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Tag: Chris Coles

Stephen Philip Harvey Is A Music Meister of the Multiversal

Published 21 October, 2025 By John Chacona

Stephen Philip Harvey is a composer, arranger, instrumentalist, label executive, educator and beginning several months ago, a radio host—a kind of superhero of music. He’s also a fan of superhero comics. So when I spoke with him recently, I asked him which superhero he most identifies with.

“There was this villain that was played by Neil Patrick Harris on ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold,’” Harvey said from his office at the radio station. “His name was the Music Meister.” That character used the power of music to achieve world domination.

While Harvey acknowledged that, “that would be a cool power. I’d love that,” his superpower is bringing people together through music, which is what he will do Friday night at BOP STOP and Saturday at BLU Jazz+ when his Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra celebrates the release of its latest album Multiversal: Live at BOP STOP.

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Garrett Folger and Aidan Plank Share DUO Lingo On A New CD

Published 23 September, 2025 By John Chacona
Garrett Folger and Aidan Plank

Today, the 99th anniversary of John Coltrane’s arrival on Earth, seems like a good time to remind ourselves that music, for all the wondrous sophistication of its scales and structures, is about the people who make it.

That point was reinforced eloquently by DUO, the new independent release by trumpeter Garrett Folger and bassist Aidan Plank, which will be celebrated by a release show Sunday at Negative Space Gallery.

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Kevin Robert Martinez’s Reclamation Band Is Back On These Roads

Published 15 July, 2025 By John Chacona
Reclamation Band

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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The Abundance Mindset Rings Out At UA JazzWeek 25

Published 7 April, 2025 By John Chacona
clockwise from left: Theron Brown, Sean Jones, Joshua Redman, Christopher Coles

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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Road To Nowhere: Nashville Duo Concurrence Tell A Somber History In Music

Published 24 October, 2024 By John Chacona
Paul Horton and Greg Bryant. photocredit: John Rogers

In 1968, Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes took the unprecedented action of asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop the construction of the so-called Clark Freeway. It was estimated that construction of the highway to connect I-271 with I-490 would sever existing neighborhoods and displace 20,000 Clevelanders, many of them Black residents of the East Side.

Stokes succeeded and the Clark Freeway was never built, but other cities were not so lucky. One of them was Nashville, where the construction of I-40 and the devastation it caused in the city’s Black neighborhoods became the inspiration for, Indivisible, a stirring musical presentation by the duo project Concurrence that will play at BOP STOP Sunday joined by Cleveland drummer Aaron Smith.

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