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John Chacona writes Posts

“Blue-Collar” Joshua Smith Comes Home With A Solid Gold Band

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: When Is A Quintet A Quartet? A: When It’s The New Kneebody

Kneebody
photocredit: Gilad Hekselman

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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Paul Giallorenzo’s Trio Serves A Fusion Menu at BOP STOP

(from left): Paul Giallorenzo, Mikel Patrick Avery, Jason Roebke

In the band photo on the tray card of Force Majeure, (Delmark Records, 2014) a CD by Paul Giallorenzo‘s GitGo band, the leader stands front and center wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of the Great Lakes. After 30 years in Chicago, does the Long Island native consider himself a Midwest musician?

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The Abundance Mindset Rings Out At UA JazzWeek 25

clockwise from left: Theron Brown, Sean Jones, Joshua Redman, Christopher Coles

There’s a word you’re going to be hearing a lot more of in the next two weeks. It’s abundance, the title of a buzzy new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that proposes something they call “the abundance mindset“ as a new basis for progressive politics. There’s no evidence that Klein and Thompson visited the campus of The University of Akron School of Music Jazz Studies Department before they wrote the book, but if they had they would have found that mindset in abundance . This week, April 7-11, that mindset will be on public display as UA kicks off JazzWeek 25: Abundance (Jazz Festival), featuring performances by Joshua Redman and Sean Jones in an illustration–and celebration–of music, community and lineage.

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Jenny Scheinman’s All Species Parade Marches (and Scurries, and Sometimes Stomps) Into The Treelawn

Jenny-Scheinman-by-Kory-Thibeault
photocredit: Kory Thibeault

Drop the needle on Jenny Scheinman ’s latest album, All Species Parade, and a verdant landscape of greens, browns and ocean blues unfolds. This is music that feels alive, vibrating with the hum of a vast, interconnected ecosystem. It’s so evocative of California’s Lost Coast that when she plays this music at The Treelawn Sunday, you might just smell the petrichor and taste the salt air of the Pacific.

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Pull UP! Where To Go & What To Hear In NEO March 27 – Apr. 2

Friendly experiencers,

Let’s just get this out of the way: jazz fans, the coming week is absolutely stacked. It’s so full of notable shows that it took two let’s call this posts to begin to cover it–and a third might not get to the bottom of the good stuff.

If the music calendar for the week were a dart board, you could close your eyes and hit a bullseye every time.

So as March goes out like a lion here’s your bulldog edition of Pull UP! Now have fun filling up that calendar.

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