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Hands up: did you have a meteorite explosion on your St. Paddy’s Day bingo card this morning? That was a sound the likes of which I’ve never heard–which, in broadcasting is called a smooth segue to the topic at hand: music.
To say that this week’s constellation of concerts descended from the heavens is a reach, but starry? For sure!
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Though hip-hop artists have made it a genre unto itself, the mixtape, a homemade cassette of songs, was the Spotify playlist of the 1980s and ‘90s. Mixtapes were playable, tradable declarations of musical allegiances and taste, a medium of exchange and sometimes winsome mash notes to crushes, delivering their message at 1 7/8 ips.
True, it’s hard to imagine jazz nerds assembling cassettes of favorite Maynard Ferguson cuts to give to romantic objects (harder still to imagine they had such objects). Still guitarist Dan Bruce liked the concept so much that he’s making a mixtape live and on stage by arranging songs performed by Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Jinari Kemet and Gretchen Pleuss with an a-list jazz ensemble.
Kevin Robert Martinez‘s Reclamation Band released a recording in 2023 called These Roads, but since that time, the road is a place you’d have been hard pressed to find them. This summer, though, the sextet returns to the stage, including two concerts this weekend, and Martinez couldn’t be happier.
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There’s a word you’re going to be hearing a lot more of in the next two weeks. It’s abundance, the title of a buzzy new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that proposes something they call “the abundance mindset“ as a new basis for progressive politics. There’s no evidence that Klein and Thompson visited the campus of The University of Akron School of Music Jazz Studies Department before they wrote the book, but if they had they would have found that mindset in abundance . This week, April 7-11, that mindset will be on public display as UA kicks off JazzWeek 25: Abundance (Jazz Festival), featuring performances by Joshua Redman and Sean Jones in an illustration–and celebration–of music, community and lineage.
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Friendly experiencers,
Let’s just get this out of the way: jazz fans, the coming week is absolutely stacked. It’s so full of notable shows that it took two let’s call this posts to begin to cover it–and a third might not get to the bottom of the good stuff.
If the music calendar for the week were a dart board, you could close your eyes and hit a bullseye every time.
So as March goes out like a lion here’s your bulldog edition of Pull UP! Now have fun filling up that calendar.
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