There’s a reason the crew at 1st Sky Omaha in the Morning calls Friday “Love Supreme Friday.” While the rest of the week might be spent wading through the news cycle — and this particular Friday came on the heels of Nebraska’s primary elections — hosts Paul B and Buddy the God made a deliberate turn toward something more nourishing: art, community, and the kind of coalition-building that outlasts any election season.
“It’s what we like to call Love Supreme Friday,” Paul B told viewers, setting the tone from the jump. The shift in energy was intentional. Buddy the God had already acknowledged the weight of the week, reflecting on how political seasons tend to fray the social fabric. “How ugly it gets, how the energy and just the emotion around people’s policies and politics separate people, drive wedges, cause enemies — it’s a dirty ugly game,” he said. Love Supreme Friday, then, is the antidote — a weekly reminder that community is built on more than ballots.
The celebration in the chat room matched the mood on screen. Viewer Aeros 402 kicked things off with the sweetest kind of news: “On a love note, my only daughter gave birth to my second granddaughter. They are both new and good. I feel blessed.” That kind of warmth set the stage perfectly for the show’s main conversation.
The featured guest was Dana Murray, executive director and founder of the North Omaha Music Academy (NMA) — a youth music academy and performance venue rooted in the historic North 24th Street corridor, affectionately known as “the Deuce.” Murray, a musician and educator who spent eleven years in New York City before returning home to Omaha, spoke with the quiet authority of someone who has done the math — personally and professionally — on what it takes to build something lasting.
His vision for North 24th Street is sweeping but grounded. “The area that has the most history and can truly claim to be a cultural and arts district is the North 24th Street corridor,” Murray said. “But we’ve been so far removed from what that was.” He painted a picture of what the Deuce once looked like — people shopping on Saturday mornings, men in their suits, a sense of unity that hummed through the whole neighborhood. To recapture that, he argued, the corridor needs more than destinations; it needs infrastructure. “You need enough housing, places of service, parking, laundromats, groceries, gas stations — all the things that make an area self-sustained.” A hotel, he added, would be a game changer. “With a hotel, you can throw larger music festivals and conferences right in the community.”
Viewer Pops connected that vision directly to Omaha’s deep musical roots, noting, “Artists like Fats Domino used to stay at your grandfather’s home when he came to town to perform. So yes, more infrastructure for the artist around the Deuce corridor would be a godsend.”
Murray grew up in South Omaha, not North Omaha — a fact he addressed head-on. “If you’re Black and you’re in Omaha, especially in the 70s and early 80s, North Omaha was the Mecca for all of us,” he said. “It was a shared relationship regardless of where you lived.” He’s tried to extend that relationship outward, making NMA a beacon for all of Omaha. And it’s working. “People have no problem coming from wherever they are in Omaha or Iowa to hear jazz music or whatever we present. That taboo about the area being an attraction was false. We’ve proven that.”
The North Omaha Music Academy isn’t just about scales and chord progressions. Murray is deliberate about teaching young people who local legends like Buddy Miles and jazz drummer Victor Lewis were — not as trivia, but as context. “If you give kids context, they connect the dots for themselves and start to see the wins and the losses — not only for Black people, but for the rest of the country,” he said. “Then they can see how they can be impactful within that ecosystem. Now you’ve got a critical thinking human.”
Paul B latched onto that idea with his concept of the “secondary matrix” — the deeper purpose operating beneath any surface-level activity. “On the surface they’re learning bass, piano, music theory,” he said, “but when you learn music, your brain starts firing in different ways. The secondary matrix is to create critical thinkers.” He also praised NMA’s newly redesigned performance space, saying it was set up “like the Blue Note New York now — it’s that level of sound quality and everything there.”
Beyond instruments, NMA offers electives in live sound, broadcasting, and podcasting — and students don’t just learn about these things, they do them. “It’s not just telling them, ‘Oh, you can be this someday,'” Murray said firmly. “No — you can be this right now. Once you remove those barriers, the sky’s the limit.” The academy is also looking ahead to a $20 million capital campaign for a full NMA campus, with Murray envisioning the organization as an economic engine for North Omaha on par with what Omaha Performing Arts is for downtown. “Our culture is equity,” he said. “Our artistic genius is equity. The sooner we understand that, the better off we’re going to be.”
Viewer Senator KML summed up what many were feeling in the chat: “Thank you, Uncle Dana. You’re changing lives in big ways. We are the students.”
As the show wrapped, Buddy the God sent viewers off with a call to action that felt less like a sign-off and more like a standing invitation. “The lanes are running. The lanes are wide open. Just get in where you fit in and make it happen.”
That’s the spirit of Love Supreme Friday in a nutshell — and it’s why this community keeps showing up, week after week. Join Paul B, Buddy the God, and the Chat Chimers again Monday morning for another edition of 1st Sky Omaha in the Morning. You won’t want to miss it.
