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When Reggie Watkins came on screen for our video interview last week he wore a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap. When I jokingly expressed my sympathy for his devotion to the once-proud team now seemingly committed to mediocrity, Watkins would have none of it. He’s a Pittsburgh ride or die, but intercity rivalries aside, he also loves Cleveland jazz and returns to a familiar stage at BOP STOP for a gig Friday.
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Dan Weiss is a no-compromises guy. He doesn’t jog occasionally for his health; he trains hard and races. He turned an interest in South Asian music into a decades-long immersion with tabla master Samir Chatterjee. When I suggested to the drummer last week that he struck me as slightly obsessive, his response was unequivocal: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Totally!”
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The billing of Sax Battle Cry, the pair of concerts that Nathan-Paul Davis and Johnny Cochran, Jr. will present this week, evokes the classic two-saxophone tussles of the past: Dexter Gordon and Wardell Grey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin, the various cage matches that were a trademark of the Jazz At The Philharmonic road show. But don’t believe the hype. The meeting of Davis and Cochran is more friendly competition than mano á mano combat.
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Altin Sencalar is a big guy. A Texan by birth, he wouldn’t look out of place on the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys football team. He has two big dogs, Navy and JJ, and they slept on the bad behind him when we chatted on a video call (note to readers: it failed to save and a lot of great direct quotes were lost).
Sencalar plays the trombone, an instrument that is associated with swaggering bluster, but when he comes to BOP STOP Saturday, you might be surprised by the subtlety that he brings to the instrument.
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If you know Joshua Smith only through his exploratory work with the cooperative trio Birth, you might be surprised to learn, as I did, that the saxophonist has a thriving practice playing straightahead jazz. His Friday concert at BOP STOP won’t be a standards gig, but it will show a side of the 45-year-old saxophonist that might surprise some fans.
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Q: What is a Kneebody?
A: It’s the name of a band whose amalgam of jazz, funk, electronica, beats, progressive rock and unheard sounds is so unclassifiable that no known word could adequately describe it.
On paper, the band, which returns to BOP STOP for a Sunday performance, has the canonical jazz formation of trumpet, tenor saxophone, keyboards, bass and drums. On stage Kneebody explodes genre categories.
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