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Tag: Chick Corea

Tigran Hamasyan’s Manifeste Destiny

photocredit: Arnos Martirosyan

Tigran Hamasyan is a man with a foot in each of two worlds, both geographically and temporally.

“Basically, I love telling stories,” Hamasyan told me to begin our interview. “And throughout my discography, there’s this aspect that each song tells a story through music.”  It’s the kind of thing you might expect to hear from any musician, but the fact that Hamasyan said this from his home in Yerevan, Armenia, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world, gives his comment the weight of an ancient culture steeped In stories.

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At BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio

Pat Bianchi
photocredit: Aidan Grant

It was a simple question that I asked Pat Bianchi: Which is your dominant hand? His answer was more complex than I expected.

“I’m kind of both,” he said. “I write with my left hand. I can write with my right hand, too, so it kind of flips back and forth.”

Ambidexterity is a useful trait for a keyboard player to possess, and because Bianchi’s primary instrument is the Hammond B-3 organ, his feet are also involved.

The lack of a dominant hand is an interesting footnote for sure but it’s also a metaphor for the absence of a dominant aesthetic in Bianchi’s musical choices, something that makes his Friday appearance at BOP STOP an unusually compelling event.

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Stars Align For Fred Hersch at The Treelawn

Fred Hersch
photocredit: Roberto Cifarelli

Silent, Listening, Fred Hersch’s affecting new recording, begins with a moody cover of “Star Crossed Lovers,” an Ellington/Strayhorn composition that was also on Hersch’s first trio recording as a leader, Horizon (Concord Jazz,1985). But don’t read too much into the programming. In music and in life, Hersch, who will play a solo concert at the Treelawn Music Hall on Friday, takes things a day at a time.

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