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Author: John Chacona

Giant Step: Akron’s Rubber City Festival Returns to Live Performance

Published 7 September, 2022 By John Chacona

 

Right now, the northeast Ohio creative music scene is like the parent of a toddler walking barefoot in the dark trying to cross the room not knowing where the Legos might be. What will the size of audiences be like? What will they be willing to spend when inflation is eating away at buying power? How will ongoing health concerns play out?

For a multiday event at several venues, the peril increases. Still, if you’re looking for a music event that has bounce-back written all over it, Akron’s Rubber City Jazz and Blues Festival has to be the one.

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Grassy Sound Welcomes A Surprise Guest for Deadly Accurate, Irony-Free Lounge Music

Published 1 September, 2022 By John Chacona

 

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Philadelphian Nick Millevoi is best known for the post-industrial guitar grime of his Desertion Trio. Keyboard player Ron Stabinsky is one-third of the jazz arsonist squad Mostly Other People Do the Killing (MOPDtK), and every punk fan knows Derrick Bostrom as the founding drummer of the Meat Puppets. So it stands to reason that when the three come together as Grassy Sound Sept. 8 at Cleveland’s Bop Stop, they’ll be playing lounge music.

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A Gabe Pollack Moment

Published 23 August, 2022 By John Chacona

Word reached me late yesterday that Gabe Pollack, longtime director of Bop Stop at the Music Settlement, will be leaving the Hingetown club to become director of performing arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art (you can read CMA’s announcement here, the Settlement’s here).

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Roll Call, August 19: Kyle Kidd, Russ Lossing, Pablo Moser and Nicolás Ojeda

Published 19 August, 2022 By John Chacona

I get a lot of music for my consideration, more than 430 (!) new releases in 2022. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, when I’m not previewing events in northeast Ohio or profiling regional musicians, I’ll offer hot takes on recent releases.

When I moved to Cleveland in late 2019, one of the bands I most wanted to hear was the Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar. You can probably guess why that remains on my to-do list nearly three years and several COVID subvariants later, but it’s taken on new urgency with the release of Soothsayer  (American Dreams Records), the spellbinding solo debut of M[A]B vocalist Kyle Kidd (all pronouns).

Read moreRoll Call, August 19: Kyle Kidd, Russ Lossing, Pablo Moser and Nicolás Ojeda
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