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Category: Event previews

Can We Talk? Gerald Clayton Comes to Bop Stop for Two Conversations on Improvisation

 

For generations, the jazz business has spent a lot of time and money looking for ways to grow the genre’s dedicated but comparatively small audience. Pianist Gerald Clayton has some advice for them: Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.

“That applies to how to approach playing the music, learning how to play the music, and also learning how to listen to it,” the 38-year-old Clayton said in a phone interview Tuesday. “If we just have folks listening to this music over and over and over, I think the process will come pretty naturally and take care of itself, but I think there’s nothing wrong with having a bit of a liaison, a tour guide pointing out some things to listen for.”

On June 1 and 2 that tour departs from Bop Stop sailing under the flag of Piano Cleveland’s Listening Series with Clayton as your guide.

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Born In A Log Cabin: AlbaTrio Celebrates the Release Of Their Debut CD

AlbaTrio
from left: Tommy Lehman, Anthony Taddeo, Tim Lekan

If you pick up a copy of AlbaTrio‘s eponymously titled new recording at Sunday’s release party at Bop Stop—and you should—you’ll hear an impressive showcase for trumpeter Tommy Lehman, bassist Tim Lekan and percussionist Anthony Taddeo. But listen closely and you might sense the presence of an uncredited fourth voice: the spacious yet intimate ambience of Strong Cabin in Lake Metroparks near Madison, Ohio.

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Ellington Is Forever

 

This is the most valuable object I own, an autographed photo of the Duke Ellington Orchestra given by Ellington to my father after one of the three engagements my dad presented in Erie, Pennsylvania between 1931 and 1933. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that my dad knew Ellington, and that I have touched this object that was once inscribed by the hand of genius.
On the 123rd anniversary of his birth–and every day–Ellington is forever.
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Vibraphonist Chris Dingman Brings His Journey of Healing to Cleveland’s Bop Stop

Chris Dingman

Listening to music has increasingly become a solitary, disembodied experience, these days. Yet an opposite if so far unequal reaction is rising: a new interest in music that serves a social purpose.

In the dim past, all music was social. It was used for celebration and worship, to lull children to sleep and to blunt the drudgery of hard, repetitive labor. The social music that Chris Dingman will bring to his solo concert at Cleveland’s Bop Stop on Thursday is similarly intentional yet with a somewhat different purpose: healing.

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