If you can’t figure out why the song titles at tomorrow night’s Bop Stop concert by Mostly Other People Do the Killing might provoke laughter among some audience members, don’t worry. They’re just Pennsylvanians who are in on the joke.
Comments closedI get a lot of music for my consideration, already more than 130 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 live events in Northeast Ohio, I’ll offer hot takes on recent releases. Lately, a lot of them have been led by pianists, and some of the most notable are the subject of this post.
Oscar Hernández is best known as the founder of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, which is the embodiment in sound of Nuyorican culture: hard working, passionate, high energy.
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A good measure of the health of a scene is the different kinds of venues that present the music. You expect to find jazz at outdoor festivals, college music departments, concert halls and, of course, in jazz clubs. And yes, all music scenes have taken hits over the last 23 months, but the appearance of a jazz concert on a Sunday afternoon at a public library has to be taken as a hopeful sign.
When that concert, Sunday, 2 p.m. at Wadsworth Public Library, involves artists as eminent as guitarist Dan Bruce and vocalist Céline Iris, it’s a very positive development indeed.
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Even if I hadn’t moved to Cleveland in 2019 I am probably a bit too young to have visited the many jazz venues that once thrived in the city’s so-called second downtown on Euclid Avenue. On any Saturday night 60 years ago, the district would have been alive with working-class revelers going out to a club for a few beers, and an unpretentious good time. The soundtrack for this custom often involved a small combo (quaint word, that!) of Hammond B-3 organ, guitar and drums that offered bluesy music with a big beat. Capable of shaking the room at a volume level that could rival a big band’s, the B-3 can also issue bedroom confidences in a whisper that could hush a crowded room. No wonder an archipelago of organ trio bars sprang up from Newark and Philadelphia on the eastern seaboard to the industrial Midwest.
Those places are gone now, but the organ trio hangs on as a vital formation in creative music in the Black American tradition, and one of the best is about to roll into town to rock the Bop Stop tomorrow night.
Jazz has so many dialectics, you’d think it was invented by Socrates or Hegel. Inside/outside, written/improvised, traditional/avant-garde: all are ways of arriving at the truth about jazz.
As a journalist as well as a player, Cleveland’s Chris Hovan is surely familiar with these admittedly reductive categories and more–like this one: young/old. It’s implied in the name of his Generations Quartet, which will appear Thursday night at Bop Stop at the Music Settlement.
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