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Sun Ra Arkestra at Tri-C JazzFest 2025
by John Chacona
Sun Ra ArkestraMimi Ohio Theatre Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland, OH June 27, 2025 When is a band not a ghost band? It is a question posed by a Cleveland jazz media figure after a performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra on the first full day of the Tri-C JazzFest, and it ...
Dan Weiss Quartet At Bop Stop
by John Chacona
Dan Weiss Quartet Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OH June 6, 2025 In his liner notes to Phillip Golub's Abiding Memory (Endectomorph Music, 2024), Vijay Iyer coined a name for the kind of music made by a set of mostly young, genre-agnostic musicians in New York, “New Brooklyn Complexity," ...
The Bad Plus at Bop Stop
by John Chacona
The Bad PlusBOP STOP at the Music SettlementCleveland, OHFebruary 7, 2025 Teachers of jazz--the good ones, at least--emphasize the importance of finding an individual sound. That goes for ensembles, too, and at their Friday appearance at Cleveland's Bop Stop, The Bad Plus demonstrated how, even with a radical overhauling of personnel ...
Holly Cole: Kiss Me Quick
by John Chacona
Hands up everyone who thinks there should be more vibes solos on Elvis Presley covers. Though press materials don't credit the player, they identify Kevin Breit as the guitarist (was there any question?) on this Western Swing-flavored chart of the 1961 Doc Pomus / Mort Shuman song. Holly Cole sings it with just the right proportion ...
Tania Grubbs: The Sound of Love
by John Chacona
Meet a person from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and you are likely to get a Chamber of Commerce-worthy commendation of their city's greatness. When it comes to jazz, the civic pride is more than warranted; the Steel City was home to immortals such as Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke. Vocalist Tania Grubbs grew ...
Sam Blakeslee Large Group at BLU Jazz+
by John Chacona
Sam Blakeslee Large Group BLU Jazz+ Akron, OH December 20, 2024 In December, flowers bloomed in northeast Ohio, but climate change had nothing to do with it. The sudden blossoming was the work of Sam Blakeslee who returned to his home state to celebrate the holidays with family and friends, 18 ...
Randy Ingram: Aries Dance
by John Chacona
No one would suggest that a car stereo in a rush-hour traffic jam is an ideal environment to evaluate a recording--or even to squeeze much enjoyment out of one. Yet even in this setting the graceful, gliding waltz that opens Randy Ingram's Aries Dance immediately dispelled the frustration and tension of the highway like an offshore ...
Alla Boara's Italian Christmas at Trinity Cathedral
by John Chacona
Alla Boara Trinity Cathedral Cleveland, OH December 6, 2024 Here in North America most of our Christmas traditions have origins in northern Europe. So the notion of an Italian Christmas might be hard to visualize. Santa filling stockings while eating biscotti and gulping down an espresso then merrily riding off on ...
John Chacona's Favorite Jazz Albums of 2024
by John Chacona
First the bad news: There are too many recordings being released these days. In the past 12 months, I have received or purchased 769. That's insane. Now the good news: There are a great many very good recordings being released these days. The following 10 are a snapshot, on one day, of my favorites ...
D.D. Jackson: I Call
by John Chacona
"I Call" is a poem about the immigrant's dilemma of identifying with two places but fully inhabiting neither, using the refrain, “a place that doesn't exist" to name this condition. Yet Quebec-born Toronto poet Choucri Paul Zemokhol's family came to Canada from the Middle East, a place that, even in the interval since the poem's publication ...
