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Category: Concert Previews

Flutist Alex Hamburger Has Found “A Crew” And An Audience In Cleveland

Alex Hamburger
photocredit: Nick Moreland

When you’re talking about comebacks, the Cavs recent run of thrillers has nothing on the resurgence of the flute.

It wasn’t so long ago that the silvery cylinder, in the hands of Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy character, was a meme-able stand in for disco-era musical cotton candy. But now, artists like André 3000 and Shabaka Hutchings are pied pipers bringing new credibility, and new audiences to the flute.

Just ask flutist, vocalist, and composer Alex Hamburger . “I think there’s been a lot of cool flute stuff happening for a while, but I think it’s exciting when other people get excited about it,” she said. “For me, it was always cool.”

Alex Hamburger
photocredit: Nick Moreland

Hamburger returns to BOP STOP Sunday night for her third appearance at the Hingetown club in four years. Her ubiquity on that stage, and the musicians who will join her there, including bassist Kip Reed, Gabe Jones on drums and percussionist Patrick Duke Graney, might suggest that Hamburger has taken up residence on the shores of Lake Erie. Yet the flutist and her pianist and husband Jose Luiz Martins, are based in Washington, DC.

Still, the audience rapport she has established here keeps her coming back. “There’s just so many amazing musicians and such a tight scene and a lot of legendary musicians,” she said in a video call earlier this week. “The audiences seem so open and into hearing original music, and I feel that sometimes that’s always the first thing to go in a city.”

“. . . found my crew”

Hamburger’s original music will have a distinctly Brazilian flavor, lent authority by Martins, a São Paulo native. The Brazilian connection was also crucial in the formation of her New York band. “My drummer Chase [Elodia] went to Oberlin, and Chase knew Pat [Graney] from Oberlin. The first time we came to Cleveland, we did a double bill with Pat and then Pat ended up just sitting in my band. It was one of those magic moments where you’re like, Oh, I found part of my crew, my sound.”

Alex Hamburger What If? album cover

That sound has been an evolving, to embrace not only jazz and Brazilian music, but also the textural and atmospheric possibilities of the studio. Her latest recording, What If? (Unit Records, 2023) wraps Hamburger’s flute and vocals in an enveloping cloud of shimmering synthesizers and Wurlitzer piano sounds. It’s an appropriate sonic frame for the record’s centerpiece, “Molinos de Vientos [Windmills],” a two-part sound painting inspired by Don Quixote and Dada poetry.

Poetry and sound

Poetry has been fundamental in Hamburger’s life and art. Her grandmother, Ana Maria Codas, was a notable poet in her native Paraguay. ‘My grandmother was an activist and a poet and an educator in Paraguay during the dictatorship there that lasted 35 years,” Hamburger said. “She built a school with her own hands and started what became a national movement for academic integrity. She passed when I was 13, so I didn’t really get to have adult conversations with her, but I’d say that post-college, I started to rediscover all of her writing, and for me, that was a really strong starting place.”

So was her grandmother’s social activism, a tradition that Hamburger carries on in her work as a community organizer and producer of “My Body, My Festival,” a fundraiser for the DC Abortion Fund.

Producing that event, Hamburger said, “has really shown me what music can do in a community organizing sense. I think as musicians, we study this specific thing so much that [we] don’t know how to do anything else and how to be an active part in society other than making music. That was something I always struggled with. But being a bandleader, you have all these skills, and they’re so closely related to community organizing. Now putting together and presenting an event gives me a similar rush to playing a show.

“It brings a lot to me.”

Alex Hamburger, Sun., March 10, 7 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. Tickets $20, available here. The concert will be livestreamed on BOP STOP’s Facebook page.

NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.

Red beans and ricely yours,

jc

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Countdown: Where To Go & What To Hear In NEO, Feb. 22-29

Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux
Ken Vandermark’s Edition Redux. Photocredit: Alex Inglizian

Friendly Experiencers,

It’s been a minnit, I know, but the last eight weeks has been a bit of a time, which is to say that big changes are afoot, but getting on the good foot, I should have the time and mental energy to resume the coverage here and there’s much to cover on the NEO scene in the very near future. So let’s get right to it.

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Violinist Meg Okura and Pianist Kevin Hays Play the Chamber Music of the New Jazz

Meg Okura has played with artists as varied as David Bowie, Lee Konitz, Diane Reeves and Cirque du Soleil. The Juilliard-trained violinist even made a solo debut at the Kennedy Center when she played European concert music exclusively. So her versatility is beyond question. But who could have predicted that she would be as adept with deadpan humor as she is with a bow?

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Countdown: Where To Go & What To Hear In NEO, Jan. 25-31

Friendly Experiencers,

It seems like a very long time since I counted down the week’s jazz and jazz-adjacent events in this space. Blame the inevitable thinning of events around the holidays, some scheduling anomalies as the new year began and some unforeseen family issues at let’s call this HQ. Still, the welcome thaw that erased some of last week’s snowfall has also started to warm the live music scene as well, and this week’s varied menu of shows, from rigorous improv to instrumental R&B (we don’t use the “smooth” word here) is evidence that better and more musical days are just ahead.

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Anthony Taddeo’s Jazz all’Italiana Band Alla Boara Sets Sail With A New Record And Tour

Alla Boara

One of the highlights of a performance by Alla Boara, percussionist Anthony Taddeo’s jazz-meets-Italian-folk-music project, is “Mamma Mia Dammi Cento Lire.” It’s a musical setting of conversation between a young woman, wheedling 100 lire from her mother so that she can go to America to start a new life, and her mother who warns that if she leaves her village the feckless girl will drown when her ship sinks. All this is set to an earworm of a dancing melody. The words, brought to vivid life by Amanda Powell, a superb singing actress, have the sly worldliness and teasing insinuation of opera buffa.

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