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John Chacona writes Posts

A vintage selection from the cellar

Published 13 January, 2025 By John Chacona

Today I’m getting my Muck Rack profile together before I pitch an article to a city/regional magazine. To this online portfolio of my work I added this piece I wrote in 2011 for a city/regional title in Erie, Pennsylvania that is no longer published. It’s a scan of the page because, like the magazine itself, its digital archive also disappeared, maybe during a server migration some years ago or more likely when the publisher was acquired. Capitalists gonna capitalist I guess.

I’m especially fond of this piece, a bittersweet chronicle of a rich time in my life. But that’s not the only attraction it holds for me. It has a happy ending, and not just in the glass. You see, dear reader, the woman I obliquely and, I hope, generously alluded to in the opening graf, married me in 2019.

Cheers!

NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.

Red beans and ricely yours,

jc

John Chacona

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At BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio

Published 12 November, 2024 By John Chacona
Pat Bianchi
photocredit: Aidan Grant

It was a simple question that I asked Pat Bianchi: Which is your dominant hand? His answer was more complex than I expected.

“I’m kind of both,” he said. “I write with my left hand. I can write with my right hand, too, so it kind of flips back and forth.”

Ambidexterity is a useful trait for a keyboard player to possess, and because Bianchi’s primary instrument is the Hammond B-3 organ, his feet are also involved.

The lack of a dominant hand is an interesting footnote for sure but it’s also a metaphor for the absence of a dominant aesthetic in Bianchi’s musical choices, something that makes his Friday appearance at BOP STOP an unusually compelling event.

Read moreAt BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio
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For Versatile Max Johnson, There’s A Play At Every Bass

Published 5 November, 2024 By John Chacona
Max Johnson
photocredit: Aidan Grant

For something a little different today, let’s talk politics. Not electoral politics; we’ve all had enough of that. No, let’s talk musical politics, which can be just as divisive and irrational. Just ask Max Johnson. He plays bass in various jazz contexts, including a trio with saxophonist Neta Raanan and drummer Eliza Salem that makes stops at BLU Jazz+ and in Avon Lake this weekend. But he also plays and composes bluegrass and concert music. It could drive a gatekeeper mad.

Read moreFor Versatile Max Johnson, There’s A Play At Every Bass
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Road To Nowhere: Nashville Duo Concurrence Tell A Somber History In Music

Published 24 October, 2024 By John Chacona
Paul Horton and Greg Bryant. photocredit: John Rogers

In 1968, Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes took the unprecedented action of asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop the construction of the so-called Clark Freeway. It was estimated that construction of the highway to connect I-271 with I-490 would sever existing neighborhoods and displace 20,000 Clevelanders, many of them Black residents of the East Side.

Stokes succeeded and the Clark Freeway was never built, but other cities were not so lucky. One of them was Nashville, where the construction of I-40 and the devastation it caused in the city’s Black neighborhoods became the inspiration for, Indivisible, a stirring musical presentation by the duo project Concurrence that will play at BOP STOP Sunday joined by Cleveland drummer Aaron Smith.

Read moreRoad To Nowhere: Nashville Duo Concurrence Tell A Somber History In Music
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