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Someone once said that all music, even at its most abstract, is about something, and that is the passage of time. That might be, but there are musicians who can transcend time to enter other dimensions in music. Vocalist Arooj Aftab, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and pianist Vijay Iyer who, as Love In Exile, will come to the Cleveland Museum Of Art Wednesday, are among them.
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Collective action is on the calendar for the next week beginning with the monthly concert by the NEO composers mob Third Law Collective, a fusion-y three-way courtesy of guitarist Oz Noy with bassist Jimmy Haslip and force-of-nature drummer Dennis Chambers and concluding next Tuesday with a New Ghosts-sponsored performance (and that’s precisely what it will be), by DIOR STAPLER, a group that bears an uncanny resemblance to Eurojazz agents provocateurs Die Hochstapler. New Wednesday’s Cleveland Museum of Art concert by Love In Exile (Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily) will get a full preview on Monday. Are you ready?
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In his 30-odd years on the scene, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling has topped the Down Beat Critics Poll 13 times and has received the Jazz Journalists Association Male Singer of the Year award eight times. He’s done this while singing texts written by Theodore Roethke and Walt Whitman, a Monkees hit, one of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. Whitney Balliett might have had Elling’s musical choices in mind when he wrote his famous characterization of jazz as being “the sound of surprise.”
Yet none of Elling’s neck-snapping musical eccentricities was as shocking as SuperBlue, which will come to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art Wednesday.
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Attention Swifties: ya girl is coming to Cleveland tonight. No, it’s not a previously unannounced stop on the Eras Tour, but you wouldn’t expect to find that kind of scoop in this column, would you? The Swift in question is Veronica, who kicks off a late-September clambake of jazz and adjacent musical revelry this week, one that could launch a million crossover dreams.
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The Bay City Rollers might look forward all week to S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night, but for jazz fans in NEO, Sunday is the night to dance to the rhythm in your heart and soul. I previewed the BOP STOP hit by the Chris Speed Trio here, but there’s a lot more happening Sunday–and all weekend long.
Because vocalist Kathy Kosins has been on the Detroit scene for a minute, you can assume a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of soul, R&B and jazz as table stakes. For her BOP STOP debut, she climbs into a classic Cadillac for an evening of cruising the satiny, midnight-blue boulevard traveled by ’50s vocalists such as Anita O’Day, Chris Connor, Julie London and June Christy. Riding shotgun on the program drawn from her recent release To The Ladies Of Cool are pros Joe Leaman on piano, bassist Jordan McBride and drummer, Scott Kretzer. And if you can’t make Thursday’s hit, they’ll do it again Friday night at Akron’s BLU Jazz+.