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This week I’m taking a Thanksgiving break of sorts. Instead of my stated project of documenting the northeast Ohio scene I’ll cover something notable that’s happening in my old hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania: a concert Saturday evening headlined by New York improvising trio Three Shamans at Erie’s Grounded Printshop on a bill that also includes New American musicians from Syria and an experimental trombone and percussion duo.
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With its wide dynamic range, speech-like articulation and capacity for playing off-the-scale notes, the saxophone would seem to be the perfect instrument for creative improvised music (some people call it “free jazz” or “avant-garde jazz” or “fire music”). Fine, but anything the saxophone can do, the trombone can do better. So why don’t we hear more trombones in creative music—or in mainstream jazz, for that matter?
It’s a question that Steve Swell, the trombonist who will appear at the Beachland Ballroom Sunday with saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, Jon Rune Strøm on bass and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, has pondered for a long time.
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Tribute concerts, for better or worse, are an established marketing hook for jazz presenters and an evergreen source of inspiration for musicians. The honors tend to cluster around past masters, and the bigger the name the batter. Living musicians who can actually appreciate the tribute aren’t often feted and even less often asked to play, but a tribute concert where the honoree is a sideman? Never happens.
Yet when bassist Aidan Plank’s octet takes the Bop Stop stage Thursday to present a program of music by Carmen Castaldi, the man of the hour will be seated where he can usually be found: behind the trap set.
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Listening to Evelyn Wright sing, it doesn’t take long to hear a complete immersion in music. Yet while her mastery of the jazz idiom might suggest otherwise, she hasn’t always been a jazz singer. She has however, always been a singer, period.
“This is all I’ve ever done,” she said at over coffee at a University Circle café earlier this fall. “I’ve never worked a day job.”
In today’s difficult jazz economy, that’s an eye-opening statement, but when Wright appears Nov. 16 with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra Little Big Band at the Happy Days Lodge in Peninsula, she will bring a repertoire and an expertise that hearkens back to a balmier music climate, one that she was fortunate to experience before it disappeared.
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Review: Jakob Bro and Joe Lovano’s ‘Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian’ PostGenre, 7 November, 2022
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