Charlie Parker - John Chacona writes

In Baseball or Jazz, Lucas Apostoleris Plays In The Big Leagues

Published 16 July, 2024 By John Chacona

Do an Internet search for jazz and baseball and you’ll get no shortage of citations. Some of them are fascinating, most of them are sentimental and nearly all of them the are work of older men—further evidence that the once-“National Pastime” and “America’s Classical Music” (scare quotes intentional) are strictly for the AARP set. Enter Lucas Apostoleris a 31-year-old drummer who responds to that notion the way Jose Ramirez does to a hanging curve over the plate. Track, wall, gone!

Don’t look now, but baseball has become a young man’s game, at least on the field, and the athletic young band Apostoleris will bring to BOP STOP Sunday are a Futures Game-level lineup of talent on the rise.

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Local Musicians Add Flavor To the Sauce At Tri-C JazzFest

Published 20 June, 2023 By John Chacona

For fans of improvised music in the Black American tradition, the arrival of Tri-C JazzFest to Playhouse Square with a roster of artists including Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride and phenomenal shooting-star vocalist Samara Joy is hands down the biggest week of the year.

The touring artists whose shelves are heavy with Grammy Awards and other honors deservedly grab the clicks and dominate the buzz, but for dozens of musicians from throughout Northeast Ohio, JazzFest will be the biggest gig of their year. For some of them, it will be the biggest opportunity of their young careers.

Javier Red’s Imagery Converter Illustrates Life Under The Umbrella

Published 12 June, 2023 By John Chacona

Pianist Javier Red was in his mid-40s and had been a working musician for years, both in his native Mexico and in the United States, when he arrived at a musical crossroads.

It happened at a workshop in 2015 with saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman at the University of Chicago. “I told Steve that I’ve got two options. I can deny everything that I saw there and keep my music flowing in a comfortable way, or I can accept that what Steve was saying is a completely new and different conception of music,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Man, what I’m losing? Nothing!’ And I decided to go that way.”

He’s still going that way on a musical and life journey that will bring Red and his Chicago quartet Imagery Converter to BOP STOP Thursday for a New Ghosts concert that will have meaning well beyond music.

Rabbit, Rabbit! Owen Broder Puts Johnny Hodges Front and Center at BLU Jazz+

Published 25 October, 2022 By John Chacona

Johnny Hodges is widely acknowledged as perhaps the preeminent alto saxophone player in the decades before Charlie Parker’s emergence. Yet unlike Parker, whose influence on saxophonists is apparent 68 years after his death, Hodges’ style is almost universally celebrated in print and online yet never heard on the bandstand.

Until now. Saxophonist Owen Broder is putting Hodges where he rightfully belongs: front and center with an ambitious recording project and a new band that swoops into BLU Jazz+ on Friday.

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Ghost Notes: Boston’s 13-Piece Makanda Project Lifts A Significant Composer from Obscurity

Published 19 April, 2022 By John Chacona

Among the many souvenirs of his half century as a music producer, manager, writer and activist, Marty Khan also has a collection of sculptures carved in ebony by the Makonde people of Tanzania, among them, one that resembled both Rodin’s “The Thinker” and his longtime friend and client Makanda Ken McIntyre. One bright and sunny day in June 2001, Khan picked up the phone to call McIntyre, when he heard a rumble in the mountains near his Tucson home. “It was this really deep rumble like thunder,” Khan remembered. “All of a sudden, a wind picks up that sculpture and smashes it on the floor, and the head breaks off. A half hour later we get a call from [producer] Steve Rowland, his brother-in-law, to tell us that Makanda just passed.”

It was a characteristic move for McIntyre, the composer and instrumentalist who shunned the spotlight but still projected his formidable intellect and influence on the jazz seen as an educator and mentor. Yet like the thunder in the Arizona mountains, McIntyre’s presence continues to be felt, as it will be in Cleveland Thursday when the 13-piece Makanda Project big band roars into Bop Stop playing a book of his unpublished compositions.

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Tag: Charlie Parker

In Baseball or Jazz, Lucas Apostoleris Plays In The Big Leagues

Local Musicians Add Flavor To the Sauce At Tri-C JazzFest

Javier Red’s Imagery Converter Illustrates Life Under The Umbrella

Rabbit, Rabbit! Owen Broder Puts Johnny Hodges Front and Center at BLU Jazz+

Ghost Notes: Boston’s 13-Piece Makanda Project Lifts A Significant Composer from Obscurity