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Tradition might call this week the Dog Days of Summer, but for jazz fans around northeast Ohio, it’s time for The Cats. That’s the name that serious practitioners of the art of improvised music in the Black American tradition give to the ones who can really play.
By any measure, the musicians listed below fit that description and all are on bandstands around the area this week. Here’s what you can expect:
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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Dominick Farinacci & Friends / Taylor Eigisti & Christian Tamburr Celebrate Chick Corea and Gary Burton at Tri-C JazzFest 2025, All About Jazz, 18 July, 2025
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There’s no point in burying the lede: if you’re a jazz fan living in Northeast Ohio, Tri-C JazzFest is a circle-the date event. And now it’s here.
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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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