No burying the lede here: the next eight days might offer the most extraordinary lineup of jazz concerts Cleveland has seen in years.
Starting with the pianists, you can hear Cuban piano great Omar Sosa (Sept. 10), Michael Wolff, Dan Wall (both Sept. 13), Theron Brown and Matt Mitchell (both Sept. 14) this week. Prefer saxophonists? Then how about James Brandon Lewis (Sept. 12), Anna Webber (Sept. 13) and Branford Marsalis (Sept. 16). Add the unpredictable chemistry of The Uninvited (Sept. 11) and, well, you’ve got some choices to make.
Any one of these events would merit the full 700-word feature treatment at let’s call this, but don’t worry. I’m going to keep this short and snackable, though I might publish more nutritious fuller versions later, here or elsewhere, and I’ll let you know about those if and when they happen.
For now, though, let’s shine a light on three mindblowingly exciting shows that will make your muso friends in New York wish they lived in Cleveland.
Omar Sosa Trio: Outside The Box
Wed., Sept. 10
Cleveland Museum of Art
The vibe surrounding a performance by Omar Sosa isn’t so much a concert as it is a ritual. Or maybe a séance. Sosa lights a candle on his piano before he plays. His clothing and head wrap are white, the color worn by the santeros or priests of Lucumí, the syncretic West African religion of the Yoruba diaspora in the West.
The music, too, seems to call the spirits to slowly gather. They materialize in waves of arpeggios and quiet pianistic murmurs. This is spiritual jazz in the authentic sense of that overused term.
“I’m a son of Obatalá,” Sosa said on a video call last week, citing one of the spirits called orishas in Lucumí practice. “Obatalá in Lucumí tradition is the old man with the white hair, the person who got the knowledge because he lived already the beautiful and interesting and bad things in life.”
One thing that unites the great lineage of Cuban-born jazz pianists (and quite a few classical pianists, too), is a huge sound and almost orchestral conception of the instrument. Omar Sosa is a part of that lineage that stretches from Bebo Valdés through his son, Chucho and grandson Cuchito, to Gonzalo Rubalcaba to Harold Lopez-Nussa, and he can bring the thunder with the best of them. Yet his music is often delicate, even dreamy—a Schrödinger’s cat simultaneously inside and outside the box of Cuban pianism.
Fittingly, he’s billed his current project as Outside the Box, and it is in several ways. His band is spare: Cuban saxophonist Yosvanny Terry and Julian Miltenberger, a drummer from Philadelphia. There’s no percussionist or bassist. “The bass player is the foundation of the building, but when you don’t have the bass, the foundation can be Yosvanny, can be Julian, can be myself. I can move the piece in any direction,” he said. Everyone has a say, even the ancestors.
“When we have the opportunity to let the elders talk, we’re going to learn a lot of good stuff,” the son of Obatalá said. “Google don’t have it.”
Omar Sosa Trio: Outside the Box, Wed., Sept. 10, 7:30 p.m., Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art, tickets $32-59, available. here.
The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis
Fri., Sept. 12
Beachland Tavern
One of the year’s most anticipated concerts is a performance by a Ph.D. with a classic post-punk band.
That is not a hallucination by AI, gentle reader. That is truth. And you can prove it with your ears at the Beachland Friday when The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis throw down.
For clarity’s sake, let’s define the terms. This spring Lewis submitted his dissertation on the what he calls Molecular Systematic Music, a system of transmission of musical information that blends music theory with molecular biology using the double-helix structure of DNA as a model. That’s next-level stuff, for sure, but with a tenor saxophone in his hands, the Buffalo native is a country preacher spitting truth and beauty at a high level.
Weeks after his dissertation was accepted, Lewis was honored as the Artist of the Year in Downbeat Magazine’s annual critics poll. Those who consider the tenor to be the prophetic voice in jazz will note that Lewis finished on top in that category, too.
A few years ago, he began to tour with The Messthetics, a DC-area band with guitarist Anthony Pirog and anchored by the rhythm section of Joe Lally and Brendan Canty of the seminal post-punk outfit Fugazi.
You might expect that lineup to be a recipe for face-melting, blast-furnace musical fury, and to be sure, the quartet can come at you with the ferocity of a Philadelphia baseball fan chasing a home-run ball. But the band’s debut recording, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis (Impulse! Records, 2024), was a surprisingly thoughtful and even lyrical affair.
Still, Cleveland is a punk and post-punk town, and the quartet will give the people what they want in an appropriate setting. “Places are, in fact, people,” said Matt Laferty of New Ghosts, the organization under whose aegis the concert is being presented (interestingly, Paul Cornish made the same statement at his sold-out BOP STOP concert last Friday). “The only reason that the Beachland Tavern is a place is because of the efforts of [people] like Cindy Barber and Mark Leddy. They are willing that space into existence through their own heart, frustration, money, gains and losses, and imagination.”
You could say the same thing about Laferty and New Ghosts, which in the span of three days will present concerts by seven of the most consequential musicians out there today. Which brings us to . . .
Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis wsg Well, Fri., Sept. 12, 8 p.m., Beachland Tavern, tickets $25, available here.
Anna Webber’s Simple Trio
Sun., Sept. 14
BOP STOP
Simple Trio is, on one level, a matter-of-fact ingredients list for an improvising group in the Black American Tradition: a melody instrument, a harmony instrument and a rhythm instrument. Can’t get much simpler than that.
Their music, though, is anything but. It’s a Piranesi drawing of fantastical musical architecture, or maybe an Escher print where patterns repeat and evolve. And it’s quite ravishingly beautiful. So, did Anna Webber name the band as an example of droll Canadian humor?
“Complexity for the sake of complexity has never been my thing,” Webber said on a video call Sunday. “For me, I actually feel like I’m trying to simplify all the time. I’m really interested in clarity and how do I get these ideas across, which might be a little complex, might be a little hard to grasp for some at the outset. How do I make those actually coherent and cogent and able to be presented in a way that connects with people in a really visceral way?”
One way is just to listen, but really listen. In the way that you can appreciate the beauty of a sunflower without knowing anything about the Fibonacci series, the Simple Trio has many points of entry.
One, instrumental virtuosity, is as old as jazz itself. All three players are astoundingly skilled instrumentalists, Webber on saxophone, pianist Matt Mitchell, a familiar presence on the BOP STOP stage, and drummer John Hollenbeck. While Webber’s music can be easy to enjoy, she concedes that it isn’t easy to play.
“As the band has developed, it’s really become for these people, and most of it would be pretty unimaginable to play with other people. I don’t doubt that other people could technically handle it. You write something with a specific person in mind, both their skill set, their personality, what they like doing, and it feels like it’s bespoke for that person.”
Sunday’s show is presented by New Ghosts, which, like the Simple Trio, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “Right at the beginning of the series Anna Webber brought one of her early projects to the BOP STOP,” Laferty remembered. “Almost nobody came.”
Don’t look for a repeat of that turnout for what promises to be one of the highlights of this or any other season. It’s as simple as that.
Anna Webber’s Simple Trio with Matt Mitchell and John Hollenbeck, Sun. Sept. 14, 8 p.m. BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, tickets $20, available here.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar,
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
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