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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 ...
Stephen Philip Harvey: Big Band Superhero In the Making
by John Chacona
There's a passage in “Party Song," the concluding cut on the Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra's debut recording, Smash! (Next Level, 2022) where the band claps hands, whoops and cheers over a syncopated praise-band saxophone riff. It's pure, unbridled joy and just like the exuberance implied by the exclamation point in the album's title, it's an ...
Billy Mohler: Anatomy
by John Chacona
Can we please retire the old cliché about jazz from Los Angeles being limp, wan and bland? One listen to pianist Cameron Graves' slamming metal-jazz or to the jittery complexity of David Binney's recent releases should be enough to torch that outdated canard. Now comes bassist Billy Mohler with Anatomy, 43 minutes of amped-up, torqued-out energy ...
Jacob Garchik: Assembly
by John Chacona
Trombonist Jacob Garchik has an interest in musical subtraction. His 2012 release The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album (Yestereve Records) presented religious music stripped of religion. Clear Line (Yestereve Records) from 2020 featured a 13-piece big band with no rhythm section. Now comes Assembly, an inquiry into what a jazz quintet sounds like when added ...
