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Tag: Alla Boara

Kurt Elling and Dan Bruce Turn Up The Musical Voltage This Week

Published 25 September, 2023 By John Chacona

Kurt Elling and SuperBlue at Cleveland Museum of Art

In his 30-odd years on the scene, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling has topped the Down Beat Critics Poll 13 times and has received the Jazz Journalists Association Male Singer of the Year award eight times. He’s done this while singing texts written by Theodore Roethke and Walt Whitman, a Monkees hit, one of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. Whitney Balliett might have had Elling’s musical choices in mind when he wrote his famous characterization of jazz as being “the sound of surprise.”

Yet none of Elling’s neck-snapping musical eccentricities was as shocking as SuperBlue, which will come to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art Wednesday.

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Moto Perpetuo Drummer Anthony Taddeo’s Next Project: Recording Alla Boara Live

Published 5 July, 2023 By John Chacona

Alla Boara

Moto Perpetuo: Drummer Anthony Taddeo and Alla Boara

 

If drummer Anthony Taddeo were a piece of music, he’d be marked Allegro vivace con brio é giocoso. Here’s a bit more Italian to represent the bilingual Taddeo: preso dalla testa ai piedi, an idiom for being in constant motion from head to toe.

This weekend finds the  in-demand sideman, dependable session musician and busy bandleader in the familiar setting of Hingetown’s Bop Stop with his Alla Boara project for a two-night engagement that will be recorded for audio and video release.

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Solo Or In Ensemble, Brandon Lopez’s Bass Is An Uncommon Sound

Published 30 May, 2023 By John Chacona

Brandon Lopez-TAK Ensemble
Brandon Lopez and TAK Ensemble

Despite the increasing numbers of creative improvising musicians who play it, the double bass in a solo context—on record or in performance–remains a comparatively uncommon sound.

Yet Brandon Lopez, with a new recording and a showcase at this weekend’s Re:Sound festival presented by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project, is the exception that proves the rule.

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At Severance, Julian Davis Reid Examines Both Sides of The American Dream

Published 17 May, 2023 By John Chacona

Julian Davis Reid

Like many Black musicians, pianist, bandleader and theologian Julian Davis Reid paid close attention to poet and essayist Amiri Baraka’s 1963 book “Blues People: Negro Music in White America.” Reid was particularly taken with, as he told me, “this idea that Black music is a place where people in this country, Black and otherwise, rest. But at the same time, the music emerges from our sense of homelessness, of not feeling welcomed.”

Baraka was a man of action as well as of ideas, and Reid, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, took his words as a call that Reid answered in words and music with “The American Dream, the American Nightmare, and Black American Music,” which he will present Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center. as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s weeklong Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream.

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Tommy Lehman’s Perpetual Search Leads To BLU Jazz+ For An Evening Of ‘Uplift.’

Published 15 December, 2022 By John Chacona

When he was a student at the Hartt School of Music, trumpeter Tommy Lehman occasionally joined the legendary late-night jam sessions at Small’s jazz club in Manhattan. One night immersed in a solo with his eyes closed he opened his eyes for a moment and found himself face-to-face with the late trumpet player Roy Hargrove, who was sitting in the second row.

Remembering the solo, Lehman said with a laugh, “It sounded terrible,” adding, “I’ll always try my best though. Even if I’m sounding sad, I’m gonna give it everything I have.”

Back in his native northeast Ohio, Lehman is giving it everything he has these days, seemingly playing with everyone everywhere. His latest venture is a new recording, Uplift, which be available on Dec. 21 on Lehman’s Bandcamp page and which he’ll celebrate with a release show at BLU Jazz+ in Akron.

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