1924: The Jazz Banquet and the Binding of the Bone Harp

In the heart of the Roaring Twenties, Cleveland blossomed as a jazz capital of the Great Lakes, pulsing with nightlife, rhythm, and rebellion. While Prohibition made public joy illegal, the city’s speakeasies thrived, especially along Prospect Avenue and into the Black neighborhoods that nurtured a generation of musicians and poets.

In 1924, Cleveland’s Commoner Changelings held an unsanctioned and dream-rich celebration beneath the city’s streets—The Jazz Banquet. Part political rally, part Glamour ritual, part bacchanal, it took place beneath East 55th and Woodland, in what was once a trolley switching station but had become a luminous speakeasy freehold known to fae as The Last Horn.

At the center of the revelry was a mythical chimera: The Bone Harp—crafted, it is said, from the ribs of a Dreaming-wrought dragonet and strung with invisible chords of broken promises and heartstrings. Its music could stir Glamour in the disenchanted and break Bunks with a single sustained note.

The Harp was to be bound permanently to the Dreaming’s weave beneath Cleveland, ensuring a wellspring of artistic magic for generations.

But the banquet was nearly ruined when a notorious Satyr troubadour named Laszlo Mirth—a dark-eyed and charismatic figure whose fae soul was known to be irrevocably bound by ancestral oath to House Leanhaun—attempted to claim the Bone Harp for his “sleeping patroness.” Laszlo argued the Harp’s inspiration belonged not to the free but to the hungry—to the ones who feed Glamour like blood to the heart.

A fierce duel erupted—half dance, half musical performance—and it only ended when a Kinain jazz singer named Marigold Bell shattered a wine glass with her voice and invoked a Dreaming-pact of her own. With her voice as the seal, the Bone Harp was hidden again.

Laszlo vanished into the night.

Legacy

• To this day, Changelings whisper that if one plays “St. James Infirmary” under the right moon, on the right street corner, the Harp will answer.
• Marigold Bell's legend lives on, and many Cleveland Kinain still trace their lineage to her bloodline.
• Laszlo Mirth’s name appears in the gray pages of old motley songbooks, but no one has seen him since 1933.