On October 5, 2025, jazzman Frank Ward died. Frank was a greatly admired cornetist who was a longtime member of the historic Cakewalkin’ Jass Band. Although not yet a member, Frank was on hand to hear the band’s inaugural performance at the Bonnie Bar on December 8, 1967. He sat in with the band that night and band leader Ray Heitger said of that day, “when he sat in, I knew right away we needed this guy.” It took a few months, but Frank eventually became a full-time member of the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band. Heitger recalled that Frank “started with the Cakewalkers in 1968, about six months after we started performing at Tony Packo’s.” He stayed in the band for 37 years. Heitger also said of Ward, “we’ve been through decades [together], he always amazed me, Frank, he never missed a note.”
Frank’s early years are a bit of a mystery; he grew up in an area of England called Blackburn, where he attended the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. By the late 1940s he was in the British military. Ragtime Rick Grafing, who is the pianist in the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band and is the frontman for his own band The Chefs of Dixieland, recalled one story Frank told of his early days in the military, sharing that “the sergeant woke everybody up in the middle of the night, saying he wanted them to know what it was like to get up and go on duty. The sergeant said, ‘but I’ll let you go back to bed if you can sing a song I like.’ Frank sang, ‘I Wish You Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.’ The sergeant let him go back to bed.” Obviously, Frank had an interest in traditional jazz as a very young man. By the early 1950s he was the leader of his own group called The New Independence Jazz Band which performed at the Blackburn Ballet Society rooms. The band made a name for itself in 1956, appearing on BBC’s TV Top Town Contest.
In the early 1950s Frank’s day job was as the deputy librarian in Accrington, in the county of Lancashire, England. After appearing on BBC’s TV show, Frank moved to Canada in 1956 to work in a public library. However, by 1957, he immigrated to the United States and eventually took up a librarian position with the University of Toledo. Frank then became a library administrator and retired from the university in 1999.
When jazz cornetist Dave Kosmyna was a teenager, he began to hear Frank perform with the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band. One night at Tony Packo’s restaurant on Front Street in Toledo, Kosmyna was dared by one of his friends to ask to sit in. The band’s leader, Ray Heitger, was out of town and the band, that evening, was under the leadership of Frank Ward. Frank asked Kosmyna, “are you any good?” He let Kosmyna call the first tune and by the third tune, “Down in Honky Tonk Town,” the hook was in and Kosmyna said, “it was that moment, next to Frank, that I knew I had to play this stuff. He had me play all night.” Later Kosmyna visited Frank at his home and Frank told him, “Besides Louis [Armstrong], you need to listen to the 3-B’s, Bunk, Braff, and Barnard.” Kosmyna said of Frank that “when he realized there were all these kids playing [in Toledo], he encouraged all of them.” Dave Kosmyna eventually took over the cornet chair in the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band, and is now a professor of music and the director of the jazz program at Ohio Northern University.
One Friday night at the Bix Beiderbecke Festival (Bix Fest), held in Bix’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa, there were approximately 10,000 people on hand, and the place was loaded with talent from around the nation. Afterward, the bands assembled in the old Coliseum Ballroom for a jam session, but nobody was playing; the guys were milling around waiting for someone to act. Frank said to Ragtime Rick Grafing, “nobody’s playing, let’s get up there and start something.” Grafing remembered the evening this way: “After a few minutes, there’s 20 guys up there playing and Frank is leading the band. The jam session is in full force… at least a dozen horns and more…all of a sudden, it’s just a huge jam session.” Frank led the session all night. According to Grafing, as recently as a few months ago, Frank expressed having fond memories of that session, calling it “one of the highlights of his career.”
As a member of the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band, Frank played the Bix Fest for 10 years and played at Tony Packo’s – made famous in the TV series M*A*S*H – for over 33 years, participating in thousands of performances there. Frank also played with the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band when they performed at countless other venues around the region, including Ragtime Rick’s First Draught. Later, after he retired, he sat in with Ragtime Rick’s Chefs of Dixieland band at The Sodbuster Bar in Sylvania, Ohio, a gig which began the day Katrina hit New Orleans.
Although he was married a few times, Frank Ward left behind no children. No family members could be found to provide more background on his life. Frank’s legacy is in performing the traditional jazz music he loved, and in the musicians he influenced along the way.
