Dana Murray climbed behind a professional drum set for the first time in the summer of 1983. He was 12 years old, perched behind a kit that felt a “mile high” on stage at Omaha’s old Civic Auditorium.

Hours later with a professional at the helm, those drums sounded the beat as Marvin Gaye sang “Sexual Healing” and other hits.

Murray had no way of knowing it then, but that night launched a journey that took him around the world and eventually back home, where he leads North Omaha Music & Arts.

Part arts academy and part jazz destination, the fledgling nonprofit aims to give area kids the same opportunities and foundational skills that allowed Murray to flourish as a professional musician performing with the likes of jazz great Wynton Marsalis.

NOMA’s home at 24th and Lake streets — the former site of Love’s Jazz and Art Center — has emerged as a haven for musicians, young and old, from across Omaha.

The importance of that dual-track mission, and its ultimate success, extends beyond music, said Preston Love Jr., a community elder and son of jazz legend Preston Love Sr., for whom the Love Center was named. Without a thriving arts scene, Love said, North Omaha’s recent progress  will fall short.

“It’s critical for that aspect of the community to be present and accepted, because what’s happening in North Omaha is we’re like the phoenix on the rise,” Love said. “We’re growing up economically … but we need to have all aspects of the community on point.”

NOMA also provides Murray a forum to share the wisdom he gained that day when his biological father, who was Gaye’s tour manager, took him behind the scenes at the Civic Auditorium.

Young Dana watched and listened as the band meticulously dialed in the sound system. The drummer asked him, “Hey, li’l man, how much you practice?”

“I said, proud, chest out, ‘Twenty minutes a day,’” Murray recalled.

The drummer wasn’t impressed. Murray asked him how much he practiced when he was a kid.

“He said there were never enough hours in the day.”

Practicing all day, that’s the commitment it takes to become a professional, the drummer told him.

“I was inspired,” Murray said. “I wanted to do that.”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Murray sat at an electronic drum set in a newly renovated studio education space in NOMA’s headquarters. Eight Omaha kids surrounded him. The children, part of NOMA’s inaugural summer music camp classes, sat on stools at new, state-of-the-art electronic drum sets. They wore headphones to help them focus on Murray’s instruction and keep out distractions.

The children were new at this. Some of them could barely reach the bass drum pedal. Murray played a video of the jazz band Ghost-Note. He set about teaching the kids the song’s basic beat.

“Hit your snare drum with your left hand,” he instructed.

They all struck the snare, but half of them used their right hand. So Murray went back further.

“Everybody hold up your right hand,” he said in an encouraging, but firm, tone. “Everybody hold up your left hand.”

When a couple kids raised the wrong hand, Murray explained the importance of perspective.

“Remember, critical thought is part of what we do,” he said.

He moved on to counting beats, combining demonstration with instruction. By the end of the half-hour class, a couple of the kids were coordinating strokes along with him.

He showed them how to practice at home without a drum like he did until he got his first drum set in ninth grade. Then he taught the lesson he’d learned decades earlier.

The difference between the great Ghost-Note drummer they saw in the video and them? Practice.

“That can be you,” Murray tells the children. “Everything is attainable, but what we learn is … the only thing that separates you from someone else who does something great is work.”

Murray wants to help his students and others realize they can do what they set their minds to do. To help them develop the discipline it takes to succeed in life.

“To be honest with you, less than 1% of these kids will ever go on to be professional musicians,” Murray said later in an interview. “What we’re teaching is critical thinking, life skills, right? Because they can apply everything they learn here to whatever it is they do, and they will be better for it.”

Murray speaks from experience. As a child, he lived in low-income housing at Omaha’s Southside Terrace public housing development and Stratford Square Apartments. Some people he grew up with are incarcerated. Some are dead.

That could easily have been him, Murray tells people, if he hadn’t had something to channel and focus his attention.

Murray’s mother, Faye Comer, often told him, “Son, you can be whatever it is you want to be.” He believed her.

At Omaha South High School, Murray played in the marching band, jazz band and drum and bugle corps.

In 1989, a music scholarship took Murray to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. But he came home for Thanksgiving his freshman year and never went back.

In Omaha, Murray worked at Homer’s Records and played in jazz jam sessions at the old Showcase Lounge at 24th and Lake streets and other clubs. He played with Love Sr., among others at the Showcase.

“There was a jam in town at a place called Kilgore’s, which Mitch Towne and I played at,” Murray said. “Luigi Waites was there, cats like Jorge Nila, Matt Wallace, Gayland Prince, these Omaha pillars. … When I really got hip to jazz, that’s when a big light turned on.”

He auditioned for the Berklee College of Music and won a scholarship to that elite Boston institution. He became a professional musician, performing on Carnival Cruise Line ships and then moving to New York City, where he played with such greats as Marsalis, Norah Jones and Jimmy Witherspoon.

Murray moved back to Omaha in 2005 to raise his son as a single father. He taught music in Bellevue and Omaha public schools and at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He also worked as a music producer.

Murray was recording, performing and producing music when, he said, LaVonya Goodwin, executive director of the North 24th Street Business Improvement District, reached out to him about leading the Love Center. He had no time to even seriously consider it.

Then came COVID and the havoc it wreaked on live music. By fall 2020, the city had canceled the center’s lease for the building at the intersection of North 24th and Lake streets, historically a hotbed of jazz music in the heart of North Omaha.

City officials were working with the North 24th Street BID to find a new use for the building. Murray proposed a youth arts academy. Goodwin, who now represents North Omaha on City Council, and the BID board chose Murray’s proposal. NOMA was born.

A nonprofit led by Murray, Now Initiative, acquired the building — essentially for free — from the City of Omaha in 2022. Then-Mayor Jean Stothert and the City Council gave the Now Initiative $415,000 in federal COVID recovery money, then sold the building to the organization for that amount.

Goodwin said she had a gut sense that Murray was right for the space because of his experience, his Omaha roots and his history of playing with such Omaha greats as Preston Love Sr.

“But then there was also a very diplomatic and democratic process we went through,” she said. “(Murray) rose above because he had the goods.”

She said NOMA today is far beyond what she had imagined.

“It just shows that (Murray) was the right choice because of where they’ve taken it in a few short years,” Goodwin said. “NOMA is a revitalizing catalyst to not just the culture and arts, but also overall place-making for North 24th Street and North Omaha.”

NOMA, which officially opened in 2021, calls itself “a creative academy for the youth of our community and master class destination for top artistic talents.” It offers group classes in bass, drums, piano and dance. Murray plans to add guitar in the fall, and has plans for music production labs. NOMA will have after-school classes beginning this fall.

The students have top-drawer equipment to learn on. The bass lab has Fender bass guitars, donated by Dietze Music. The piano lab has Roland 88-key keyboards with weighted keys so they feel like an acoustic piano.

It’s a first-class facility in an underserved part of Omaha.

“I remember when the LaFern Williams Center was built in South Omaha when I was growing up in the projects,” Murray said. “It was brand new. It was state of the art. And it was in the hood. … What NOMA represents for me is providing someone else that same feeling. I want them to walk in and feel like, ‘Wow.’”

While youth education is its focus, NOMA has a performance space with regular shows by local musicians on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and national musicians as well.

Richie Love will play at NOMA on Friday, Aug. 1, and Sugaray Rayford on Saturday, Aug. 2, during Native Omaha Days. The fourth annual NOMAfest concert, Aug. 9 at Turner Park, will feature blues, jazz and funk with Lakecia Benjamin, Ghost-Note and headliner Eric Gales.

Preston Love said the Omaha Days shows will go a long way in bringing in a different crowd and establishing local connections.

Early on, NOMA grappled with operating in the shadow of the Love Center, whose closing spurred some anger and pushback in the community, the junior Love said. The city’s involvement and Murray’s relative lack of longtime North Omaha roots also fueled skepticism, he added.

But Murray has revived the venue and established great programming, Love said. He’s among those rooting for NOMA’s success.

“We need it to be up and functioning and integral in the wonderful growth and development of a full-circle North Omaha.”

That’s what Murray expects from NOMA. He wants to expand on vacant lots next door with more education and a recording studio.

Already, a popular weekly jazz jam session on Monday nights draws aspiring and professional musicians and music lovers from across the city to North Omaha. A revolving house band plays for about an hour on Monday nights. Then other musicians join in.

“Some of your prominent musicians in town come in, and you get some college kids, you get some high school kids,” Murray said. “They all come in with their instruments. You’ve got Black, white, Asian people. They come from west Omaha, they come from here in the neighborhood. It’s the coolest thing on a Monday night.”

On a recent Monday, tenor saxophonist Marcelles Walker took his turns under the blue lights on the NOMA stage during the jam session. He performs with a group he leads in town, but has been going to listen and play at NOMA on Mondays since it opened. More than 60 people were there, many of them musicians, but some just to listen.

It’s “the love of music” that brings them together, Walker said.

“The cultural significance of the music itself. It’s very important for North Omaha to have places like this to continue to nourish it.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/in-north-omaha-a-veteran-jazz-artist-set-...