Anyone who has ventured outside in the last couple of days can confirm it: September is the most glorious month in northeast Ohio. This week, dedicated indoors enthusiasts will join the amen chorus, because great jazz is everywhere you will look and listen.
There’s so much happening that I could write three or four full posts this week, but that wouldn’t leave enough time for the music. So rather than the full, big band version, I’ll give you the scaled-down trio arrangement–three can’t miss events that will have you circling the date and smashing the BUY NOW button on the ticketing page. And wait until you see next week.
Countdown . . .
Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival
What did we do to deserve not one but two top-shelf free jazz festivals on consecutive weekends? Maybe a better question would be: what did we do to deserve an organization with the generosity and foresight of Akron’s Open Tone Music?
Chris Anderson’s nonprofit stepped into the breach vacated by the Local 4 Music Fund to provide the infrastructure for last week’s Hingetown Jazz Festival (wasn’t it great?), but this week, they are front and center with their own event, the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival.
While Hingetown celebrated its third birthday last Saturday, big brother turns 10. It’s a big occasion and the festival responds in kind with 35 performances, most of them free, at nine venues in downtown Akron over three days beginning Thursday, Sept. 4.
There’s a very special vibe to the Akron jazz scene and it won’t be hard to clock this weekend. If Hingetown was conceived as a block party, Rubber City has always felt more like a family reunion, and the schedule suggests that most of the significant players on the NEO scene will be there.
So will touring artists. The big name in this regard is saxophonist Kirk Whalum, whose Saturday evening concert at Lock 3 is one of the festival’s two ticketed events. With deep roots in gospel music, Whalum is an inspired choice to anchor the festival’s programming.
His background in the church aligns nicely with that of Open Tone artistic director Theron Brown, whose trio will provide the rhythm section for trumpeter Jon Lampley, the festival’s artist in residence. Lampley, a Tallmadge, Ohio native and founder of the Huntertones, has been a member of the house band for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
That gig is likely coming to an end, a casualty of the uncertain political climate that has arts funders taking a wait-and-see attitude, As a consequence, there will be fewer touring artists at Rubber City than in recent years and more local bands. Here at let’s call this, we call that a feature, not a bug, and with a lineup of pros and students, vocalists and swinging bands, fusion ensembles, singer-songwriters, talks and a masterclass, no one should go home disappointed.
So, happy birthday RCJ&BF, and don’t worry. You’re doing it right.
Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival, Thursday, Sept. 4 – Saturday, Sept. 6, various venues in downtown Akron. Most events free. Complete schedule available here.
Paul Cornish at BOP STOP
While the Rubber City festival is an unmistakable high point, there has been an abundance of great music in Akron this year. Case in point: the concert in April by the Joshua Redman Group at EJ Thomas Performing Arts Hall. A positive Covid test the day before kept me at home, which meant missing a chance to hear the pianist Paul Cornish, who was a member of that band.
Lucky for all of us that Cornish returns Friday, this time as a leader, touring to support his debut recording, You’re Exaggerating! released two weeks ago.
Cornish is the latest in a remarkable lineage of pianists nurtured at Houston’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, that includes Jason Moran, Robert Glasper and James Francies. You can hear a little of each of those players in Cornish’s style–well, a lot of Moran, to be fair. There’s also a bit of Keith Jarrett’s rhapsodic lyricism and Herbie Hancock’s way of shaping a line (that little tremolo at the apex of phrases), but Cornish is no ventriloquist, His style is his own articulated with a touch as clear and effervescent as a cold bottle of Pellegrino.
This is notable because there’s a lot of counterpoint in Cornish’s music, so much that I suspected that he played a lot of Bach. “I did,” he said, “another one of those things that maybe I grew to appreciate later on, I tend to go back to that music pretty often nowadays.”
Like many Houston musicians before him, Cornish found his way to Los Angeles, which he has made his base for 11 years, and grown along with the city’s scene. “When I got there, it was right after like the buzz of [Kendrick Lamar’s] To Pimp A Butterfly album and then Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin. Now we have all these amazing musicians that you would typically go to New York to see, and they’re all in LA in making great music. I think it’s kind of just spiraled in a positive way out of things like that.”
So has Cornish’s career, which has been boosted by recording for Blue Note, perhaps the most storied of jazz labels. Speaking on the anniversary of birth of Horace Silver, the quintessential Blue Note pianist for 25 years.
That legacy carries some weight, for better or worse. Yet Cornish, an exceptionally poised and thoughtful man, can acknowledge it without being haunted by it. “I know the best thing that I can offer people is the best version of myself,” he said. “All of my favorite artists–on Blue Note and otherwise–they all did it in their own way and that’s why they became who they are. It’s taken me 28 years to realize that, and thankfully I’ve had a lot of great experiences and mentors along the way.”
Some of the names of those mentors might be familiar to NEO jazz fans. “I met Chris Coles at the Banff jazz curated residency like 10 years ago, and I remember he was like one of my favorite people there,” Cornish said. “He wrote a piece, and everyone was crying. I haven’t really seen him since then, but we kept in touch over the years online and then I saw him when we came to Akron [in April].”
Cornish will be joined on Friday by Jonathan Pinson on drums (“One of my favorite drummers in the world,” he said) and Jermaine Paul, who’s also from LA. “We’ve been playing together for about a year,” Cornish said. “I’m really excited because the music to me has already evolved so much just in the year we’ve been playing it. So it sounds completely different than the record, and I’m excited for people to hear it, especially if they’ve already listened to the record and have a few [songs] that they like.
“I think they’ll be hopefully pleasantly surprised with how they sound now.”
Paul Cornish Trio with Jermaine Paul and Jonathon Pinson, Friday, Sept. 5, 8 p.m. BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $25 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.
Don’t comply in advance,
jc
