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Tag: Cleveland jazz

At BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio

Published 12 November, 2024 By John Chacona
Pat Bianchi
photocredit: Aidan Grant

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.

Read moreAt BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio
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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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Marta Sanchez’s Music Is A Partner Dance Of Head And Heart

Published 22 October, 2024 By John Chacona
Marta Sanchez
photocredit: Larisa Lopez

“My music is kind of intricate,” Marta Sanchez admitted. Then she quickly added, “It’s not that I’m not attracted towards intellectual music, but I’m attracted to beauty–in music and in art–but both at the same time.”

Listen to Sanchez’s bracing, elegant pianism as you can do Saturday at BOP STOP, and you’ll learn that intellectual rigor wrapped in beauty are magnetically attracted to her, too.

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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop! The Indispensable BOP STOP Celebrates Ten Years

Published 16 October, 2024 By John Chacona
Alla Boara records at BOP STOP in 2023, photocredit: Jackson Clark

When you think of all the challenges that have faced independent music venues for the past ten years, industry consolidation, soaring rents and the rise of streaming entertainment—then add the COVID-19 shutdown–it’s a miracle that there are any places left to hear live music. The jazz scene, which has lived on the economic knife’s edge for decades, was hit hard. Yet a few places survived, and that’s something to celebrate.

Welcome to BOP STOP, the little engine that could and the beating heart of Cleveland’s scene. This week the club marks its tenth anniversary in its third incarnation as part of the Music Settlement in Hingetown. There it cultivates a training ground for young musicians, brings the world’s most notable artists to northeast Ohio’s and connects our most notable artists to the world. Hell yeah that’s worth celebrating.

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Let’s Play Two: John Fedchock Honors J.J. Johnson At Two Concerts This Week

Published 8 October, 2024 By John Chacona

Making improvised music in the Black American tradition means fixing your gaze firmly on the future while honoring the innovators of the past. 2024, with the centenaries of drummer Max Roach and pianist Bud Powell, has been a good year to do that. Yet while those two lions of bebop were deservedly celebrated for the way they redefined the language of their instruments, trombone master J.J. Johnson’s contributions have received less recognition—until now.

Trombonist John Fedchock is determined to see that his distinguished predecessor gets his flowers, and he’s put his money where his mouthpiece is on a Midwest tour that will bring him to Akron’s BLU Jazz+ and BOP STOP in support of his new Summit Records release Justifiably J.J.

Read moreLet’s Play Two: John Fedchock Honors J.J. Johnson At Two Concerts This Week
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