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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 ...
Rova Saxophone Quartet at Bop Stop
by John Chacona
Rova Saxophone Quartet Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OHOctober 4, 2022 One of the inescapable trends in music over the last decade has been the convergence of two traditions in improvised music, one that was created in the African diaspora and another that evolved in European art music. Classifications ...
Ernie Krivda and Theron Brown at Free Concerts in Cleveland
by John Chacona
Ernie Krivda and friends Ernie's front porch Lakewood, Ohio July 31, 2022 Cleveland, Ohio is the birthplace of Albert Ayler and the late Abdul Wadud. It's where the Black Unity Trio recorded what was probably the first free jazz record to be independently released. The city's free jazz bona fides are ...
Lars Scherzberg: Top Floor Encounter
by John Chacona
The first phase of jazz was characterized by melodic improvisation. In its second phase improvisers dealt with harmony and, in the current phase, density is the improviser's concern. So says Anthony Braxton—if I understand him correctly (if anyone does). If so, then Top Floor Encounter may be as characteristic of our time as Armstrong's “Weatherbird" was ...
