For years, Amina Figarova was such a constant presence on the Cleveland scene that you might have assumed that she lived here. So it came as a surprise when the pianist told me that her engagement Oct. 12 at Bop Stop will be her first at the Hingetown club.
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You can’t blame bassist Noah Garabedian for hoping that the engagement Friday at Blu Jazz+ with his cooperative trio Ember will be a little less memorable than his last northeast Ohio visit. “Nobody was there,” Garabedian remembered.
It was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the election.
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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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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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Barbara Knight doesn’t consider herself a jazz singer, though you wouldn’t know it from the swinging, rhythmically alert performances she’s lavished on northeast Ohio audiences through the years. But hear her out.
“I’ve always called myself a big band singer, rather than a jazz singer,” she said by phone from her home in nearby western Pennsylvania. “If you listen to me, you’ll hear that I am more traditional with my presentation of songs. I’m not using vocal pyrotechnics to do all kinds of crazy things with the melody. I think the people that I sing for are more interested in hearing the melody.”
When Knight and her quintet, John Orsini (saxophones), Phil Lantry (keyboards), Tim Powell (bass) and Glenn Schaft (drums) take the stage at Cain Park for a free concert Sunday, Aug. 14 at 1 p.m., you will certainly hear the melody, but you’ll also hear the wisdom of a singer with hundreds of songs in her repertoire and decades of exploration into their subtleties.
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