The best improvised music in the Black American Tradition offers something for the head, heart and feet. A pair of concerts this weekend at BOP STOP offer a potent distillation of how much music can move us.
OHM! (Dan Bruce, Jordan McBride, Gabe Jones) Album Release Show for “The Architects”
Versatility has been the defining quality of guitarist Dan Bruce’s performing career. On any given week, he might sit in the rhythm section of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, play Italian folk music with Alla Boara, make a standards gig in an intimate spot with another guitarist, or play straightahead with the region’s most notable improvisors. Yet there’s one setting he’s avoided: leading a groove-oriented trio.
Enter OHM!, the high-powered band with electric bassist Jordan McBride and drummer Gabe Jones that will play an album release show for The Architects at BOP STOP Saturday night.
Anyone who has heard Bruce soaring solos in other contexts might be surprised that he’s waited until the middle of his career to form a power trio, something many jazz guitarists do at the start of theirs. So, why the resistance?
“Being a musician that went through academia and stuff, I’ve never been a very secure person, and I just never thought I was good enough to be the main person fronting a trio if it was a little more like fusion, rock, funk,” Bruce said by phone from his Lakewood home. “I just didn’t think I’d want to hear myself do it. In all transparency, I had to get old enough that my self doubt turned into, ‘Screw it!’”
The Architects, which will be released by Shifting Paradigm Records on Friday, is a beat-forward collection of five band originals, four short interludes and a composition by Nathan Douds, the album’s producer. Douds was the drummer in the band’s original lineup with fellow Pittsburgher Denzel Chizmar-Oliver on bass. But having two-thirds of the band, busy musicians in their own right, living two hours away was impractical.
Not that McBride and Jones sit around waiting for the phone to ring. The bassist might be Bruce’s match for adaptability, playing in multiple contexts on both acoustic and electric. And though Jones’ drums aren’t electrified, his style is, with a deep and authoritative groove that powers some of northeast Ohio’s most forward-thinking improvising bands.
Bruce credits McBride and Jones for pushing him in a new rhythmic direction. “When you have a rhythm section that’s that solid, you really notice it when you fall out of the pocket as a soloist,” Bruce said. “I feel like there’s a lot of swing rhythm where you can kind of fall out and float for a minute, and it works fine. But when it’s this hard-hitting, funky [groove], it kept me a little more on my toes to be rhythmically accountable, which I’ve been wanting to do.”
The groove is the foundation of the project that is OHM!, and Bruce, McBride and Jones are both designers and builders. But the album’s title has a subtler connotation. “I think we need more people [whose] instinct is to build things rather than tear them down,” he said. “I’m not trying to make a political album, but in one sense, I hope I’m raising architects, I hope my kids are architects.”
The Architects is available from Bandcamp at this link.
OHM!, Saturday, Nov. 1, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, Tickets $20, available here.
Caroline Davis’ Portals
Caroline Davis made in music cognition the subject of her doctoral program. As a composer she created music as a portal into memory and as a daughter and granddaughter, she walked through that portal to use memory and music to help come to terms with her own experiences of loss and grief.
The result is a body of work she calls Portals, an ongoing, multi-part project the second installment of which she will present with a quartet at BOP STOP, auspiciously enough, on Sunday evening, Dia de Muertos or All Souls Day.
Davis began the project in 2019 following the unexpected death of her father. The music was released two years later on Portals, Volume 1 – Mourning (Sunnyside Records) to great acclaim. Volume 2, released by the German label Intakt last summer, is dedicated to her grandmother, Joan “Lady” Anson-Weber, a British poet whose recorded voice appears on the recording.
“Music can really transgress any of the possible realms of existence into these places that seem so ethereal and mysterious, and so that’s what I’m doing,” Davis said. “I’m trying to use these mechanisms of sound and the organization of pitches and rhythms to access those points of communication with my lost ones.”
The music on Portals, Volume 2 has much in common with the methods and approach of the community of improvisors centered in Brooklyn who combine the rigor of modern notated music with the language of the Black American tradition. It was that tradition that inspired Davis as a budding musician growing up in Atlanta. So it isn’t surprising that vocals play a large role. Davis sings, but for the tour, she, pianist Julian Shore, Chris Tordini on bass and drummer Tim Angulo will play instrumental versions of the music.
Returning in time is one aspect of the music of Volume 2, but returning in the embodied world is a recurring thread that stretches across generations of Davis’ family. Growing up in England during the Second World War, Anson-Weber’s family was displaced by the Nazi bombing campaign. Davis herself has a story of displacement.
Though she has lived in the U.S. for much of her life, Davis was born in Singapore. The immigrant experience is woven into both her music and her activism. Sometimes the two practices are indivisible.
“I was at this detention center yesterday here in Albany, Oregon, right outside of Portland.,” she said when we spoke in late August. “I played a piece for these young girls., and one of them just said to me, ‘You really took me somewhere else.” And I was like, yeah, that’s it there. I want you to feel like you don’t have a care in the world just for this five to 10 minutes. I want us to be in here together. I want you to close your eyes and just be here with me. And I would hope that that’s where the music could take people when they’re listening to it.”
Portals, Volume 2 : Returning is available from Bandcamp at this link.
Caroline Davis’ Portals, Sunday, Nov. 2, 7 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, Tickets $25, available here.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Don’t comply in advance,
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