Even at 83, saxophonist and composer Howie Smith remains an endless fount of surprises. You might even call his concert Friday night at BOP STOP a veritable Russian doll of surprises.
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Like many Black musicians, pianist, bandleader and theologian Julian Davis Reid paid close attention to poet and essayist Amiri Baraka’s 1963 book “Blues People: Negro Music in White America.” Reid was particularly taken with, as he told me, “this idea that Black music is a place where people in this country, Black and otherwise, rest. But at the same time, the music emerges from our sense of homelessness, of not feeling welcomed.”
Baraka was a man of action as well as of ideas, and Reid, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, took his words as a call that Reid answered in words and music with “The American Dream, the American Nightmare, and Black American Music,” which he will present Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center. as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s weeklong Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream.
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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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At 70, you would think drummer and percussionist Jamey Haddad would be ready to slow down. After all, he’s toured the world with artists such as Paul Simon, Sting and Yo-Yo Ma. Yet he’s equally excited to play this weekend’s pair of gigs at Bop Stop with a trio of accomplished Ohioans. To Haddad, only the music matters.
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