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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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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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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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With Labor Day in the rearview mirror, northeast Ohio returns to the comfortable (clambakes, sweaters) and maybe less comfortable (fretting about the Browns) routines of early autumn. Hey, traditions are traditions, and they don’t change much–unless you’re a NEO jazz fan in which case you’ll want to add the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival to your list.
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Friendly experiencers,
Forget the headline of this post. The question this week is how to decide where to go & what to hear Friday night. Between an A-list Jamey Haddad quartet hit, a night of Roma jazz in beautiful CVNP and a powerhouse band led by saxophonist John Petrucelli, that’s a tall order. And that’s only if you won’t be at The Treelawn for Fred Hersch (see you there?). Still, this is a good problem to have and there is no wrong answer to this question. Whichever you choose, let me know what you heard and how you liked it. I’ll open the comments to this post, but please keep it clean and respectful.
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