Lighthouse Arts is a beacon for jazz in Pittsburgh

“Jazz brings so many different kinds of people together,” says drummer Thomas Wendt after his Sunday set at Golden Age Beer Co. in Homestead. One of Pittsburgh’s premier jazz luminaries, Wendt serves as vice president of Lighthouse Arts, Inc. , a collective of artists and scholars who have been teaching the history and growing the Pittsburgh jazz scene for over a decade. It’s this dynamic of jazz — the ability to bring different people together, to create community — that drives the work of Lighthouse. “At a jazz concert,” Wendt observes, “it’s very possible that you’ll be sitting next to someone that voted very differently from you. And that’s a really wonderful thing.” Thomas Wendt performs with the Boilermaker Jazz Band on Sept. 2, 2026. Credit: Mars Johnson In addition to his role with Lighthouse, he fronts the Thomas Wendt Quartet, sits in with various groups around the city, and works as an adjunct professor of jazz percussion at Duquesne University. One of the foundational lessons he leaves with his students is that jazz history is American history, and therefore it allows us to understand our culture, and by extension, to create community. Lighthouse Arts President Harry D. Clark agrees. For him, jazz is about freeing the spirit through communication. “It evolved out of gospel, the blues,” he says over coffee in Squirrel Hill, “which came from the African drumming rhythms, which was communication.” And it was survival. “Slave owners wouldn’t allow the enslaved people to congregate,” he says, “and so they communicated through music.” For him, jazz continues that survival-through-communication dynamic, and it’s a goal of Lighthouse to foster the community that can facilitate that communication. Lighthouse Arts was established in 2012 after Wendt, Clark, and the late George E. Heid decided that the Pittsburgh jazz scene needed more opportunities for the Pittsburgh community to experience jazz — to experience that com