Nearly Sixty Years In, Toledo's Oldest Jazz Band Still Means It
On Sunday, August 9, the Toledo Zoo Amphitheatre's free Music Under the Stars series is set to hand its stage to the Cakewalkin' Jass Band — which is to say, to nearly six decades of Toledo history in matching enthusiasm.
The band started in 1967. Clarinetist Raymond Heitger has led it the whole way. "We started out as a four-piece group — piano, drums, banjo, clarinet," Heitger recalls. "Played our first gig at the Pawnee Bar in 1967." By 1968 they'd begun a long residency at Tony Packo's, the Hungarian institution that is itself Toledo shorthand, and the two local legends grew up entangled. Ask most Toledoans of a certain age about hearing live jazz in this city and Packo's and Cakewalkin' arrive in the same sentence.
What's kept it alive isn't nostalgia — it's conviction. Banjoist Betsy Grafing, "Banjo Betsy" to the faithful, joined in the 1970s and still talks about the music like a calling. "This music makes sense to me. It just does," she says. "It brings about a lot of emotion for me." That kind of devotion is the only thing that sustains a New Orleans-style band in northwest Ohio for nearly sixty years, playing a repertoire most of America has filed under "your grandparents' records."
The lineup reads like a Toledo family tree. Rick "Ragtime Rick" Grafing on piano. Dave Kosmyna on cornet. Trombonist Russ Damschroeder, who has now given the band an astonishing 53 years. And on vocals, Nicole Heitger — Raymond's daughter, who started singing with the band at 16 and had to reckon with why this old music grabbed her when her friends were listening to the radio. "I did like pop music, but I loved this music," she says. "It was in my blood." A band that has literally passed itself down a generation is not a novelty act. It's an heirloom that happens to swing.
This is the part of Toledo's music scene the touring calendars miss. When national coverage talks about the Glass City, it means Frankie's and the acts that once broke there. But a music town is also its long memory — the players who never leave, who turn a Hungarian café into a jazz landmark, who are still, in 2026, hauling banjos and cornets to a Zoo amphitheatre to play trad jazz for free to whoever wanders in. Toledo's jazz heritage is real and cited constantly; Cakewalkin' is one of the reasons the claim holds up.
And Music Under the Stars is the ideal frame for it. The series runs free on Sunday evenings in the Zoo's WPA-era band shell — gates at 6, downbeat at 7:30 — with a programming philosophy that cheerfully refuses to pick a lane. This same short season leans on a symphony one week and this washboard-and-cornet institution the next, and treats both as exactly what a Toledo Sunday deserves.
If you've never actually sat through a Cakewalkin' set, the August 9 date is the low-commitment way in: no cover, a gorgeous old amphitheatre, and a band that has been perfecting the art of making a crowd forget it's Sunday since Lyndon Johnson was president. Go for the history and stay for the fact that it still, genuinely, cooks.
Sixty years is a long time to keep meaning it. This band still does.
Sources: We the People: Toledo jazz band keeps tradition alive for nearly 60 years (13abc); Music Under the Stars (Toledo Zoo); City Pages: Explore Toledo's Extensive Jazz Scene (Toledo City Paper)