When shooting wrapped on the new Superman film last month, it wasn’t the end of Superhero Summer in Cleveland. That will have to wait for this weekend when the stars won’t be heroes, they’ll be Sheroes. That’s the name of the all-female-identifying supergroup that pianist, educator and author Monika Herzig will bring to BOP STOP Friday.
Herzig is no stranger to the Hingetown club. She’s appeared four times, including twice last year. Friday’s gig will be the third for her Sheroes project, and there’s a reason Herzig keeps coming back. “We love the BOP STOP,” she said by phone from her home in southern Indiana. “I love the fact that you have a club that benefits an educational program.
I mean, how cool is that?”
But cool factor aside, one gig at BOP STOP will be impossible for Herzig and the Sheroes to forget. It was March 12, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
“Oh my God, that was a memorable day. We were on our release tour for the last album and . . . we had incredibly great concerts lined up,” she said. “Thursday came and nobody knew if we were supposed to shut down or not. So we just went out and played, and I think we had three or four people there. We played our hearts out and we told them [that] we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
What happened next was astonishing. “After the show, a man from Buffalo who was in Cleveland on business offered to buy all our CDs,” Herzig remembered. “I said sure, and he asked, how much is it? I said, ‘Oh, maybe 100 bucks,”” Herzig said. But when she handed him the credit card reader, she saw that he’d paid a thousand dollars.
Herzig couldn’t have known how much that money would come to mean given the adversity that would follow. Still, as a woman and a leader in a male-dominated artform, adversity has always been table stakes for Herzig. Still, she maintain that founding the Sheroes broke no barriers.
“DIVA, [the all-female big band for which Cleveland’s Jackie Warren serves as pianist] has been at it for 30 years,” Herzig was quick to acknowledge. “My purpose was just to showcase some really incredible players that should be on a larger stage, on a larger platform.”
On the front line, Reut Regev, a slashing, Israel-born trombonist, and flutist Jamie Baum, a composer and leader whose recent release, What Times Are These (Sunnyside Records) is one of the year’s most acclaimed recordings, have been with the band since the beginning. The drummer for the current tour is Chelsea Hughey from Indianapolis, and on bass is Gina Schwartz, whom Herzig met in Vienna, where she now teaches. “So now we’re becoming intercontinental, I guess,” she said.
In truth, the Sheroes have been intercontinental since the beginning. Herzig is a native of Germany who came to the University of Alabama in 1987 and never left. She received her Doctorate in Music Education and Jazz Studies at Indiana University, where she recently concluded a three-decade teaching career.
That leaves more time for writing (Herzig has written or edited four books about jazz), for recording (All In Good Time, the band’s fourth recording, was recently released on the Zoho label), for podcasting, and for touring, an activity that she finds rewarding. “We love traveling together,” she said noting that with an all-female touring van, “I can tell you the conversations are very different.”
She mentioned that Regev often takes her daughter on tour, a decision with which the trombonist struggled at first. “She was torn,” Herzig remembered. [She asked] “’Should I stay home? I’m dragging the girl all over the world. Is that okay?’ And we’re saying, yes, it’s okay. If that’s what we dream to do, we have the right to claim our space, to be part of it. You don’t have to feel bad about it. That’s part of the encouraging trek here.”
Sure enough, Regev’s daughter is along for the current tour. She is 12,” Herzig said, “and I think she actually might play her trumpet on one of the tunes.”
Get ready. The next generation of Sheroes is about to claim her space
Monika Herzig’s Sheroes, Fri., Aug. 30, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland, Tickets $20 advance, $25 day of show, available here. Thurs. Aug. 29, 7 p.m. City Gallery, 1503 State St., Erie, Pa., Tickets $20, available by calling 814-218-4185.
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
