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Tag: Cleveland Jazz Orchestra

Play Like Where Your From: The University of Akron’s JazzFest Is Back

For a long time, jazz education was an oral tradition. Students learned at the feet of their master or in the adjacent chair in a section of a big band, a lineage that you could witness as well as hear. These days, that formerly oral tradition has largely moved to the university or conservatory classroom but the professionalism of jazz education hasn’t totally done away with the notion of lineage.

Sean Jones
Sean Jones

This week offers vivid proof in the form of the University of Akron Jazz Week an event that brings together three UA alumni, two of whom, Theron Brown and Chris Coles, are now teaching at their alma mater, with internationally prominent trumpet player and Warren Ohio native Sean Jones.

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New Composers Collective Lays Down the Law at Bop Stop

Third Law CollectiveWhat’s the second-most exciting day in a composer’s life? The day of the first performance of a new piece, of course. So, what’s the most exciting day? The day of the second performance. World premieres are exciting, but many compositions are heard once and then disappear. A second performance confers a bit of staying power.

This is especially true in the concert music world, but composers of creative music in the Black American tradition face many of the same challenges in bringing their work to the stage. Enter The Third Law Collective, a gathering of local composer/players whose project to present and support new composition in northeast Ohio gets underway Jan. 26 at Bop Stop.

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Flutist Hofmann Comes Home for the Holly-Days for Three Concerts with the CJO

 

It’s pretty common these days to find jazz instrumentalists who were classically trained before beginning to improvise. Not Holly Hofmann. The Painesville-born flutist who will appear this weekend with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra studied with the legendary Walter Mayhall at Youngstown State University and with former Cleveland Orchestra principal flutist Maurice Sharp at the Cleveland Institute of Music. But her first teacher was her father, Nelson.

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Exploring the Unknown: Bassist Aidan Plank Arranges the Music of Carmen Castaldi

Aidan Plank
photograph by Tanya Rosen-Jones

Tribute concerts, for better or worse, are an established marketing hook for jazz presenters and an evergreen source of inspiration for musicians. The honors tend to cluster around past masters, and the bigger the name the batter. Living musicians who can actually appreciate the tribute aren’t often feted and even less often asked to play, but a tribute concert where the honoree is a sideman? Never happens.

Yet when bassist Aidan Plank’s octet takes the Bop Stop stage Thursday to present a program of music by Carmen Castaldi, the man of the hour will be seated where he can usually be found: behind the trap set.

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Alla Boara Presents a Bella Figura at Friday’s Album Release Celebration

Alla Boara

Drummer Anthony Taddeo finished his graduate degree from Youngstown State University in 2020, but he won’t hand in his final project until Friday night.

True, Le Tre Sorelle, the new CD by his band Alla Boara, wasn’t exactly a class assignment, and as capstone research projects go, this one is more joyous than the average academic paper. Yet the CD, which will be celebrated Friday at an album release party at Bop Stop, is the culmination of a long period of study, research, writing and interrogation into Taddeo’s Italian roots.

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