It was a Love Supreme Friday on 1st Sky Omaha in the Morning, and hosts Paul B. and Buddy the God brought the kind of energy that makes you want to pour a second cup of coffee and pull up a chair. From primary election results to a $52,000 prize winner to a conversation that had the chat moving fast, Episode 53 of Season 4 delivered — and then some.
Paul B. set the tone early, explaining the spirit behind Love Supreme Fridays the way only he can. “Use music, use whatever it is that you need to use to get your head straight, get your feelings up, and come together and share that so we can all have that same vibe,” he said. The community clearly felt it. Viewer Judy Princ chimed in with a note that felt perfectly timed: “If you are sad or angry, go out and help others. Your attitude will change.” And over in the chat, viewer Aeros 402 brought some pure joy: “On a love note, my only daughter gave birth to my second granddaughter. They are both new and good. I feel blessed.” That’s the kind of Friday energy that carries you right into the weekend.
Before the main interview, the hosts touched on local primary election results and a question that keeps coming up in Omaha conversations: civic engagement and voter turnout. Buddy the God didn’t sugarcoat it. “None of that really matters if the people don’t vote — and as I’ve been listening to conversations, it’s a pretty valid point that a lot of this doesn’t matter if everybody voted,” he said. Viewer Sean McCarthy added some hard numbers to the discussion, noting that the Douglas County Election Commissioner reported average primary voter turnout around 35 percent. The conversation was honest, a little uncomfortable in the best way, and exactly the kind of talk a community needs to have.
The show also paused to celebrate some well-deserved wins. Charell Shelton claimed a remarkable $52,000 diagnostic lab prize, and Omaha North earned national recognition for engineering excellence. Paul B. wove these moments into a larger idea he called the “secondary matrix” — a framework for understanding how community building works beneath the surface. “Everything that we do has a secondary meaning, a deeper meaning,” he explained. “The primary matrix is us on this show — talking heads talking about the news. The secondary matrix is when chat chimers go to the towers, when Kimra Snipes is talking to folks and asking how we can help.” It’s a concept that resonated well beyond the studio walls.
The heart of the episode, though, was a rich and wide-ranging conversation with Dana Murray, executive director and founder of the North Omaha Music Academy — formerly known as Love’s Jazz — anchored right on North 24th Street. Murray spent eleven years in New York City before returning home to build something lasting, and his vision is nothing short of ambitious.
When asked about the future of what Paul B. has long called “the most important Black corner in Nebraska,” Murray didn’t hold back. “Really, the area that has the most history and can truly claim to be a cultural and arts district is the North 24th Street corridor,” he said. “But we’ve been so far removed from that — and what concerns me more than how the rest of Omaha views North 24th Street is that a lot of the community within can’t relate to the power of what was.” His blueprint for change is practical and visionary at once — housing, services, eateries, transportation, and destinations. “With a hotel, you can throw larger attractions, music festivals, and conferences right in the community,” he said, “and that traffic becomes fuel for the corridor.”
Murray also addressed questions about his roots — he’s from South Omaha, not North — with a candor that clearly landed well with the audience. He spoke of Native Omaha Days with respect but also with a challenge: “It’s a failed opportunity to showcase our culture because none of that is trying to invite the rest of Omaha to partake in what we have to offer.” He pointed to South Omaha’s Cinco de Mayo as a model of cultural pride that opens its arms outward. And he said NMA has already proven the skeptics wrong. “People told me that was going to be very hard — and 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.”
What makes NMA tick, Murray explained, goes far deeper than music lessons. The academy teaches live sound, broadcasting, and live streaming. Students conduct their own artist interviews in a broadcast lab. And the instructors are chosen not just for technical skill, but for something harder to quantify. “Unless you’re able to inspire a young person, they don’t have the attention span for it,” Murray said plainly. “The why is everything, because they don’t need us for the what — they can go to YouTube and find anything we’re trying to teach them.”
He spoke powerfully about teaching students the legacies of Omaha-born musicians like Buddy Miles and Victor Lewis — not as trivia, but as context. “If you give kids context, they connect the dots for themselves and they start to see the wins and the losses — not only in Black history but in the rest of the country. Then they can see how they can be impactful within that ecosystem. Now you’ve got a critical-thinking human.” Viewer Pops captured the feeling in the chat: “I love this interview. This brother’s vibe is so cool and his intentions are admirable.”
Looking ahead, Murray announced NMA’s first capital campaign, with an initial phase of $20 million aimed at building a full NMA campus. He’s clear-eyed about what’s at stake. “Money is not our issue in North Omaha — it’s transformative ideas that are going to allow us to be not only sustainable but gainfully active.” And he left the audience with a thought worth sitting with: “What we have to sell in most Black communities is our culture — because if we don’t monetize it, the rest of the country does. The sooner we understand that our culture is equity, that our brilliance and our artistic genius is equity, the better off we’re going to be.”
Buddy the God brought it home with a line that felt like both a challenge and an invitation: “We got to do both — build our own ecosystems and continue to engage the political structure, because whether you want to be engaged in it or not, you’re a part of it. Don’t pay taxes and see what happens.”
If you’d like to connect with the North Omaha Music Academy or learn more about NMA Fest, you can reach Dana Murray at dmurray@northomahamusic.org or his assistant Andrew Bailey at abailey@northomahamusic.org.
It was, by every measure, the kind of Friday morning conversation that sticks with you. Join Paul B., Buddy the God, and the whole 1st Sky Omaha family next week — and bring a friend who needs to hear something good.
