’t been old enough to immerse themselves in the live music scene as they should have been doing. They simply haven’t had legal access to the key venues. That’s a direct and predictable result of an unnecessary and counter-productive ordinance enacted by Savannah City Council a number of years ago under the illusion of crime control.

Corey Barhorst of Tonto at The Jinx

But back to Friday night. After a stop at my second home — American Legion Post #135 — I headed to The Jinx, where the opening band Tonto was playing their first announced public gig. A power trio with lead vocalist and guitarist Anders Thomsen (formerly of the alt-country The Ex-Husbands and now guitarist for the outlaw country of Damon and the Shitkickers), bassist Corey Barhorst (formerly with metal band Kylesa and now with Niche), and drummer Lee Vallier, who also plays “Southern/Heavy Rock” with Bear Fight. Tonto’s sound is a kind of straight ahead rock and roll that I hear pretty rarely in Savannah. Click here for “Jet Plane Jane”.

Jason Bible, Eric Dunn, and Ricardo Ochoa with The Train Wrecks at The Jinx

The Train Wrecks were up next — one of the city’s tightest, best known, and hardest working bands. On the band’s Facebook page, they bill themselves as “Americana, alt.country, Rockabilly, Rock”. They play sometimes as a six-piece, and were joined on stage Saturday by Ricardo Ochoa, a violinist with the defunct Savannah Symphony and the leader of the jazzy combo Velvet Caravan that has been playing regular gigs around town too.

I’ve gone into so much detail about those Friday night performances not because they were remarkable — and they were in some ways — but because they were so typical. We have many musicians in town who cross genres routinely, and do so with seeming ease.

Many of the city’s players are friends with each other too — a real community who support each other, no matter the genre. At least for those 21 and over.

In recent years, Savannah’s music scene has probably attracted the most national and international attention because of a cluster of standout metal bands. Metal continues to be really popular among some of the under-21 set, but as I noted above, that demographic is largely separated from the larger Savannah music community. There’s a strain of Americana that’s really popular here, plus there’s the ongoing popularity of a few big rock bands. We have excellent but limited blues too, and a few American songbook performers. We have some good performers that I consider indie rock for want of a better term.

As Savannah Red notes, there’s relatively little jazz to be found most nights, and even less hip hop — at least not in venues that I routinely hear about.

I could go on and on, and I apologize to acts — and even to genres — that haven’t been mentioned.

With so many musicians comfortable crossing genres and so many bands apparently thriving (artistically if not financially), is it a problem that Savannah lacks a clearly identifiable sound?

Savannah Red cites a Savannah Morning News column by the Creative Coast’s Jake Hodesh about Austin’s scene compared to Savannah’s. That’s definitely worth a visit and so is this great guest post on the Creative Coast blog last February by Savannah Stopover founder and CEO Kayne Lanahan: In Search Of A Music Scene. The first on Kayne’s top 10 list of “music market factors”:

A community of musicians and bands that support each other, often share members, and are proud to be “from” their city. In some markets like Baltimore and Brooklyn, this has resulted in a recognizable “sound” associated with the music scene.

Musicians are clustering together in Savannah and supporting each other, a key element for creating a stronger scene, which would seem inevitably to pull certain sounds together. And I guess you could say that we have a prevailing sound that’s somewhere between metal, southern rock, blues, and country. But that’s not saying much, is it?

And it gets clearer to me all the time that many Savannah fans have far narrower tastes than the players. I guess it’s not surprising that fans would balkanize themselves by genre and sometimes by venue, that they would retreat into their comfort zones so regularly, but the trend makes it hard to get the word out and even harder to get butts in the door. That’s especially true in a city the size of Savannah, which is much smaller than all the cities mentioned here.

I relish the sheer diversity of acts, but the diffuse nature of the scene would make it hard to establish a great indy label, which is another of the 10 elements that Kayne mentions in her post. It would also make it hard to ensure the success of the larger venue that many of us envision.

We don’t have much in the way of music blogs either –yet  another of the elements Kayne lists. The dearth is a constant surprise to me given the number of knowledgable music fans I know in this town. I think the Savannah Morning News and Connect Savannah both do strong work routinely in covering local and touring acts, but a casual visitor or a newly arrived resident might have an especially hard time combining so many disparate elements into a more cohesive whole. Pretty much all the venues could improve their messaging too.

I’m not suggesting that we try to limit the choices in the current scene, or try to streamline programming in any way.

Fans, music writers, musicians, music professionals, venue programmers, and municipal leaders — we all need to do a better job of making connections between the disparate elements that make up our current scene and sound.

I put those few objections into the broader context of Savannah’s history of letting a very small number of objectors have a great deal of control over civic decisions they know amazingly little about:

A few squeaky wheels nearly killed the much-needed rezoning of Thomas Square, which was finally adopted in 2005.

A few years ago, there were fears that permitting wine service at a downtown café would turn the neighborhood into St. Patrickâ€s Day every day. A handful of worried folks pushed design modifications that severely limited the quality of the stage in Forsyth Park.

I could go on and on — and on and on — with similar examples.

I wrote about the design pressures on the stage in Forsyth in Good intentions + Conflicting agendas = Bad design.

Here’s Richard Florida from “Revenge of the Squelchers”:

What distinguishes thriving cities from those that stagnate and decline is a group of people [Jane Jacobs] calls the “squelchers.” Squelchers, she explains, are those political, business, and civic leaders that divert human creative energy by posing roadblocks and saying “no” to new ideas.

In his Savannah Morning News column today — Are we regulating ourselves into a corner? — Creative Coast director Jake Hodesh mentions some examples of squelchers at work:

• A battle over public art along the Waters Avenue corridor and how the complaints of a few can influence the opportunities and visions of many.

• Regulations plaguing an aspiring quadracycle entrepreneur and how government regulation could cause the demise of her business.

• Arguments against a $26 million-plus development along Victory Drive and how the ongoing battle could cause future developers to think twice about investing in Savannah.

Jake frames the column largely by thinking about needless regulation, but I’d add that those regulations and extra layers of bureaucracy are a direct result of a very small number of people who object loudly to the new, often irrationally, and who are given far too much power in decision-making.

Jake appropriately juxtaposes those examples with the entrepreneurial spirit at last Friday’s TEDxCreativeCoast and notes that Savannah’s prospects will be limited by such public battles that could frighten off investment and creativity.

The Savannah metro area has lost 2700 payrolls jobs since April 2011 and we’re still far off the 2007 peak of employment.

We are just shooting ourselves in both feet if we continue to do business as usual.