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For years, Amina Figarova was such a constant presence on the Cleveland scene that you might have assumed that she lived here. So it came as a surprise when the pianist told me that her engagement Oct. 12 at Bop Stop will be her first at the Hingetown club.
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On Tuesday, Oct. 4, a quartet that has been one of the world’s most restlessly creative and genre-defying ensembles since its founding in San Francisco in the 1970s will return to Cleveland for the first time in nearly 35 years.
No, it’s not the Kronos Quartet, which played here in 2006 and 2013. Tuesday’s New Ghosts concert at Bop Stop will present the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, a musical aggregation that has been as influential, catalytic and inventive as its more celebrated Bay-area string-playing contemporaries.
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Philadelphian Nick Millevoi is best known for the post-industrial guitar grime of his Desertion Trio. Keyboard player Ron Stabinsky is one-third of the jazz arsonist squad Mostly Other People Do the Killing (MOPDtK), and every punk fan knows Derrick Bostrom as the founding drummer of the Meat Puppets. So it stands to reason that when the three come together as Grassy Sound Sept. 8 at Cleveland’s Bop Stop, they’ll be playing lounge music.
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Word reached me late yesterday that Gabe Pollack, longtime director of Bop Stop at the Music Settlement, will be leaving the Hingetown club to become director of performing arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art (you can read CMA’s announcement here, the Settlement’s here).
Leave a CommentI get a lot of music for my consideration, more than 430 (!) new releases in 2022. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, when I’m not previewing events in northeast Ohio or profiling regional musicians, I’ll offer hot takes on recent releases.
When I moved to Cleveland in late 2019, one of the bands I most wanted to hear was the Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar. You can probably guess why that remains on my to-do list nearly three years and several COVID subvariants later, but it’s taken on new urgency with the release of Soothsayer (American Dreams Records), the spellbinding solo debut of M[A]B vocalist Kyle Kidd (all pronouns).
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