Friendly experiencers,
Pull up! I see this all over my social feeds, an exhortation from my musician friends to get out and experience the music the way it’s meant to be heard: live.
This weekend brings a pair of shows on the west side–both on Friday (are you superstitious?). Good luck deciding which one you’ll want to pull up to. While you make up your mind, enjoy tomorrow’s theme song in the composer’s authoritative version with all-timer Walter Theodore Rollins, who turned 94 last Saturday the 7th.
When Sean Jones, Dominick Farinacci, Tommy Lehman and Curtis Taylor took the stage at the Tri-C JazzFest in June, you could have called them The Lettermen. All four trumpet players hail from northeast Ohio and all are Tri-C JazzFest Academy alumni. We see a fair amount of the first three players, but Taylor has been a less frequent visitor since relocating to SoCal a decade ago. He returns this weekend with the same hard-hitting lineup that he featured on Taylor Made, his independent recording released in April: Marcus Elliot on tenor saxophone, Theron Brown, piano, bassist Jonathon Muir-Cotton and Alex White on drums. There as, presumably, at BOP STOP, they stoke the classic tradition of muscular post-bop with fiery intent.
Curtis Taylor Quartet, Fri. Sept. 13, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, tickets $25 in advance, $30 day of show available here
Having lived in India, Canada, Switzerland, Egypt and now the United States, New York-based guitarist, composer, and producer Shubh Saran speaks a lot of languages. That goes for his music, too, which has elements of rock, Carnatic music and jazz among other elements. Saran, with Shaker Heights native Brian Plautz on saxophone, played Mahall’s Locker Room in November, 2021, a show I previewed here. If you weren’t yet going out then (I wasn’t), good news. Saran is back, this time at an equally unexpected venue: CODA. That’s the Tremont basement space beneath Chef Dante Bocuzzi’s Dante Next Door, whose expansive booking policy might be summarized as “We’d love to have you play!” The guitarist heads up a high-energy, high-decibel triple bill with party-starters Da Land Brass Band and saxophonist Jevaughn Bogard’s forward-leaning Abstract Sounds. Apple Watch wearers might want to disable their “Loud Environment” warning before heading down the stairs.
Shubh Saran, Da Land Brass Band, Abstract Sounds, Fri. Sept. 13, 8:30 p.m. doors 7:30 p.m., CODA, 2247 Professor Ave., Cleveland, tickets $15 available here
I couldn’t live without Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar , NEO’s most complete list of jazz and jazz-adjacent events. If you haven’t visited it lately, what are you waiting for?
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
