BG bar serves up good beer and live music

BOWLING GREEN – Eric Jones loves music, especially jazz.  

In fact, he loves it so much that he opened Arlyn’s Good Beer to give local musicians a steady place to play.

Before Arlyn’s opened on Feb. 5, 2020, students and faculty from Bowling Green State University were forced to jam in different local venues for decades. Jones said he attended their Wednesday night sessions for five years.

“They were kind of at the whim of bar owners who would let them play or pay them enough to play,” Jones recalled. “I had the chance to enjoy the jazz every Wednesday night. It looked like they were having trouble getting a place to play so I started talking about opening a bar.”

“And lo and behold, he did it,” said Jeff Halsey, a jazz bassist who plays regularly at Arlyn’s.

Jones retired as a professor of special education at BGSU and decided to take the plunge and open the bar, mainly to support live, local music.

Jones and his wife, Akiko Kawano Jones, teamed up with brewer Roger Shope and business partner Sean Brennan to buy a building and several acres of property on Hankey Ave., a side street just three blocks from downtown.

The new owners decided to name it after the building’s former owner, the late Arlyn Snyder, who ran a wood-milling shop.

The Joneses and partners opened Arlyn’s about a month before the world came to a screeching halt because of COVID. But Arlyn’s survived the pandemic and patrons know they can count on the venue for live music – and good beer.

Jazz is featured on Wednesdays, and blues and rock on Fridays and Saturdays, Jones said.

“It’s a fantastic place,” said Halsey, who just retired as a BGSU music professor and plays there on Wednesday nights. “It’s really cool, a beautiful space, and the beer really is good.”

“The community really likes it,” Jones added. “We hear frequently how much people really like the place.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Jones said the age of the patrons typically range from their mid-20s to 70+.

“People ask me if it’s popular with students. Well, not really. It’s kind of a mature adult hangout,” he said.

The beer brewed by Shope is mostly German and English ales and lagers.

“We decided early on to keep it simple, no fruity beers or sours. The only fruity beer we make is a raspberry ale. And we don’t have clever names; we just name them what they are,” Jones said.

The biggest night for students is Wednesdays. They come for the jazz. Many of the BGSU music students often join the band after the first set.

“The music students, they love it. They come there to play and to see each other,” Jones said.

He said about a third of them don’t drink because they’re under the legal age, but they can bring in their own soda pop.

Arlyn’s does not charge admission.

There is a half-acre beer garden outside with tables and chairs and picnic tables, and there is ample parking. The bar also doesn’t have a kitchen but food trucks open shop on the weekends and on many Wednesday and Thursday nights.

Arlyn’s Good Beer is at 520 Hankey Ave., Bowling Green, OH 43402. More information is available on its Facebook page.

BOWLING GREEN – Jeff Halsey studied trumpet and piano as a child but found his instrument of choice by chance.

“I didn’t really pick it. I mean, it just happened,” he said.

His father, Tracy Halsey, worked full time in a day job and led his own band in the evenings. One night, which happened to be the biggest night of the year for musicians, his bass player called in sick for a New Year’s Eve gig.

“I was 13 years old and his bass player called in sick on that day,” Halsey recalled. “My dad said, ‘I want you to play bass tonight.’ I didn’t even know we had a bass in the house; it was upstairs
or something and it only had three strings on it, one string was off.

“I didn’t know anything about the bass. My dad said I want you to go ‘doom, doom, doom, doom’ all night long,” Halsey said, singing a progression of four notes. ‘Try to lock in or synch with the drummer, what he’s playing on the ride cymbal.’

“I didn’t know what I was doing but the guys in the band seemed to like it. And then some of the older guys spent a lot of time with me.”

It wasn’t long before Halsey found every note that could be plucked on that big standup double bass.

That was the start of his long and illustrious career as a bass player.

Halsey has performed with some of the most respected names in jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Yusef Lateef, Pete Siers and Stanley Cowell, to name just a few.

Meeting the late great pianist Claude Black was the turning point in his career, Halsey said.

Black, who was from Detroit, is a legend in Toledo for playing all over town, but especially at Murphy’s Place with bassist Clifford Murphy. Black passed away in 2013 at age 80.

“Claude was really the first training ground for me,” he said.

Black hired him to play at a club in Grand Rapids, Mich. six nights a week for two or three years.

“Through Claude I got to play with a lot of great people, including J.C. Heard.”

Heard, also from Detroit, was the drummer for the prestigious Jazz at the Philharmonic.

“Everybody knew him and when I played in his big band, we traveled around the world and were kind of like the ambassadors for the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival.”

Halsey also “climbed over the fence,” as some jazz artists call it, landing a teaching job at Bowling Green State University early in his career.

He found that performing and being a music professor were two sides of the same coin. The teaching job provides a steady income and gives him the opportunity to help young musicians. Performing allows him to collaborate with other artists and create something special.

“People ask me, ‘What do you do for a living, do you have another job?’ They don’t think you can make a living playing music. My vocation is my avocation,” Halsey said. “And basically, throughout my life, I’ve been able to play my bass with a whole lot of great musicians, and then I get to come home and talk about it with my students.”

Now, after 42 years teaching at BGSU, Halsey is fully retired. But he has a lot of work to do before he leaves the campus.

“I kept every piece of paper back when paper was, well, when we didn’t have the internet and there was no email. I kept every piece of paper in a folder,” he said, adding, “This is not fun!”

It’s actually the second time he retired from BGSU.

“I put my in papers in November 2019 to retire June 1, 2020. They started a search for my position and then COVID hit in February 2020 and [BGSU] froze all the positions,” he said.

The university asked him to stick around, but instead of keeping his full-time tenured position he was offered a part-time job as an adjunct professor.

“A nice thing about being an adjunct is you don’t have a lot of the pressures of being a full-time tenured faculty,” Halsey said. “There was all the documentation and promotion and that kind of stuff, and I had none of that as an adjunct, so I enjoyed those four years.”

While he also enjoyed performing regularly with his jazz colleagues at BGSU, Halsey said it’s time to step aside and make way for the new jazz faculty members.

“We’re very cohesive,” he said of the music department faculty.

“We enjoy performing with each other. It’s kind of a diverse group of very talented players. So, I will miss that aspect of this, playing with them and working with them, because they were great.” 

Halsey will still keep performing, of course. Bass players are always in demand, and a stellar musician like Halsey is always getting calls for gigs.

He recently played four nights at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., and said he loves playing at Arlyn’s Good Beer, a brewery and jazz haven in Bowling Green just a mile from Halsey’s home.

“I’ll be busy on many weekends, and I’ll be quiet sometimes and I’m fine with that. If somebody calls me to do a wedding, I’m not going to jump on it. I only want to play creative music or play music with creative musicians.”