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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:
When you think about the greats of Pittsburgh jazz the first names that come to mind might be the pianists, an incredible legacy that stretches from Earl Hines through Mary Lou Williams, Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, and Sonny Clark.
That’s pretty hard to beat—until you consider the drummers: Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey Beaver Harris, and Jeff “Tain” Watts. And smack dab in the middle of that roll call is Roger Humphries, who will make his BOP STOP debut at 82 on Friday.
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Overjoyed wasn’t the first choice for the theme of this year’s University of Akron Jazz Week ’26 that begins today. “At first we said gratitude, but there was something about it that wasn’t as killing,” said Chris Coles, who curates the four-day celebration and festival with his fellow UA faculty member and frequent musical collaborator Theron Brown.
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Summer’s sudden arrival in northeast Ohio has everybody emerging from their deep-winter isolation and hitting the streets. Cabin fever is breaking for national and touring jazz artists, too, and they are hitting area stages en masse this week.
With so many worthwhile shows in the next seven days, I’ll offer a kind of consumer’s guide to where to go and who to hear. There’s a wide range of music on offer this week; you really can’t go wrong with any of these shows.
Countdown . . .
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Nathan-Paul Davis makes this statement at the top of his Linktree page:
"I play energy, not notes!" Nathan-Paul calls his music SOUND MEDICINE.
Anyone who has heard Davis play will recognize that he is simply stating facts. No cap. No flex. The energy in a typical Nathan-Paul performance could power a dozen AI server farms for a month.
Thursday night finds the saxophonist in an unusual setting: playing a birthday gig, in this case, his own. The setting, Edwin’s Leadership & Restaurant Institute, is at once familiar, but different.
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