a home for my content writing, journalism and let's call this blog
Visit the website of Chris Pitsiokos (click on this name and you’ll get there) and you’ll see an image of a blue sky striped with contrails. The saxophonist is no conspiracy theorist, but he is a roaddog, logging 92 shows in 2024. He’s off to a strong start in 2025, too, with a tour that will bring him to the Little Rose Tavern for a duo gig with eruptive drummer Weasel Walter presented by New Ghosts.
Comments closed
When Cleveland wants to greet the world, here’s what it says: “Hi. I’m Daniel Peck and welcome to Live at the BOP STOP.”
Comments closed
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.
Comments closed
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.
Comments closed
“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.
Comments closed