When you think of all the challenges that have faced independent music venues for the past ten years, industry consolidation, soaring rents and the rise of streaming entertainment—then add the COVID-19 shutdown–it’s a miracle that there are any places left to hear live music. The jazz scene, which has lived on the economic knife’s edge for decades, was hit hard. Yet a few places survived, and that’s something to celebrate.
Welcome to BOP STOP, the little engine that could and the beating heart of Cleveland’s scene. This week the club marks its tenth anniversary in its third incarnation as part of the Music Settlement in Hingetown. There it cultivates a training ground for young musicians, brings the world’s most notable artists to northeast Ohio’s and connects our most notable artists to the world. Hell yeah that’s worth celebrating.
Best of all, the club commemorates the occasion not with a splashy, star-studded Met-gala blowout, but by doing what it always does, and does better than any jazz venue in the area.
Take the opening event, the Outlab evening that is a sort of all-comers, stone-soup potluck for experimental musicians. “Those are always such an interesting mixed bag depending on who shows up,” said BOP STOP director Bryan Kennard. “The experimental community is an active if small part of the music community, but we host [Outlab] once a month, and it just happens that this would be the week that we would host it. So why not be part of the celebration?”
Why not indeed? It’s part of the genre agnosticism nourished by Kennard and established by Gabe Pollack, whose directorial tenure elevated the club’s profile and whose contributions I honored here.
Pollack started the songwriter showcase led by Brent Kirby that anchors Wednesday night’s anniversary slot, and Kennard is happy to continue it. “Having grown up in the songwriter community, this is an event that speaks a lot to me,” he said. In an anniversary-week twist, jazz musicians will join the songwriters for one song each. “[Going] from one genre to another makes these music collaborations really interesting,” Kennard said.
When hometown heroes return to Cleveland, they often stop at BOP STOP, and John Fedchock, the New York-based Highland Heights native brings his J.J. Johnson tribute project to Hingetown Thursday night (I previewed the Akron stop on Fedchock’s tour here).
Jam sessions have been a staple of BOP STOP’s programming since the beginning, and Friday will continue the tradition, but not before longtime Cleveland favorite Hubb’s Groove gets the party started with a Brecker Brothers tribute at 7:30.
With the sudden closure of Nighttown, BOP STOP stands alone as the only Cleveland club that regularly books touring jazz artists. To the club’s great credit, some of them are among the music’s most innovative. That’s Nate Wood, who will close the anniversary week on Sunday with a solo project where the LA native, best known as a drummer for Kneebody and outward-bound saxophonist Donny McCaslin, will also simultaneously play bass, synths and sing—in real time.
But if you’re looking for one anniversary-week event that synthesizes what the club means to the scene, it’s Saturday night’s BOP STOP Big Band concert. This one has it all: local and national heavyweights gathering—more accurately, huddling—on the same stage to play compositions by northeast Ohio composers that were commissioned for the celebration.
One of them is trombonist Sam Blakeslee, who was a constant presence on the BOP STOP bandstand before becoming one of the rising stars on the busy and competitive New York scene. He’s happy to be there and be a part of it. Still, he told me, “There’s certain venues like Birdland or the Blue Note or Dizzy’s that might have more of a jazz tourism thing happening, but even those places really lack the idea of like, ‘Oh! Something’s happening at the Bop Stop, I’m going to go to the Bop Stop.’”
On the East Side or the West side, in three locations and in good times and dire times, BOP STOP has always been there. It’s a commitment that Blakeslee honors with a commissioned piece that also plays tribute to his mentor saxophonist Bobby Selvaggio.
“Here was this club that was a perfect situation, and it closed,“ Blakeslee said by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. “We were all devastated, and then out of nowhere, against all odds it came back.”