Concert Previews - John Chacona writes

The Jazz Gallery All-Stars Finally Land in Cleveland for a March 6 Concert

Published 1 March, 2022 By John Chacona

Back in the 1980s, listings of events in The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section were introduced with this charmingly worded caveat: Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives that are subject to last-minute change; it is therefore always advisable to call ahead.

For presenters and musicians who ply their trades during winter on the Great Lakes, that advice goes double, especially when high winds and more than a foot of snow arrived to slam the door on the Feb. 3 concert by the Jazz Gallery All-Stars at Cleveland’s Tri-C Auditorium. Yet when Tri-C JazzFest director Terri Pontremoli canceled that show, it wasn’t a double bar, but only a fermata.

Comments closed

Mostly Other People Do the Killing Finds the Laughter in “Disasters” At Bop Stop

Published 23 February, 2022 By John Chacona

If you can’t figure out why the song titles at tomorrow night’s Bop Stop concert by Mostly Other People Do the Killing might provoke laughter among some audience members, don’t worry. They’re just Pennsylvanians who are in on the joke.

Comments closed

Chicago’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble Returns To Erie With the Spirit

Published 10 February, 2022 By John Chacona

Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at Artlore Studio 2019

Lately there’s been a revival of interest in so-called spiritual jazz, a meditative offshoot of the 1960’s avant-garde that was advanced by figures such as the late harpist and organist Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders, a tenor saxophonist very much with us whose “Promises,” a collaboration with British electronic musician Floating Points, topped many critics’ lists of 2021’s best jazz recordings.

The attention these once undervalued players are receiving is both gratifying and overdue, but spiritual jazz has never gone away, as anyone who has had the privilege of attending the nearly annual Erie concerts of Kahil El’Zabar‘s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble can tell you.

Check Out Jazz at the Library with Céline Iris and Dan Bruce

Published 5 February, 2022 By John Chacona

A good measure of the health of a scene is the different kinds of venues that present the music. You expect to find jazz at outdoor festivals, college music departments, concert halls and, of course, in jazz clubs. And yes, all music scenes have taken hits over the last 23 months, but the appearance of a jazz concert on a Sunday afternoon at a public library has to be taken as a hopeful sign.

When that concert, Sunday, 2 p.m. at Wadsworth Public Library, involves artists as eminent as guitarist Dan Bruce and vocalist Céline Iris, it’s a very positive development indeed.

Soul Message Band Returns to Cleveland With Timeless Organ Trio Grooves

Published 27 January, 2022 By John Chacona

Soul Message Band Bop Stop 2020-02-01

Even if I hadn’t moved to Cleveland in 2019 I am probably a bit too young to have visited the many jazz venues that once thrived in the city’s so-called second downtown on Euclid Avenue. On any Saturday night 60 years ago, the district would have been alive with working-class revelers going out to a club for a few beers, and an unpretentious good time. The soundtrack for this custom often involved a small combo (quaint word, that!) of Hammond B-3 organ, guitar and drums that offered bluesy music with a big beat. Capable of shaking the room at a volume level that could rival a big band’s, the B-3 can also issue bedroom confidences in a whisper that could hush a crowded room. No wonder an archipelago of organ trio bars sprang up from Newark and Philadelphia on the eastern seaboard to the industrial Midwest.

Soul Message Band Bop Stop 2020-02-01 Those places are gone now, but the organ trio hangs on as a vital formation in creative music in the Black American tradition, and one of the best is about to roll into town to rock the Bop Stop tomorrow night.

Comments closed

Category: Concert Previews

The Jazz Gallery All-Stars Finally Land in Cleveland for a March 6 Concert

Mostly Other People Do the Killing Finds the Laughter in “Disasters” At Bop Stop

Chicago’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble Returns To Erie With the Spirit

Check Out Jazz at the Library with Céline Iris and Dan Bruce

Soul Message Band Returns to Cleveland With Timeless Organ Trio Grooves