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Author: John Chacona

Busy Body, Busier Mind: Sam Blakeslee Returns Home To Celebrate His New CD

 

Though Sam Blakeslee has been increasingly active on the New York scene for five years, a part of him will always be most at home in Ohio. Want proof? Check out the credits on Busy Body, the new CD by his band Wistful Thinking, which will celebrated with a concert and release party at Bop Stop Saturday.

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Rabbit, Rabbit! Owen Broder Puts Johnny Hodges Front and Center at BLU Jazz+

Owen Broder
photo by Adrien H. Tillman

Johnny Hodges is widely acknowledged as perhaps the preeminent alto saxophone player in the decades before Charlie Parker’s emergence. Yet unlike Parker, whose influence on saxophonists is apparent 68 years after his death, Hodges’ style is almost universally celebrated in print and online yet never heard on the bandstand.

Until now. Saxophonist Owen Broder is putting Hodges where he rightfully belongs: front and center with an ambitious recording project and a new band that swoops into BLU Jazz+ on Friday.

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Alla Boara Presents a Bella Figura at Friday’s Album Release Celebration

Alla Boara

Drummer Anthony Taddeo finished his graduate degree from Youngstown State University in 2020, but he won’t hand in his final project until Friday night.

True, Le Tre Sorelle, the new CD by his band Alla Boara, wasn’t exactly a class assignment, and as capstone research projects go, this one is more joyous than the average academic paper. Yet the CD, which will be celebrated Friday at an album release party at Bop Stop, is the culmination of a long period of study, research, writing and interrogation into Taddeo’s Italian roots.

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