Home » Search Center » Results: John Chacona
Results for "John Chacona"
3x3: Jazz Trios Playful and Pensive
by John Chacona
Can we finally retire the assertion that we are living in a Golden Age of the jazz piano trio? It seems like every month brings trio dates of such imagination and accomplishment as to render superlatives beside the point. These three recordings released in an eight-week period in Spring 2023 are a reminder that one of ...
Petros Klampanis: Tora Collective
by John Chacona
Some ideas work better on paper than on record. Take the attempts to fuse jazz and Greek popular music. There is, to be sure, a certain logic to the notion. Both traditions share an emphasis on virtuosic improvisation and a foundation in dance rhythms. Rebetika, the mournful songs of heartache, alienation and ...
Ken Vandermark: Returning To The Road With A New Band And New Energy
by John Chacona
For three decades, Ken Vandermark has criss-crossed the globe as one of music's most restless and exploratory improvisors. Yet as he embarked on a tour in Spring 2023, his improvisatory skills were put to the test--not as a musician, but as a bandleader and organizer. He assembled a new band, Edition 55, that includes ...
Ben Wendel Group At Bop Stop
by John Chacona
Ben Wendel Group Bop Stop Cleveland, OH March 22, 2023 For a long time, California has held a mythic place in the U.S. popular imagination as a fountainhead of new ideas in culture, technology, or in the case of the smartphone ("Designed by Apple in California") of both. So it makes ...
Choose Joy
by John Chacona
What should music sound like as the world emerges from the musical Ice Age of the pandemic years? An elegiac tone is an inevitable and perhaps necessary acknowledgment of the desolation of those years. Equally valid is an expression of joy and gratitude for the transformative power of music to heal and uplift. In their own ...
A Tasting Menu
by John Chacona
It says a lot for the current state of the music that some of the most interesting music hitting the market is being made by lesser-known artists who might never get a look from major labels. Here are four that have their own particular—and very different—charms. All are worth a spin for the sheer joy of ...
Fred Hersch & Esperanza Spalding: Alive at the Village Vanguard
by John Chacona
Is it possible that we underestimate Esperanza Spalding? That would be quite a trick for an artist who has hardly been out of the spotlight since leapfrogging a couple of nobodies named Drake and Justin Bieber to take the Grammy award for Best New Artist in 2011. With a recent resume that includes a high-profile teaching ...
Dan Weiss Trio at Bop Stop
by John Chacona
Dan Weiss Trio Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OH December 11, 2022 Are we living in a golden age of the piano trio? The recorded evidence from 2022 would suggest that we are. Piano trio recordings by John Escreet, Fred Hersch, Aaron Parks, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Marta Sanchez, Matthew Shipp ...
Alla Boara: Le Tre Sorelle
by John Chacona
Sustaining a career as a full-time working musician, especially if you live far from major urban centers, requires that you speak several languages. With a resume that includes party band Hey Mavis to the acclaimed period-instrument Baroque orchestra Apollo's Fire, Cleveland-based drummer Anthony Taddeo qualifies on musical terms. But he also picked up his ...
Noah Garabedian: The Power of Patience
by John Chacona
Patience might be not the first word that you'd expect to find on the job description for a professional jazz musician, but it has been crucial to the career of bassist Noah Garabedian's career. Growing up in Berkeley, a hothouse of young jazz talent, Garabedian never intended to become a working musician. “I definitely ...
