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Category: Concert Previews

Altin Sencalar Unleashes A New Release at BOP STOP

Published 20 May, 2025 By John Chacona
Altin Sencalar - Unleashed press photo 3 by Anna Yatskevich
photocredit: Anna Yatskevich

Altin Sencalar is a big guy. A Texan by birth, he wouldn’t look out of place on the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys football team. He has two big dogs, Navy and JJ, and they slept on the bad behind him when we chatted on a video call (note to readers: it failed to save and a lot of great direct quotes were lost).

Sencalar plays the trombone, an instrument that is associated with swaggering bluster, but when he comes to BOP STOP Saturday, you might be surprised by the subtlety that he brings to the instrument.

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“Blue-Collar” Joshua Smith Comes Home With A Solid Gold Band

Published 6 May, 2025 By John Chacona

If you know Joshua Smith only through his exploratory work with the cooperative trio Birth, you might be surprised to learn, as I did, that the saxophonist has a thriving practice playing straightahead jazz. His Friday concert at BOP STOP won’t be a standards gig, but it will show a side of the 45-year-old saxophonist that might surprise some fans.

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Q: When Is A Quintet A Quartet? A: When It’s The New Kneebody

Published 29 April, 2025 By John Chacona
Kneebody
photocredit: Gilad Hekselman

Q: What is a Kneebody?

A:  It’s the name of a band whose amalgam of jazz, funk, electronica, beats, progressive rock and unheard sounds is so unclassifiable that no known word could adequately describe it.

On paper, the band, which returns to BOP STOP for a Sunday performance, has the canonical jazz formation of trumpet, tenor saxophone, keyboards, bass and drums. On stage Kneebody explodes genre categories.

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Paul Giallorenzo’s Trio Serves A Fusion Menu at BOP STOP

Published 23 April, 2025 By John Chacona
(from left): Paul Giallorenzo, Mikel Patrick Avery, Jason Roebke

In the band photo on the tray card of Force Majeure, (Delmark Records, 2014) a CD by Paul Giallorenzo‘s GitGo band, the leader stands front and center wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of the Great Lakes. After 30 years in Chicago, does the Long Island native consider himself a Midwest musician?

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The Abundance Mindset Rings Out At UA JazzWeek 25

Published 7 April, 2025 By John Chacona
clockwise from left: Theron Brown, Sean Jones, Joshua Redman, Christopher Coles

There’s a word you’re going to be hearing a lot more of in the next two weeks. It’s abundance, the title of a buzzy new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that proposes something they call “the abundance mindset“ as a new basis for progressive politics. There’s no evidence that Klein and Thompson visited the campus of The University of Akron School of Music Jazz Studies Department before they wrote the book, but if they had they would have found that mindset in abundance . This week, April 7-11, that mindset will be on public display as UA kicks off JazzWeek 25: Abundance (Jazz Festival), featuring performances by Joshua Redman and Sean Jones in an illustration–and celebration–of music, community and lineage.

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